"Before I read through his Instagram page," Pillow says, "I didn't know that he was showing how bad he felt inside. You couldn't tell. It is pretty unbelievable to me, because some of the postings that he put on Instagram were much more telling as far as how he was feeling inside rather than him speaking it aloud. And his Instagram page was really — I had never been on Instagram before and I would say that he started to prepare to do this I would say at least, serious preparation began a least a month or two before."
Watts' social media page appears to bear out Pillow's theory, with cryptic captions going back to mid-September. On Sept. 13, a picture has the word "Chrysalis" as its caption, suggesting a coming transformation. On Sept. 17, apparently unrelated captions read, "Dead," "Why is leaving my first but only option," and "Syn•co•pe," a medical term for loss of consciousness.
On Oct. 3, one of his Instagram captions read, "Do you hate life enough to see what happens after?" On Oct. 5, Watts posted an image with the caption, "Disconsolate," and another a picture of a drowning woman, taken from the cover of Young Galaxy's 2011 album Shapeshifting. It shows a peacefully unconscious young woman with her temple resting on the sandy bottom, while the rest of her body floats above, with Watts' caption reading, "I think the saddest thing is the closeness isn't there anymore so you're completely alone for now or maybe even forever." He tweeted: "The Weekend is Near" and "I can't describe how happy I am."
Friday, Oct. 24, and Saturday, Oct. 25 seem to have been busy days for Watts. His uncle dropped him off at his mom's in Hamtramck, where he uploaded his EP, entitled .NOTH!NG., to the Internet, while erasing much of what was on his laptop. After posting a link to his album on YouTube, he published his final tweet: "I'm not taking my computer home. Goodbye."
As his family later realized, Watts had set up his getaway for Sunday. His uncle and his mother both thought he'd be working that afternoon, and the earliest he was expected was at the Pillow residence later Sunday. After midnight, early Sunday morning, Watts' posts became more explicit — and more disturbing. At 1:37 a.m. Sunday morning, he posted a photo of him smiling broadly, his glasses hanging off an arm stuck into the hair under his hoodie, with the caption, "Thinking about cutting my hair for my funeral."
On the morning of Sunday, Oct. 26, Watts left his mother's house in Hamtramck and began walking downtown, posting 14 photos to his Instagram account along the way, some unimportant, others provocative. At 10:28 a.m., he posted a photo of a glass of water and two plates of food: waffles, sausage links, and hash browns. He captioned it: "My last meal." At 10:39, his caption read, "Planned and focused." By 10:45, he had reached the Blue Cross-Blue Shield building, in a photo captioned, "Still progressing." At 11:05, he posted a selfie of himself squinting in the morning light down by the Detroit RiverWalk.
Needless to say, some of Watts' friends, alert followers of his Instagram, began trying to get in touch with him, as his uncle later learned.
"And as he was posting those pictures, people were calling him or texting him," Pillow says. "I believe he spoke to one person on the phone and then he would text back and forth with others. And they were asking him what was he doing when they saw he said his 'last meal.' There were some people that tried to call him. None of his friends that are on Instagram, none of them contacted us to say that they thought something was wrong. We don't really know his school friends. We got to know them personally after this incident."
The final two images are the most disturbing. The final image is of Watts' wrist, his watch reading 12:03 p.m., captioned with the morbid joke, "Time to see if my watch is really waterproof."
But the second-from-last image is most compelling of all. It's a selfie of Watts, ball cap, headphones, and all, staring into the camera. What stands out most is the expression on Watts' face. Unlike the grins in the photos from the night before, he wears a relaxed smile, the eyes steady and even. It's as if, in the moments before death, the young man who'd posted so many carefully coiffed selfies finally felt comfortable to let his guard down a little. The caption reads simply: "Smile. You've lived."
"What really caught me about that photo was his happiness," says Pillow. "I rarely saw him smile like that. ... It was the last picture that he took of himself and he looked extremely happy. And that was disturbing to me."
What happened next is difficult to ascertain. Pillow says there was a witness, somebody who was watching Watts as he listened to his headphones by the river.
"This person indicated that he was listening to his headphones," he says. "Bill never went anywhere without them. And he sat over the edge with his headphones and listened to music for a while. I believe the guy had a conversation with him — and then I guess he decided to jump in."
A competent swimmer, Watts quickly made it about 50 feet from shore before going down.
What happened next is extraordinary. At roughly the same time witnesses called police about Watts jumping into the river, another man jumped into the river closer to Hart Plaza. Quick action from the Detroit Dive Team saved the man, who roughly matched Watts' description but was much older. The man was quickly hospitalized, and, despite the confusion, the dive team quickly pressed on with their search for Watts. It would take three days to find his body.
Pillow and his family had no idea what was happening. On Monday morning, Marvin Pillow got a call from Renaissance High School saying Billy hadn't reported to school and that students were all talking about his posts to Instagram. Trying to track down Watts' last movements, he went to Checkers, only to find that Watts didn't have to work the day before. Finally traveling to Watts' mother's house, he found Watts' laptop, and that's when Pillow knew something was very wrong: "He would never leave it anywhere."
A trip to the Hamtramck Police Department wasn't much help, since the HPD were apparently still under the mistaken impression that the Hart Plaza jumper and Watts were one and the same, that Pillow's nephew was saved and hospitalized. But by Tuesday, Oct. 28, HPD realized that the patient was a much older person than 17-year-old Watts.
The confusion finally ended on Wednesday, with the dive team's recovery of Billy Watts' body. The family held Watts' funeral Nov. 8, and laid his body to rest.
Almost six months later, Pillow finds it hard to believe his nephew could have intentionally drowned himself in the river.
"I cannot believe that," he says. "It's unbelievable to me. I haven't spoken to the man who – I would like to speak to the person who witnessed him jumping in. But I can't believe – if you would have asked me if he had the psychological strength to do that, I would have said no."
Looking back, Pillow also believes things would have been different if he had been monitoring Watts' social media.
"I don't deal with social media too much," Pillow says, "but, when this happened I went through his page as far back as I could go, and there are some things in there that he wrote that are kind of disturbing. If I would have seen them, I would have definitely investigated so much more."
Among the most disquieting things to come to light since Watts' death was that his nephew had planned to originally commit suicide earlier.
"I found out from his girlfriend that he had actually planned on doing this in January of 2014," Pillow says. "His girlfriend talked him out of it or he told her that he thought he had more to live for. That he was gonna reconsider. He actually went down there to do it and he rethought about it and I guess came on home. The girlfriend, I asked her why she didn't tell anybody and she said the only person she told was her mom. And I'm quite surprised that mom didn't give us a call or that we never heard about any of this until after the death."
While Watts' death wasn't covered much in mainstream media, the story moved many to comment, especially on a memorial pages set up for him.
In death, Watts did much to raise the issue of chronic depression among his peers. For example, take hip-hop writer DJ Kraze's obituary of Watts, which included a defense of the socially ostracized outsider Watts epitomized, declaring, "I was once 17. I was once that weird DJ kid everybody noticed but nobody knew. I was once (or maybe a few times) depressed to the point where being on this Earth was more pain than I could bear."
If that outpouring of love and sadness represents Watts' memorial, it's his final opus, .NOTH!NG., that's his monument. It's full of not-so-subtle hints about Watts' battle with depression, alienation, indoctrination, and suicidal ideation. The quotes he bites are especially interesting, such as Russell Crowe's speech from A Beautiful Mind, in which he says, "The truth is that I ... I don't like people much. And they don't much like me."
There's a sound bite in which a man discusses the parasitic nature of technology, about how it separates us from human interaction. He bites Frank Zappa's intelligent rant against schools, in which Zappa says that schools "try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up."
A female voice discussing depression is one of the longer pieces of dialogue; the speaker says, "One of the scary parts may be having the feeling that you serve no benefit to society. And that you feel forced to expect tomorrow is going to be better when you know it's not. Being afraid all the time and not even knowing what you're afraid of. It hurts to live, and breathing is painful. You feel helpless. You feel hopeless, like there's nothing more than this funeral that's playing over and over in your head. For some all they can do is wait for someone to snap them out of it. But what if there's no one is there ... to snap them out of it?"
There are chilling effects, too, such as the sound of a flat EKG, or a sinister, overmodulated voice that declares, "You can end it all!" The composition goes out with Kevin Spacey's lines from American Beauty: "I've always heard your entire life flashes before your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn't a second at all. It stretches on forever, like an ocean of time. ..."
It's a bit of electronic, 21st century poetry, from somebody who left his mark and moved on. And it almost harks back to Edgar Guest's rhymes dedicating the Belle Isle Bridge 92 years ago:
Much we have done shall swiftly pass away,
Shall fade and fall before Time's sure decay.
A few brief years and we shall be forgot,
Our memory but the common resting plot,
But this staunch bridge, from all the cares of day
To rest and beauty, still shall proudly stay.
If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has suicidal thoughts, the number for the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255.
Michael Jackman is managing editor of Detroit Metro Times.
