Vertigo
by ChrisOctober 21st, 2005 1:09 am
The story:
With a federal corruption probe closing in on him, City Councilman Rick Mariano climbed to the base of the William Penn statue atop City Hall this afternoon, and was talked down after emergency vehicles responded to a possible suicide attempt.
But at a news conference late last night, authorities said that Mariano had never been in danger because the observation deck at the base - about 500 feet above the ground - is encased in protective Plexiglas.
Both Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson said they did not believe Mariano, who expects to be indicted next week, had been suicidal.
“He just really wanted an opportunity to reflect on all of it,” said Street, who talked to Mariano before he came off the deck shortly after 6 p.m. “He just went to a place where he thought he would be able to be peaceful. . . . It never occurred to me that he was on the verge of taking his own life.”
Mariano was taken to Pennsylvania Hospital, with his wife, Susan, by his side.
Johnson acknowledged that Mariano had voluntarily admitted himself for observation.
The twilight drama capped a day of emotion in which he had earlier commented that he wished a bus would run over him. At a morning news conference, he discussed the federal probe, suggesting federal authorities targeted him because he is from a blue-collar background.
He then attended a City Council meeting and met with his lawyer before going to the deck sometime after 4 p.m.
Mariano has been the target of a federal grand jury investigation into whether businesses in his district paid his credit card bills in exchange for favors. Pressure had been mounting on the councilman; his face was on the cover of Wednesday’s Philadelphia Daily News with a banner headline that read: “Going Down.”
This article does a fairly decent job of pointing out something obvious to anybody who has ever been on Philadelphia City Hall’s observation deck - there is no way in hell for a person who isn’t carrying a weapon or a bottle of Drano to kill themselves up there. Had you seen this event play out on television, or heard it on news radio, you would imagine that the only thing standing between Mr. Mariano and the pavement was some brief glimmer of reason or the grace of god.
That simply wasn’t the case. The observation deck, like nearly every observation deck on the face of our fair planet, is a large zoo enclosure in the sky, where gawking humans are on the inside with only rising air pollution to take note of them. Once you are in, there is no way out save the elevator.
While I’ve never thought much of Mariano and it’s a damn good bet that the feds have him dead to rights, I still imagine him to be smart enough to know that the observation deck is no place for suicide. Anybody with a even a spec of reason within the local broadcast media surely knew the same, though they certainly didn’t report it at the time. Something else was up. Whether it was a very pathetic cry for help or a thoughtful gaze at the gates of a self inflicted hell we’ll probably never know, unless, god forbid, he is featured in a mini-series.
Anyway, I hope Mr. Mariano finds peace. Clearly, today was not his best. Only time and a trial will tell us if it was his worst.
