JOYCE — Except for reports she would occasionally watch on the television news, the pain of teen suicide had never hit close to home for Melinda Didier, a 14-year-old student at Crescent Middle School.

That changed forever on March 17, 2004.

On that day, friend and classmate Joe Rogers shot himself in the chest with a .22-caliber rifle he pulled out of a guitar case near the end of his second-period language class.

Didier was in the classroom.

She saw it happen.

She never wants to see anything like it again.

“Before Joe, suicide was pretty much alien to us — it was like another kid on the news,” said Didier, who now forms part of a teen suicide prevention group of seven Crescent students.

Five of the students witnessed Rogers’ final act.

“Since it happened here,” Didier said, “now we’re feeling what they felt.”

“With Joe, it’s not just another kid,” added Mike Wiley, 14, on Friday after the group of teens made an hour-long suicide-prevention presentation to a classroom of sixth- and eighth-grade students at their school.

“We knew him.”

According to Sherri Jones, the school’s behavior interventionist specialist who helped organize the suicide-prevention group, suicide is an all-too-common problem in Washington state.

‘Silent epidemic’

“After car accidents, suicide is the second-leading cause of death for youth aged 15 to 24,” Jones said.

“An average of two youth kill themselves each week in the state.

“It’s a silent epidemic.”

While educating parents about the signs to watch for in a suicidal teen is important, it’s young people themselves who really stand at the front lines as far as being able to help prevent a friend or classmate from ending his or her life.

“Research shows that nine times out of 10, a youth contemplating suicide will confide in a peer,” Jones said.

Members of the school’s suicide prevention group tell of experiences that bring those statistics to life.

While Rogers didn’t offer many signs that he was suicidal, he did talk about it with at least one student in the group who says she would handled it differently knowing what she knows now.

In fact, since Rogers’ death, Crescent students say they have faced different cases in which friends were contemplating suicide.