ATLANTA -- The popular president of one of Atlanta's most prestigious prep schools gave a rousing talk to the faculty about the new year. Hours later, he apparently jumped to his death from the eighth floor of a hotel.
Sixty-year-old Harry C. Payne left behind short letters to his family and the board chairman of the Woodward Academy. But friends and colleagues were still baffled by the suicide of the highly accomplished and ordinarily upbeat man.
The chairman of the 2,850-student school, Ben Johnson, said, ``It's just one of these great unexplained tragedies in life -- an example of what all you don't know about the kind of pain some people live with.''
Payne came to Woodward in 2000 after resigning abruptly from elite Williams College in Massachusetts, where at the time he left he was the highest-paid college president in the country, with more than $878,000 in salary and benefits as part of special package related to his departure, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Police said that when officers entered his eighth-floor hotel room, they found an opened package of steak knives and bloody tissue on a counter, as well as a note to police and two or three envelopes, none of which have been made public.
The medical examiner's office ruled the death a suicide.
Johnson said he got a short note that was typewritten and signed, while the other letters were for Payne's wife and two sons, both of whom teach at Stanford University. He would not discuss exactly what his letter said, except to say that it ``reflected a deep depression.'' The educator said he did not know Payne was depressed.
Monday
March 17th, 2025
4:46AM
