Teachers and teens are baffled by their president’s decision to commit suicide hours after he gave a speech about the new year.

Harry C. Payne, 60, left short notes to his family and the board chairman of the Woodward Academy, but they were not made public. Friends and colleagues were still in shock after hearing that Payne, who they thought to be an accomplished and ordinarily upbeat man, jumped from the eighth floor of a hotel.

"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," said Ben Johnson, chairman at the 2,850-student school in College Park, Ga., the Associated Press reported.

On Monday, Payne gave a rousing speech at a Woodward Academy faculty and Johnson and members of the board committee said that he seemed upbeat and “was at the top of his game.” Everyone was shocked when, hours later, Payne was found breathless outside the Marriot Courtyard in midtown Atlanta.

Police entering the room Payne stayed in before throwing himself out, said they found an opened package of steak knives and bloody tissue on a counter near a note to the police and three envelopes, which weren’t made public.

Johnson, who was addressed one of the letters, did not want to comment on it, but he said that it “reflected a deep depression.” The other letters were addressed to Payne’s wife and his two sons, both of whom teach at Stanford University.

Payne arrived at Woodward Academy in 2000 after he previously had resigned from elite Williams College. His decision of resigning came very abruptly. At the time he left the Williamstown School, he was the highest-paid college president in the country, with more than $878,000 in salary and benefits.

Before, William College he was president of Hamilton College in New York and provost at Haverford College in Pennsylvania.
Besides teaching, his career includes many books and articles he wrote based on the 18th-century European intellectual history.