Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Great Guys and Suicide

Most of them WERE great guys at one time. But something happens and they change. People want to remember them before the change. Once you reach that point you're no longer thinking rationally..The guy who pulls the trigger, or swallows a bottle of aspirin isn't the same person he was earlier.. They truly believe what they are doing is the best thing for their family. And even the ones who were a POS have mothers, who mourn them. And I've known of a few where I understand. People facing a certain long painful death from cancer of other horrible diseases have been known to take control and choose when and how they would die. Having watched 1st hand how hard that is for family I'm not so sure a quick death isn't better in some cases.

It is a bigger issue than most people realize. I volunteer on a SAR team. Virtually all of our searches involve looking for people who walked out into the woods to die. We get asked to assist all the time. In the last year I've looked for more than a dozen suspected suicides or murder victims in the woods and traveled from south Florida to northern Indiana. Most don't want to be found, and many are never recovered. We are planning a search this summer in North Carolina for a missing person on National Forest property. Suspected suicide. The ranger we spoke to last week told us they averaged one suicide a week on NF property in NC.

Not being able to have closure is harder for the family. We had a 21 year old male disappear here 4 years ago. We searched for him 5 days in November without finding him. We planned another search in early May and his mother wouldn't let us set up our command post on their property. She was convinced he had just left and would show up any day. We had searched everything within two miles of home in November and widened our search in May. His remains were found within 2 hours. I had been standing less than 100 yards from him when we called the search off in November.