Beyond the endless glare for the bright neon lights and the sounds of slots, cocktail glasses and sexy encounters, lies a much, much darker and grimmer reality in Sin City: a seldom-reported fact and the one that many accommodations walk out their way to keep from the media is the actual amount of suicides committed in Las Vegas, sometimes following a final week-end of debauchery and with as numerous tragic motivations as life it self needs to offer. These suicides are not at all times associated to something that happened in Las vegas, nevada, mind you; but the town of Neon seems to represent to many individuals a destination to see life off, for whatever reasons.

In fact, several research reports have discovered that nevada is the #1 destination of choice for people to kill themselves within the U.S.

Hotels Do What They Can

Obviously, there ‘s no real means for accommodations to stem this constant stream of lives lost, as generally the deed is done from inside a college accommodation, with as many techniques utilized as the reasons themselves for the suicides. The one thing resort hotels can and very nearly always do is allow it to be extremely difficult to fling oneself from a resort space screen, however; either making them difficult or impossible to open; or making those openings so narrow that all however the slightest in our midst could never fit through the space that is limited.

But that doesn’t mean tourists on a mission to self-destruct can’t throw by themselves over somewhere else, and the story of one such girl from Phoenix now has her family and others calling out for greater obstacles and stricter safety at the most obvious among these non-Strip locations: the world-famous Hoover Dam, about 35 miles off the Las Vegas Strip, that provides an unsurvivable fall into rushing water below for anybody who is intent on closing their life.

‘ We are in support of providing stronger safety measures at the O’Callaghan-Tillman Memorial Bridge [at Hoover Dam] in the hope that they will deter future tragic occurrences,’ said the family of Heather Price Papayoti, the victim in this case that is latest. It’s undoubtedly not initial self-inflicted death at the Hoover Dam; in fact, Papayoti could be the seventh individual to jump to her death into the Colorado River 900 legs below through the bridge as it opened in October 2010.

Woman Plunges to Her Death

It was week that is just last on January 10, that Papayoti took a cab ride more than 280 miles straight from the Tempe, Arizona behavioral counseling meeting, telling the driver to take her to the Hoover Dam, where she had been somehow in a position to quickly crawl over a 5-foot barrier railing and jump, just moments before sunset.

Her family members’s given media statement reflects the despair that they had been Papayoti that is clearly aware who married with a child had been fighting recently.

‘we have been mourning the lack of our heather that is beautiful, child, sister (in law), aunt and friend. We had been blessed with her laughter and light for the years we shared with her. Unfortunately the darkness of anxiety and depression ingested her in recent months, and despite treatment, she had been unable to overcome it.’

It will now be up to the Nevada Department of Transportation to further explore possible barriers that are improved safety measures, as well as come up with a plan as well as the money to finance it, which would come probably from federal highway programs.

These ideas aren’t actually new; in fact, ways to discourage suicides were under discussion also before it had been opened, based on district engineer for the Nevada Department of Transportation Mary Martini.

Among the feasible solutions initially considered had been safety nets and 6 8 foot Plexiglass shields, said Martini; but both were dismissed as either being too tempting for ‘jackass’ kind daredevils, or too obscuring of this magnificent view associated with river for that the pedestrian walkway had been being built. Developers were concerned the plexiglass would also grow dull and be described as a magnet for graffiti artists. Ahead of all that, the expenses would be into the millions that are many stated Martini, who also noted that the Federal Highway management could have to approve such a thing along these lines.

Martini says the existing five-foot rail was just designed to prevent individuals from falling, perhaps not to prevent determined jumpers from offing by themselves. And in order to jump, individuals like Papayoti must crawl over a 5-foot 6-inch concrete wall to even access that railguard, Martini added.

‘Can you crawl over it? Yes. But it would have prevented people from being able to see the dam if we made the guard rails on the bridge any higher.

‘we don’t think we could engineer enough ways to avoid somebody from committing suicide off the connection,’ she stated. ‘then they will do it. if someone is determined to do it,’

Extra needs for improved protection patrols and a suicide prevention line much like the ones at other major U.S. bridges are also being called for by Papayoti’s family. But regardless of what happens later on, for one despondent girl, she is currently just another sad statistic in a city that addresses suicide as simply another side-effect of being larger than life itself.