The Death of Tyler Clementi

ON THE weekend that eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington

Bridge, I tucked my infant son into his carrier and took the train to my childhood home in New Jersey. My mother wanted to see me. She wanted to talk about the death—of the tragedy of it, and a single damning fact of the story that seemed, when she turned it over and over in her mind, to implicate us all. Of more manageable concern were the boxes of college books that, seven years after graduating, I still hadn’t unpacked from my parents’ basement.

She and my father were talking about selling the house, and she wanted them gone.

The details were trickling in, but this is what we knew then of Tyler Clementi’s story: He was born and raised in

New Jersey, roughly a decade behind me. He played the violin throughout his childhood and teenage years. When he came out to his mother, an evangelical Christian, she had withered at first.

Then she had held him and asked him never to hurt himself.

“God,” my mother said. “That