ABSTRACT
A 14-year-old adolescent, while listening to “Suicide Hotline” by Insane Clown Posse heavy metal rap band on his iPod, pens his last words in a suicide note, scrawling his large printing with a pencil on wide-ruled paper from a spiral binder. Having never learned cursive, his handprinting looks awkward and misspelled, lacking the maturity of the cursive on which his great-grandparents so prided themselves. His handwriting’s poor arrangement, and its confused use of uppercase letters in the middle of printed words, would suggest to a handwriting researcher that the youth may have learning disorders. His writing consistency is also affected by his abuse of illegal substances combined with prescription medications for attention deficit disorder (ADD). The youth writes several passages from the Biblical text Ecclesiastes onto his lined notepaper. After he finishes the last verse, “Who can tell him what will happen under the sun after he is gone?”, he puts his pencil down and picks up the handgun laying beside him. He raises the muzzle of the gun to his head and pulls the trigger.
