She called 911 nine times in six months seeking help before neighbors found her dead

By Kaylee Tornay / InvestigateWest

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of suicide.

At first, the police officer stepping into Pamela Antoni’s empty one-bedroom apartment observed nothing out of the ordinary. The air was cool and smelled fresh. Clothes hung in the shower and a packed bag sat on the floor by the bed.

But Officer Jonathon Fetherolf, an officer in training in Bend, Oregon, also noted the shattered toilet tank lid in the bathroom and the shards of broken beer bottles littering the floor around the couch and coffee table. Walking out the back door, his eyes followed a trickle of white-brown liquid that ran from an empty pint glass across the balcony to the opposite corner.

Antoni’s body was still there, hanging from the railing. She was 49 years old.

Two stories below, a group of residents who had found their neighbor dead 15 minutes earlier was gathered on the street. Paramedics had blocked traffic with cones and vehicles. Just an hour of daylight filled the sky: It was 6:30 a.m. on June 4.

This was far from the first time Bend police had responded to Antoni’s apartment in the Eddy, a complex billed on its website as “The perfect home in the perfect neighborhood.” But the packed bag, spilled drink and smashed glass didn’t shed much light on how the tragedy unfolded — because the most glaring clues that Antoni had been teetering on the precipice of suicide were not inside her apartment.

Friends and family described Antoni as fashionable, exuberant and quirky. She was 49 when she died. (Photo courtesy of Greg Kuschnik) They were in the nine 911 calls she had made over the last six months asking for help with paranoid fears and, once, threatening explicitly to kill herself. They were in the reports from friends and neighbors who received alarming text messages and menacing letters, and who had heard screaming and glass breaking late at night. They were in the door knocks, voicemails and texts from police and the county’s crisis response team, staffed with trained mental health clinicians, who combined had contacted her at least four times before.

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InvestigateWest (invw.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kaylee Tornay covers labor, youth and health care issues.