The Collective

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There’s a road in Sudbury, on the outskirts of Boston, called Waterborne. Famous for the great blue herons that nest there, the road cuts through the immediate floodplain of the Sudbury River. It’s lined with red maple, white oak, and dead ash yellows, long ago decimated by a virus. It curves and dips, wending through hills and an alluvial marsh, rising once again past meadows and farmland, then descending in a series of hairpin turns. It’s a beautiful road — smooth, continuous, unsullied by houses or businesses — and therefore popular with bikers, runners, and drivers in a hurry. To no one’s surprise, hardly a month goes by without some sort of accident on Waterborne.

It was around three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in late September 2008, partly cloudy and unseasonably warm at seventy-six degrees, the tincture of fall edging the flora. Joshua Yoon, thirty-eight, was on his afternoon run on Waterborne, hugging the road’s left edge so he could watch for approaching cars. He had intended nothing for that day. The week before, in fact, he had arrived upon the method he’d use, suggested by a group on the Internet: he was going to put a clear plastic bag over his head, fasten the bottom of it around his neck with Velcro, open two canisters that would pump helium through tubes into the bag, and within minutes he would be unconscious and dead. Painless, quick, and efficient.

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