Mom who jumped to death with son at Petco Park looked up ‘easy suicide’ on her phone
The mom who plunged to her death at Petco Park while holding her young child in her arms had reportedly searched “easy suicide” on her phone — and then calmly looked at her boyfriend as she stepped to their deaths.
Before she fell, Raquel Wilkins, 40, had just bought cotton candy for her son Denzel Wilkins-Browning, 2, and unusually asked for a family selfie at the Padres stadium, her boyfriend, Christopher Browning, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.
While Browning thought they were just taking in the “beautiful views” from the upper stands, his partner suddenly stared straight at him with “an eerie silence, like in a movie,” he said.
“It was so quick, so fast,” Browning said of Wilkins stepping on a bench and “literally a split-second later” plunging 82 feet with their toddler.
“Both of them went over. It was very quiet. I was in complete shock,” he said, saying he instantly knew his partner and child were dead.
Browning was speaking out for the first time because of Wilkins’ family’s ongoing denial that the deaths could be a murder-suicide, as ruled by the San Diego Police Department.
He insisted the death fall was “very intentional, very planned.”
Wilkins had grown increasingly paranoid and delusional in the months before, drifting “further and further away from reality,” he said.
The day before her death, Wilkins and searched for “easy suicide” and “means of suicide” on her phone, according to autopsy records.
She also broke down and asked her partner “why don’t you just kill us both?” and on the day she died twice talked about how high someone would need to fall to guarantee dying, Browning said.
At least one witness to the death fall told police that it was “100 percent intentional,” the paper said after a review of documents.
“Her demeanor walking up was so calm. She didn’t even look down. It looked just like she was trying to hop over a fence,” the witness said, according to the police report.
Browning said that as painful as it is to admit it was a murder-suicide, the only way to “honor Denzel and her is to really be truthful.”
“And to grieve in a healthy way, you have to honor the truth,” he said.
“I loved her core,” he said of Wilkins, while their son — who would have turned three on the day after Father’s Day — “was beautiful and he was happy and he got the most out of life.”
“I’m grateful for the years I had with him and I am sure I will see him again,” he said.
