On 11 March 1987, 4 teenagers from Bergenfield, NJ asphyxiated themselves.
Thomas Rizzo (19 years old), Thomas Olton (18), Cheryl Burress (17), and her 16-year-old sister, Lisa - were were discovered in Olton's 1977 Camaro in a parking garage at the Foster Village apartment complex.
The four were distressed over the death of a close friend, Joseph Major, who had fallen from the cliffs of the Palisades last September (Thomas Rizzo’s mother described Major’s death as a “suicide”).
They had all dropped out or been suspended from Bergenfield High School. The 2 young men had recently begun to drink again, after going through alcohol rehabilitation programs last fall. The father of the Burresses had died of a drug overdose and the sisters had quarreled often with their stepfather. Olton's father had shot himself to death.
In the car, they left a note scrawled on a brown paper bag asking that they be buried together after a joint wake.
The so-called “Bergenfield Four” alarmed the suburban New Jersey region (and made national news) and sparked theories of a “suicide cluster” in the community, which had experienced a number of teen suicides the previous year.
The day after the deaths in Bergenfield in 1987, 2 teen girls in a Chicago suburb killed themselves in the same way. A week later, police rescued a 2 people who were trying to kill themselves by asphyxiation in the same garage where the Bergenfield Four had died.