Shedding light on teen suicide

For two weeks, a community waited and hoped. Close friends Rachel Crites, 18, and Rachel Smith, 16, dubbed by their families “The Rachels,” left the Crites’ Gaithersburg home on Jan. 19 to see a movie in Georgetown. But instead of making their way to D.C. and coming straight home, as they had told their parents they would, the Montgomery County teens disappeared. Their bodies were found Feb. 2 lying side by side in a Subaru station wagon on a remote trail in Loudoun County near the West Virginia border.

Their deaths have been ruled suicides, the result of carbon monoxide poisoning in a tragedy that captured media attention from around the nation.