The long and short of it is this, today one man’s suicide changed the lives of possibly hundreds of people. When I first heard it my heart went out to the man who sat on top of a parking garage, shot himself then fell 8 stories to the pavement. I know the kind of depression and anger towards life in general that can drive a person to want to die. I just said it the other day and in fact I’ve been seriously suicidal for two long months. I know how it feels to be driven to the edge, so when I heard a man killed himself today my immediate response was sorrow and understanding, that is until I heard the details.
This year alone Indiana has had 155 suicides, two of those suicides were in one week in a public arena, downtown Indy. We are not strangers to major depression in the city, not at all. We’ve also had our share of crime and corrupt leaders, but what we don’t often have is a lesson in how one person can touch the lives of many with a shot to the head. Come to find out this man strangled his wife earlier in the morning and left her body in the home. He then drove to her place of employment, climbed to an adjacent building and shot at it as well as at innocent bystanders all before taking his own life. If that wasn’t enough, the body of his wife could have easily been discovered by his daughter when she got off the school bus. Fortunately the police were already on the scene and caught her before she entered the home to find her mother’s strangled body.
In a short period of time he killed a woman, himself and orphaned two children. He did all of this shortly before rush hour which means those who witnessed his end feared for their lives AND saw him shoot himself AND saw his body hit the pavement. He left a suicide note and a confessed to killing his wife. He also left a facebook status blaming lawyers for the break up of his marriage. He named names, placed blame and wished they could be made to pay for breaking up his marriage.
I’ll tell ya, if for one second I had sympathy for him it left quickly when I heard more and more details as to why he took his life AND how. People have to live with the images he left. They have to live with the image of his body hitting the pavement with a bullet in his head. They have to live with being shot at. They have to live with unanswerable questions, with guilt and a host of other emotions that survivors feel all because this man wanted to die.
Today’s events did not change my level of depression, but it has given me a moment of pause. I know suicide is a desperate act. I know I can’t take it back, but I also can’t take back the pain I’d cause to people that I love. I’d never make my death a public spectacle but in my mind suicide is always a public affair because it touches so many people so deeply and for so very long.
Murder victim found in Brownsburg after man commits suicide in Indy on WishTV.com.
It’s a sad day in the city of Indianapolis.
fma
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