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Following a mysterious plunge into the Thames, two grieving parents reckon with the anatomy of a fall.
CAPTION: Balconies overlooking the Thames at the Riverwalk complex, where Zac Brettler spent his final night. IMAGE CREDIT: Photographs by Lewis Khan
CAPTION: A friend of Zac’s recalls him saying that someone had “threatened to harm his family.” IMAGE CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEWIS KHAN
After Zac Brettler died, his parents struggled to decode the mystery of what had happened to him. They thought that they could pinpoint the moment he’d started to change: three years earlier, when, at sixteen, he began boarding at Mill Hill School, in North London. Zac had grown up in Maida Vale, a quietly affluent neighborhood in the city. His father, Matthew, is a director at a small financial-services firm; his mother, Rachelle, is a freelance journalist. As a child, Zac was bright and quirky, with curly red hair and a voice that was husky and surprisingly deep. He was an excellent mimic, and often entertained his parents and his brother, Joe, by putting on accents. Joe was nearly two years older than Zac, and he attended University College School, an élite day school in Hampstead. But when Zac took the University College entrance exam he struggled with the math portion, and wasn’t admitted. He was clearly intelligent and creative, but he was less of a student than Joe, and after applying unsuccessfully to two other schools he enrolled at Mill Hill, as a day student, at the age of thirteen.
Established in 1807 and occupying a rambling hundred-and-fifty-acre campus, Mill Hill has a hefty tuition price, but it has a less academic reputation than its peers. In the bourgeois milieu in which Zac grew up, to mention that you attended Mill Hill could be interpreted to mean that you’d been rejected by more rigorous schools. When Zac arrived, in 2013, he found himself in the company of the cosseted offspring of plutocrats from Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. “It was the children of oligarchs,” Andrei Lejonvarn, a former student who befriended Zac at Mill Hill, recalled. The kids wore designer clothes and partied at swank hotels. On cold days, rather than make the eight-minute walk from the dormitory to class, they summoned Ubers. Because...