Matthew Hunter woke up disoriented, his cheek against concrete. He looked around and saw a rectangular bench, a camera and a toilet. There was no window. He sat up and noticed what he was wearing: cargo shorts and a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, same as the night before. Socks but no shoes.
Hunter, who had been an officer in the Des Moines Police Department for 21 years, was on the wrong side of a cell door. He searched his memory, straining to make sense of how he got there, but found only fragments. Long stretches of the previous night had gone dark. He remembered arriving at a relative’s house in his Chevy Silverado pickup truck, walking inside with his wife for a family celebration. He recalled finishing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He would learn more about what happened later from body-camera footage and police reports, which said he tried to drive off in his truck, insulted officers, called them “podunk” and worse, banged his head against the side of a police van, threatened a jail guard, collapsed on the ground and wept inconsolably.
He had been in trouble long before that night. Hunter, who was 45 and recently promoted to sergeant, had been spiraling for months, ever since his best friend died by suicide. Hunter and Joe Morgan had been paired up as partners early in their careers, patrolling the mostly blue-collar neighborhoods of the city’s east side. Morgan was a couple of years older and more seasoned; he previously worked at a smaller agency and served as chief in a town of 500 before joining Des Moines, the state’s largest Police Department. The two men clicked instantly and became close. Both fanatical Minnesota Vikings fans, they found much to commiserate about during football seasons. When it snowed, they wore matching hats with furry flaps covering their ears.
On Sept. 16, 2020, Hunter was in his bedroom, changing out of his uniform, preparing to help his wife make dinner for their three children, when he received a call. “Joe Morgan just killed himself,” a sergeant told him. Hunter didn’t believe it at first. If he had been asked to name cops who might hurt themselves, his friend would not have been on the list.
He climbed into his truck and drove five minutes through the suburbs to Morgan’s home, parking on a quiet street with tidy lawns. He walked past a dozen patrol cars and approached the crime-scene tape that circled his friend’s driveway. He had ducked beneath yellow tape hundreds of times in his career, but that night he felt his pace slow, as a familiar act suddenly became filled with foreboding. He approached the officers crowded around Morgan’s S.U.V., peered between them, then stepped closer. He saw Morgan lying on his back, his shirt removed. One of his flip-flops, left behind as officers had dragged him out of the driver’s seat, dangled from the S.U.V.’s running board. There was a dark hole in his friend’s chest.
Hunter tried to force his mind into investigative mode as he studied the scene, hoping to see signs of a struggle, or at least evidence of an accident. He saw Morgan’s sunglasses on the dash where he usually left them, his phone plugged into a charging cord. There was a bottle of Coke in the cup holder, a quarter of it gone. On his friend’s chest he saw signs of stippling, tiny red burns that indicated the gun had been fired at close range.
Hunter wanted to go inside and comfort Morgan’s wife and daughter, but at first he couldn’t move. He felt distressed that the other cops could just stand there looking at Morgan’s 54-year-old body lying still and vulnerable.
As Hunter waited for the medical examiner to arrive, he realized that neither the police chief nor any of the assistant chiefs had shown up. Hunter thought that was odd. When an officer got hurt — whether by bullet or car crash or heart attack — top commanders usually came to check on the troops and comfort their family.
Thirteen hours later, Hunter arrived at the police station to attend roll call, where officers gathered for assignments before their 6 a.m. shift. The mood was somber. No one suggested that Hunter, sleep-deprived and still reeling from the sight of his dead friend, take the day off or see a counselor. The police chief, Dana Wingert, walked to the front of the room and looked out at several dozen cops, many of whom had worked for the city for 20 to 30 years.
“By now you’ve heard that Sgt. Joe Morgan killed himself,” Wingert said. “We’re never going to know why.” Sitting in the back of the room, Hunter says, he heard Wingert say that the department wasn’t going to spend time trying to figure it out. There would be no inquiry into why Morgan, a 23-year veteran, had shot himself 40 feet from his front door. The agency seemed to blame Morgan and look no further. (Wingert did not respond to requests for comment.)
American policing has paid much attention to the dangers faced in the line of duty, from shootouts to ambushes, but it has long neglected a greater threat to officers: themselves. More cops kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects. At least 184 public-safety officers die by suicide each year, according to First H.E.L.P., a nonprofit that has been collecting data on police suicide since 2016. An average of about 57 officers are killed by suspects every year, according to statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After analyzing data on death certificates, Dr. John Violanti, a research professor at the University at Buffalo, concluded that law-enforcement officers are 54 percent more likely to die by suicide than the average American worker. A lack of good data, however, has thwarted researchers, who have struggled to reach consensus on the problem’s scope. Recognizing the problem, Congress passed a law in 2020 requiring the F.B.I. to collect data on police suicide, but reporting remains voluntary.
“Suicide is something you just didn’t talk about in law enforcement,” says Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). “It was shameful. It was weakness.” But a growing body of research has shown how chronic exposure to stress and trauma can impact the brain, causing impaired thinking, poor decision-making, a lack of empathy and difficulty distinguishing between real and perceived threats. Those were the very defects on display in the high-profile videos of police misconduct that looped across the country leading up to the killing of George Floyd by an officer in 2020. National outrage and widespread protests against the police were experienced as further stress by a force that already was, by many metrics, mentally and physically unwell. PERF now calls police suicide the “No. 1 officer-safety issue.”
Most officers are required to pass psychological and physical screenings before they are hired. But many struggle after chronic exposure to trauma. Some 86 percent of police officers are male, a group already at higher risk for suicide, and officers have ready access to firearms, which departments are loath to take away for fear of further discouraging cops from seeking help. In many suicides, officers use their own service weapons. Research has shown that proximity to suicide is in itself a risk factor, causing a potential contagion effect.
Police officers have higher rates of depression than other American workers. Shift work, which disrupts sleep, and alcohol use, long the profession’s culturally accepted method of blowing off steam and managing stress, further compound health issues. A longtime psychologist for the Los Angeles Police Department, Denise Jablonski-Kaye, who is now retired, often began presentations about police suicide by displaying a quote onscreen: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
After Morgan’s death, commanders in Des Moines sent Hunter and other officers to the department psychologist for “fitness for duty” evaluations. Hunter signed a form acknowledging that the doctor worked for the city of Des Moines, not for him personally. Knowing that whatever he disclosed could be shared with his bosses, Hunter was circumspect in what he said. The psychologist cleared him and said he did not need to come back for a second appointment, as required by agency policy. Hunter drove home, feeling as though he had become detached from himself.
Hunter responded to his first suicide call as a rookie, two decades earlier, when he was 25. He arrived at a high-rise building with his field training officer to check on a man who hadn’t shown up for work. While searching, they came to a bathroom door that wouldn’t open. They removed the door’s hinges and saw the man’s body wedged beside the vanity. He had shot himself in the mouth. Hunter could see bruising on the man’s face, the path where the bullet traveled beneath his skin. The man wore glasses, but the force of the gun had been strong enough to pop out one of the lenses, now on the vanity. He had put in earplugs to mute the sound.
What struck Hunter most was the smell of blood, something like a mixture of copper and iodine, so thick he felt he could taste it. Hunter and the training officer removed the body from the bathroom. Afterward, Hunter took off his gloves and washed his hands in the kitchen sink, using the man’s citrus-scented soap. He noticed that none of the other police officers seemed particularly bothered. A crime-scene investigator bent over the man’s body. She explained to Hunter about stippling and exit wounds, then pushed a finger against the man’s skin to show Hunter where the bullet was, how easily it moved back and forth. She snapped a picture of his earplugs. She had never seen that before, she said, and wanted to show colleagues. Hunter took the cue, distancing himself with a veneer of professional curiosity and busying himself with preserving the scene.
That evening, Hunter and the training officer went for dinner at a nearby fire station, where firefighters were deep-frying corn shells to make tacos. He was surprised to find himself with an appetite, and ate several.
Over the years, Hunter realized that the things that drew him to policing — heroics like car chases and hostage rescues — were rare. No kid dressed up in a cop costume realizing what the work really was: hours crisscrossing the city in a squad car, moving from mundane calls about stolen lawn ornaments to gruesome, bloody scenes of limbs severed in a car crash. Hunter was surprised by the number of suicides. He and Morgan once arrived minutes after a man rehabbing a house hanged himself from the ceiling with an electrical cord. Hunter hoisted the man’s legs as Morgan tried to cut him down, hoping they could save him, but they were too late.
At another call, Hunter found a church pastor hanging in his garage; he had told his wife he couldn’t hear God anymore. Hunter would sometimes step out of his patrol car and smell death, an unforgettable stench, from the curb. He’d see newspapers stacked on the porch, flies trying to get inside, and know that a days-old body awaited. The big, dramatic crimes left a mark, but the greater toll of policing was cumulative, the daily repetition of peering behind neighbors’ doors, seeing close up the sad mundanity of life’s brutal, lonely moments.
Washing his hands at a neighbor’s house one day, he suddenly tasted blood, before registering the hand soap’s citrus scent. Images of the dead man’s bathroom from years earlier flashed into his mind. Hunter began to understand that all the things he was seeing on the job, calls he believed he’d forgotten or locked away, were capable of emerging unbidden and without warning.
In the months after Morgan’s suicide, Hunter sometimes seemed fine. He passed the sergeant’s exam and was promoted. At other times, colleagues saw him crying at his desk. Once, when he and his wife went to a friend’s house for dinner, Hunter began talking about Morgan and became inconsolable. His wife called a friend who reached out to one of Hunter’s police academy classmates, now a sergeant. He came to the house and encouraged Hunter to see a counselor. Hunter decided not to, taking comfort in the fact that his agency psychologist had told him that what he was feeling was normal.
As time went on, Hunter began to feel as if a sheet of glass had descended between himself and the world. He was on one side of it, watching his life, his family, his days unfold. For long stretches, there were no feelings, no connection, just numbness, as if he were a thousand miles away. When a feeling did surface, it was something like despair. He wanted to pound on the glass and get back to the other side, but there he remained, disconnected and alone. What is the point of going on when you can’t feel anything anymore? he wondered.
Months after Morgan’s suicide, on Memorial Day, an alert went out over the police radio about a suspicious death. Hunter drove to the house, walked past crying relatives and stepped into the living room. On a couch, he found a military veteran in his 90s who appeared to have shot himself. It was the first suicide Hunter had responded to since Morgan’s death, and the second time in his career he saw a man with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest — the first was Morgan. Hunter’s mind flashed to his friend’s S.U.V. He remembered seeing a bottle of Dr Pepper that Morgan had bought for his daughter in a plastic bag on the passenger seat.
As a supervising sergeant, Hunter was expected to teach a rookie officer how to process the scene, but he felt more like the grieving relatives out back. Hunter excused himself and walked upstairs. A squad member followed and asked if he was OK. “Yeah, why?” Hunter answered sharply. He drove back to the office, tried to busy himself with paperwork and looked over at Morgan’s empty desk. He felt as if he were having a hot flash. He had an overwhelming urge to visit Morgan. He tried to fight it — the cemetery was a long way away in rush-hour traffic — but he climbed into his squad car and drove.
Hunter became obsessed with figuring out why Morgan killed himself. So did Morgan’s widow, Jennifer. She told Hunter she kept waiting for someone to knock on the door and tell her about Morgan’s secret life. If that didn’t make it more bearable, it might at least explain it. But that didn’t happen. Morgan, who collected superhero comic books and had dreamed of being a cop since he was a boy, seemed to love his job in a way Jennifer envied. He was “Joe the Cop,” his profession and identity entwined. Jennifer, a compliance officer for an insurance-and-financial-services company, handled their money — no problems there. Their 23-year marriage was strong, as were Morgan’s relationships with his two children: Andrew, 24, and Ava, 15. No rumors of infidelity, no catastrophic health diagnosis, no allegations of misconduct at work.
Jennifer told Hunter about the couple’s last day: They drank coffee together on the deck. Jennifer worked from home as Ava, whose school went remote during the pandemic, attended her classes over Zoom in the basement. They walked their white rescue mutt, Blanca, at noon. Around 3:30 p.m., Morgan stepped into the kitchen in gym clothes and said he was going to the store for a soda.
An hour later, Ava emerged from the basement and asked, “Where’s Dad?” Jennifer pulled up his location on her iPhone and saw that he was in the driveway. She and Ava laughed. Morgan was sociable; he probably was talking to a neighbor. Jennifer took a shower. Still no Morgan. She figured he’d lost track of time; he needed to be at the police station around 5:30 p.m. He’d been grumpy about going into work for a meeting where he expected commanders to announce promotions. He hoped to retire as a lieutenant but had been passed over twice. Jennifer opened the garage door, took a couple of steps toward his S.U.V. and saw her husband’s body slumped forward. She ran to the car, looked inside and screamed.
In Jennifer and Hunter’s search for answers, they kept coming back to an incident several years earlier. As the supervising sergeant of his squad, Morgan picked two officers to transport a prisoner who was detained a couple of hours away. On their way back, a drunken driver, traveling the wrong way on the interstate, crashed into their police car, killing himself, the officers and the prisoner. Morgan raced to the scene, where he saw one of his officers, a 30-year-old with a husband and toddler at home, sitting in the passenger seat, her ankles crossed as if she had not braced for impact or seen the collision coming; she was just heading to the jail one minute, then gone the next. “I chose them,” Morgan kept saying. Afterward, he would drive by that officer’s house, wondering if her husband and daughter were OK. He would call Jennifer, obsessing over how he handled routine calls, something he’d never done before. It was as if he feared making another mortal choice.
In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, Morgan stood outside police headquarters in riot gear as people threw bottles, bricks and rocks. For him, it was troubling to be so widely condemned. He began carrying his gun off-duty, and seemed to Jennifer to be hypervigilant, almost paranoid at times. He’d come home from work around 11 p.m. and make a drink, a new habit. Jennifer occasionally woke to find an empty vodka bottle in the recycling bin.
Something else happened in May 2020, four months before Morgan’s death. He called Jennifer from the hospital and said he’d gotten into a fight with a suspect, who bit him in the face. It was the kind of call her husband usually turned into a funny story. But when he arrived at her mother’s house for Sunday dinner, he seemed distressed. “Joe is not OK,” Jennifer’s sister told her quietly. Morgan seemed embarrassed by how he’d handled the call. How did I let that guy get the jump on me?
After Jennifer mentioned the call to Hunter, he pulled up body-camera footage and watched the incident from multiple angles. He saw Morgan enter a bedroom where a suspect was hiding in a closet. As Morgan opened the door, the man flung out an ironing board, hitting another officer in the head. They Tased the suspect, who weighed about 300 pounds, to no effect. The suspect punched Morgan in the face, pinned him to the ground and then sank his teeth into Morgan’s cheek. Morgan screamed to the other officers: “He’s biting me!”
As Hunter watched the footage, he was struck by the sound of Morgan’s voice. He didn’t want to use the word “scared,” because cops hated that word, but his former partner’s voice was full of fear, almost desperation. In all the dicey calls they’d handled over the years, Hunter never heard his friend sound like that. He played the clip for another officer and asked, “Is that Joe?” The officer nodded. Hunter could only surmise that the primal brutality of the bite, the feel of a human’s teeth in his flesh, had deeply unnerved him. Hunter called Jennifer and told her what he’d seen. She pulled up the photographs Morgan sent her from the hospital that night, a bloody cut on his face. She didn’t see it then, but now she thought his eyes looked haunted.
In the mornings, Jennifer would pass by her husband’s sink in the master bathroom, seeing his contact-lens solution, toothbrush and plastic yellow rinse cup. She knew the most intimate, mundane parts of her husband’s existence. How had she not known what he was going through? She felt crushed by guilt. Sometimes when Ava went downstairs to shower, Jennifer followed quietly and sat outside the bathroom door, listening for sounds of movement. She worried about what else might be taken from her.
Police Departments have elaborate, sacred traditions to honor officers who die in the line of duty. Officers stay with the body before burial so that their fallen comrade is never alone. Commanders wear dress uniforms to funerals as a sign of respect. Dispatchers call for the officer over the police radio one last time, and then let the silence stretch on, an emotional moment of nonresponse, signaling that the officer has gone “10-42” for the last time. End of watch.
None of that happened for Morgan. At first, Jennifer was grateful for the support from her husband’s Police Department. Jennifer presumed her husband had not received a 10-42 call at the church, the honor most cherished by officers, because he didn’t die in the line of duty. But about nine months after her husband’s death, Jennifer learned that an officer who died from cancer would be given full honors. As she and Ava sat in a church pew at his funeral, they watched commanders walk by in their dress uniforms and listened to the officer’s final radio call. It seemed to Jennifer then that her husband’s death, and his years of service, were viewed as lesser by the department. She didn’t begrudge the other officer those honors, but she thought her husband deserved them, too. Wingert would say later that he was afraid of glorifying suicide and feared other officers in his department might kill themselves.
While she grieved, Jennifer received a box in the mail from First H.E.L.P., which sends care packages to the families of officers who die by suicide. It contained a book about suicide and an information card that directed her to the group’s website. There she was shocked to learn that more officers die by suicide than in traditional “line of duty” deaths. Jennifer got to know a founder of the group, Karen Solomon, who had been collecting data on police suicides since 2016. Solomon, who is married to a police officer in Massachusetts, had become frustrated by negative sentiment toward cops after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Solomon believed the shift in public opinion was taking a huge toll on officers. She and a small team of volunteers began searching the internet for reports of cops who died by suicide, collecting information on each case and compiling what became one of the most comprehensive data sets in the country. “I know every single name because I’ve been really lucky — and really unlucky — to have heard their stories,” she told me.
What she heard from families, primarily widows, shocked her. If an officer died in the line of duty, relatives could receive, by Solomon’s calculation, $1 million in cash and benefits. After a suicide, on the other hand, many widows, still reeling from the trauma of finding their husbands dead, quickly found themselves without a paycheck or health insurance. One widow called Solomon in tears after her infant son got sick and she arrived at the hospital to find that her health insurance had been cut off. Solomon had a Christmas tree sent to another widow who couldn’t afford one. These women often felt cast out of the police family.
Solomon became convinced that the trauma of police work, along with a strong internal stigma against getting help, was a factor in many police suicides, and that those officers, too, deserved to be recognized. The issue took on new prominence after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when officers who died from physical complications were treated differently than those who died by suicide. Officer Brian Sicknick, 42, who suffered two strokes hours after sparring with the mob and died a day later, lay in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, praised as a patriot with “profound inner strength.” Officer Jeffrey Smith, 35, who was hit in the head with a metal pole during the attack, possibly suffering from a traumatic brain injury, shot himself on the George Washington Memorial Parkway nine days later. He was not honored in the Rotunda and his death was initially not considered “line of duty” by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.
Jan. 6 became a catalyst to move the issue of police suicide forward, says Jim Pasco, the executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “It perversely became a vehicle for some good.” His group, along with First H.E.L.P. and Jan. 6 families, lobbied Congress to allow suicide, under some circumstances, to be considered a “line of duty” death. It is not just an honorific distinction; the change would allow families to apply for a roughly $400,000 federal death benefit, and in some cases, more easily collect officers’ full pensions and retain their health insurance. In May 2022, Jennifer Morgan was among many family members who wrote to lawmakers to urge the passage of the Public Safety Officer Support Act of 2022, sponsored by Representative David Trone, Democrat of Maryland, and Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois.
“Joe loved his job, he loved being a police officer, he loved serving the east side of Des Moines, he loved being a dad, son, brother, husband and friend,” Jennifer wrote. “No one knew he was struggling.” She recounted something she’d read, that most people experienced one or two traumatic events in their lifetime — but over a 20-year career in policing, an officer experienced an average of 800 traumatic events. “EIGHT HUNDRED,” she wrote. “I am still shocked by that statistic.” Her letter continued: “I am not ashamed of how my husband died. I’m ashamed of how our country treats and views mental health of first responders.”
When President Joe Biden signed the bill into law that year, it opened an avenue for officers who died by suicide to be added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, two curving limestone walls that carry the names of the fallen. It is a sort of holy ground for police officers, an eternal roll call dating back to the first known officer death in 1786.
The nonprofit that oversees the wall, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, considered an authority on “line of duty” deaths, historically has rejected cases of suicide for commemoration. After the new federal law was passed, the organization decided that if the Justice Department deemed an officer’s suicide a “line of duty” death, and if it was clear that trauma suffered at work was the cause, the officer could be considered for the wall. Jennifer began helping to prepare a case for the department to submit: She wanted Joe’s death to be recognized.
By the summer of 2021 — nine months after Morgan’s death — Hunter’s grief was consuming him. Late one night, in the town of Indianola, according to police reports, a sergeant noticed a woman pounding on the back of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck at an intersection. The sergeant, Justin Keller, walked toward the truck, where Hunter sat in the driver’s seat. The woman was Hunter’s wife, and she explained that he’d had too much to drink at a family celebration. She told the officer that Hunter was a sergeant at the neighboring Des Moines Police Department and that he’d been struggling since his friend killed himself.
Asked by the sergeant for his identification, Hunter replied, “What’s your [expletive] probable cause for stopping me?” Keller radioed for backup. When he asked Hunter where he was going, Hunter yelled, “Lie, lie, lie!” Hunter got out of the car, approached the officer and said, “[expletive] you,” several times, then shouted, “Do you want to [expletive] with me, dude? I’ll [expletive] with you!”
An officer told Hunter’s wife that they were arresting him on a misdemeanor charge of public intoxication. When Hunter refused to follow the officers’ orders, an officer grabbed him by the arm and put him into a patrol car. Hunter threw his body forward onto the seat and claimed the officer had pushed him, the police said. As the encounter unfolded, Hunter’s wife began to cry, and asked her husband to calm down: “Oh, my God, Matt. Stop, please.” She told the officers that they’d been married for 13 years and that she’d never seen him like this. “It’s scary,” she said. From inside the car, Hunter shouted, “Is that how you treat a [expletive] cop?”
Later that night, according to a police report, Hunter wept and hit his head against the inside of a police van, called a detention officer a “homosexual,” accused him of rape and said, “I will kill you and your family!” Then he passed out. (Hunter denies saying these things, which were not captured on audio or video.)
At the jail, Hunter tossed a fingerprint card and pen in the air, and insulted and flipped off an employee. At one point he refused to get off the ground, and said, “I’m a piece of [expletive] cop.” He continued shouting obscenities from inside a cell, then passed out again.
Hunter was released the next day and placed on administrative leave while his department opened an investigation. He made an appointment with a private psychologist, Dr. David Grove, whom he had seen once before. In session notes, Dr. Grove wrote that Hunter had been experiencing nightmares, flashbacks, emotional numbness, detachment, disturbed sleep, impaired concentration, crying spells and feelings of despair. He diagnosed Hunter with post-traumatic stress disorder. Because Hunter’s actions on the night of his arrest were inconsistent with his previous behavior, Grove believed that PTSD had played a significant role.
A few weeks later, Hunter arrived at Chief Wingert’s office in police headquarters. He said there was no excuse for his behavior, which he described as “mortifying.” “That’s not who I am as a person,” he told the chief. “I thought I could deal with what I had seen, what I lost.” He said he hadn’t recognized what he was going through and had not been able to reach out for help. He reminded the chief that he’d never been in any serious trouble, and said he believed he could continue getting help and return to the force, perhaps sharing his experience with other officers who might also be struggling. Jennifer Morgan and a fellow officer had written to the chief on his behalf, with the officer describing Hunter as “someone worth saving.”
The next day, Hunter received a call from a captain, who told him the chief had decided to terminate him. The captain instructed him to drop off his uniforms and other gear at the station. Hunter hung up the phone and sat on the edge of his bed for a long time, stunned at the abrupt end of his 21-year career as a police officer.
He’d been a cop for nearly his entire adult life. Who was he without a badge? The days passed, long and shapeless, as Hunter struggled with what to do next. Money troubles mounted. He worried about paying the mortgage on his two-story house on a cul-de-sac, the kind of place he’d dreamed of for his family. His marriage struggled. One night after a disagreement during dinner, his wife left the house and didn’t return.
Hunter had always viewed himself as part of a big police family, one in which everyone took care of one another, but many of his friends and colleagues had disappeared overnight. He coached his 10-year-old son’s football team alongside the captain who called to fire him. The captain suggested he step down from coaching. Hunter refused.
That fall, Hunter climbed into his truck, drove a few blocks and opened the DoorDash app, where he’d set up an account as a new driver. He was dispatched to a neighborhood restaurant, where he walked past families eating inside, like his own used to do, and retrieved a pizza order. He finished his first delivery, then a second and third. It got easier. In some ways, it felt like policing — spending hours in a car, traveling from call to call. He dropped off groceries one afternoon at the home of an officer he had worked with.
Hunter had planned to retire with a full pension at 55. As the first anniversary of Morgan’s death passed, he thought about all he’d lost: his best friend, the job he loved, his marriage. It no longer felt as if he had much to live for.
Hunter decided to fight his firing. He hired an employment lawyer, Kellie Paschke, who represented emergency medical workers across Iowa. Paschke told me that she was surprised the Police Department fired Hunter. He’d behaved badly, to be sure, but he hadn’t laid a hand on anybody. His personnel file was full of commendations. After watching the videos from his arrest, Paschke told me, she thought it was obvious Hunter was having some sort of mental-health crisis. She thought it remarkable that he’d been let go less than 24 hours after disclosing his PTSD diagnosis.
Paschke learned that the department had not followed its own policy, which required officers to have two mandatory counseling sessions after critical incidents — one within a week to provide immediate help, and another after at least 30 days, roughly how long symptoms must be present for a PTSD diagnosis, which can include angry outbursts, mood swings and muddled thinking, particular liabilities for armed police officers. Hunter had one appointment 22 days after Morgan’s suicide: too delayed for immediate help, too early to diagnose PTSD. Paschke was appalled by how the department had handled things, including sending Hunter back to work the morning after his friend’s death and providing him little mental-health support. To her it was both ill advised and heartless.
Employment cases are difficult to prove. Many people have gripes about their bosses, but few claims are actionable in court. And this case had a huge obstacle: camera footage from Hunter’s arrest, showing him drunk and belligerent. He was a big guy — 5 foot 11 and 230 pounds — and Paschke worried that jurors would see him as another meathead cop who thought he was above the law. She worked on contingency; if she lost the case, she’d lose thousands in expenses. Also, Hunter would have to take the stand and answer for those videos. His mug shot, with the Mötley Crüe T-shirt, would again make the rounds on the local news. But Paschke said she believed that PTSD was endemic among emergency medical workers, and that agencies needed to be held accountable for not doing more. They filed suit against the city of Des Moines under the Iowa Civil Rights Act, claiming that the city had discriminated against Hunter because of his disability — PTSD — and failed to reasonably accommodate it.
Two years after he was fired, in the fall of 2023, Hunter walked into the Polk County Historic Courthouse, ascending a marble staircase as he’d done many times to testify as an officer. Now he wore a civilian’s gray suit, his hair longer, his waist thicker. When he stepped into the courtroom, he saw two police officers, both of whom he’d long known and worked with, neither of whom made eye contact as they sat behind the city’s lawyers.
Paschke and her partner, David Albrecht, were nervous going into jury selection; they didn’t know how receptive a group of strangers would be to discussing suicide and mental trauma in a sterile courtroom. But right away, people opened up, the lawyers told me. A former U.S. Marine talked about his friends’ struggles with PTSD. A refugee from Bosnia talked about the emotional trauma of surviving an explosion. Others discussed suicide attempts in their own families. It was the most intimate voir dire the attorneys had ever experienced.
As the trial opened, Paschke told the jurors that this case was about a good man who’d had a bad night. It was caused, she said, by a disease that was allowed to fester because the Police Department viewed cops with mental-health problems as broken and not worth saving. If the city was going to send men and women out to deal with the community’s messiest traumas, it had to provide adequate support and not punish officers for disclosing mental-health struggles.
But one of the city’s lawyers, Michelle Mackel-Wiederanders, would later tell the jurors that instead of taking responsibility for his bad behavior, Hunter was trying to blame police commanders. “Do we want someone in a uniform with a gun who may emerge like the guy who showed up on that video?”
Police officers took the stand to testify on Hunter’s behalf, including a 33-year department veteran, Capt. Kenneth Brown, who told jurors that he did not believe the agency provided sufficient mental-health support and that there was a stigma to seeking it. “You can be ostracized,” he told jurors. Brown said he believed encouraging openness about mental-health struggles should start with top commanders. When asked if he thought the city’s police chief, Wingert, fostered such an atmosphere, Brown said, “No, I don’t.”
Wingert testified that officers rarely talked about mental health when he joined the agency three decades ago, but now annual training included discussions about trauma and PTSD. The chief said that he personally addressed the “physical and mental aspects of the job” with his troops every winter, and that “their health and well-being is a primary concern.” The department had a peer-support team, where officers could seek confidential help from one another, and the city provided free use of the Lighthouse app, which offered various mental-health resources. Officers also were free to seek outside help and counseling through their health insurance.
Wingert told jurors he’d watched video of Hunter’s arrest in his office the next day. The aggression, the name calling, the vulgar language — Hunter had threatened the responding officers, who worked at a smaller local Police Department, about what would happen if they ever came to Des Moines. Wingert said the arresting officers had been “overly gracious” to Hunter, noting they could have charged him with more serious offenses, including harassment, for threatening to kill the detention officer and his family.
The chief talked about the shifting landscape for police officers after the killing of George Floyd, and the increased public scrutiny of the profession. “I mean, we even went so far as to have an 11-hour debate at a council meeting about whether or not we should be able to buy ammunition to train our officers,” he said. The public expected him to hold officers accountable, and that was what he had done, Wingert said. Hunter’s diagnosis had nothing to do with his firing. “His actions got himself fired,” Wingert said. A PTSD diagnosis did not absolve him of consequences, Wingert said.
Albrecht pressed the point. “If an officer ran a red light and caused a really bad car accident and you said, ‘Wow, this is bad,’ and it turned out they had a seizure and they pressed the gas pedal through it, are you still going to throw the book at them, or are you going to consider that fact?” Albrecht asked.
“I’d have to consider all the factors,” Wingert responded. Still, he said, he could not have a cop on his force who behaved that way.
Albrecht pointed out that it was actually pretty difficult to get fired from the Des Moines Police Department. So many officers had gotten into drunken bar fights that an officer in a nearby town complained about “goddamn Des Moines cops” coming to his town and “causing problems.” Albrecht also detailed several excessive-force cases, including one in which an officer who had been repeatedly disciplined punched a man in the face, stomach and groin, and then, after handcuffing him, dropped him face-first on the concrete and broke or cracked nine of his teeth. Though a jury found the officer guilty of battery, and the city paid an $800,000 settlement to the victim, the officer kept his job.
Albrecht asked the police chief whether Hunter’s words were worse than those other cases.
“In and of itself, yes,” the chief said.
“Hmm,” Albrecht replied. “Out of everybody we talked about, he’s the only one whose behavior was determined, or discovered, was influenced by PTSD; yes?”
“As far as I know,” the chief said.
After a trial of seven days, the jury took three hours to reach a decision. Quick verdicts usually aren’t good for civil plaintiffs, but when the jurors filed back into the courtroom, several made eye contact with Hunter. The judge announced they had found the city had discriminated against him and failed to reasonably accommodate his disability. The jury also rejected the city’s claim that it would have treated Hunter the same way if he hadn’t had PTSD. The jury awarded him $2.6 million for lost salary and emotional distress. (The city has appealed the verdict and declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation; the Police Department also declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing litigation.)
Hunter wept. He looked over to the jurors; several of them were crying, too. Jurors typically departed from the back of the courtroom, but because the verdict came late in the day, they were asked to leave through the front with everyone else. One by one they walked past the plaintiff’s table. Each stopped and shook Hunter’s hand.
One of the biggest annual gatherings of law-enforcement officers, National Police Week, begins in Washington on Sunday, May 11. Tens of thousands of officers from across the country attend the week’s most important event, an annual candlelight vigil to honor fallen officers. What qualifies as a “line of duty” death has expanded over the years to include heart attacks, strokes and Covid-19. Many families expected this to be the first year that death by suicide would be included, too.
But in January, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the nonprofit that oversees the wall, told families that it would not add any suicide deaths this year. Bill Alexander, the chief executive of the organization, told me that the issue has been difficult to navigate. While the wall sits on federal land, it is maintained entirely by donations. Because there isn’t a consensus about how to treat deaths by suicide, the group’s board was concerned about alienating some of its supporters. It also worried about maintaining the integrity of the country’s most important policing monument, Alexander told me, one that embodies the profession’s highest ideals: honor, service and sacrifice. “The board felt a strong moral duty to protect what they view, and what I view, as a very sacred space,” he said.
Last year, the board received nine applications for officers who died by suicide to be considered for the wall. (Morgan’s was not yet one of them.) When a committee began to analyze these cases, many questions arose, Alexander told me. Suicides are as complicated as life itself. There were divorces, childhood traumas, financial problems, affairs, misconduct allegations, depression and other mental-health conditions, some of which predated an officer’s policing career. It was difficult teasing out how much of an officer’s trauma was caused by policing versus life. “It gets surprisingly complicated in ways we had not envisioned,” Alexander said.
Even if you take it for granted that police work causes trauma, which can lead to suicide, “a lot of people in the profession today would say there is a distinction between that kind of death and what we historically have viewed as a ‘line of duty’ death,” Alexander said. “One group went to work, kissed their spouse goodbye and didn’t go home, versus a man or woman in uniform who, for a variety of reasons, took an act that ended their own life. I’m not trying to disparage the men and women who died. But I do know that there is a strong contingent in the law-enforcement community that feels like there’s a distinction there.”
The decision upset many family members, including Katie Slifko, whose husband, Cory, a 20-year veteran of the South St. Paul Police in Minnesota, died by suicide in 2019. Slifko, whose husband’s death already has been classified as “line of duty” by the state of Minnesota and the Justice Department, points out that the wall has included hundreds of officers who died from Covid-19. She does not believe that the board, which has requested years of her husband’s medical records, requires similarly conclusive proof that an officer contracted Covid on the job. “You’re telling me that you can link Covid back to the job, but you have a tough time linking PTSD?” Slifko said. “I could list 35 calls off the top of my head that bothered my husband on a regular basis.”
Alexander told me it’s a fair point. But he said he sees an important distinction between officers who die by suicide and the 24,412 men and women whose names are on the wall. The latter, he said, if given a choice of life or death, “would unanimously say, ‘I choose life.’”
Shut out of the traditional wall in Washington, relatives have found another way to honor their loved ones. Jennifer climbed onto a bus with other widows, parents and children last fall and rode to a county park near Dallas where three gray granite panels rose. Solomon’s group, First H.E.L.P., had decided to build its own wall.
Jennifer walked to the memorial and found her husband’s name. It had been four years since his death. She had come to believe that her husband didn’t choose to leave them; he just wasn’t able to figure out how to stay. As she ran her fingers along the wall, tracing her husband’s name, she felt certain that if he, and so many of the other officers whose names were on the wall, had been helped, they would have chosen life, too.
Matthew Hunter awoke on a recent morning and stepped into the day’s first light. He’d sold his house in the suburbs and moved to a rural area outside Des Moines. Here, among hayfields and horses, Hunter lives with his new girlfriend and her young daughter. He spends each morning tending to their horse, pig, rooster and chickens. He and his ex-wife share custody of their three children.
After the initial elation of the verdict, and feeling as if his honor, in some small way, had been restored, Hunter has continued fighting to get his pension and to keep his law-enforcement certification. He hasn’t received any of the jury award as he awaits rulings on the city’s appeal. He occasionally hears from police-officer friends, but not often. Every time he sees a squad car, he pictures some other version of himself behind the wheel.
Hunter now works as a district manager of a nonprofit that focuses on employment. When people discover that he used to be a cop, they sometimes ask questions about what they imagine must have been a career of adventure. “Did you ever fire your gun?” they ask. Hunter tries to come up with stories they’ll enjoy instead of telling them stories like the one that came to him on a recent afternoon while driving home with his girlfriend. They passed beneath a pedestrian bridge over Interstate 235, and he instantly remembered a call he handled years earlier, when a woman jumped off that bridge into eastbound traffic. Hunter raced to the scene, peering under a Volkswagen Jetta to try to help the woman. He saw her body hopelessly broken. He escorted the traumatized Jetta driver away, trying to spare her the image he’d just witnessed — one of many he remembers in perfect detail.
Hunter has had a lot of therapy in the past five years to process those kinds of images. But even now, after fighting for his PTSD to be recognized as a casualty of policing, a medical condition just like back pain or a broken bone, it’s hard for him to admit how dark things got after Morgan’s death. “If I tell you I contemplated taking my own life,” he recently told me, “if I tell you I had a gun in my hand, that I sat there and stared at it, held it, literally could have been moments from ending my life — if I say that, I get scrutinized by every single person I’ve ever known. I get looked upon by some as being weak. All the people who work at the city will say, ‘See, it’s a good thing he’s not a cop.’ It’s still an incredibly hard thing to talk about.” And yet he tries, because in his heart he thinks that kind of honesty might save lives, might even have helped his partner.
Every couple of weeks, Hunter drives through the cemetery gates, winds around a path along the edge of a pond and up a hill. He steps out of his car and walks to Morgan’s grave. He tells him about everything he has missed. Before leaving, he takes a photograph of Morgan’s headstone, with the pond in the background. Hunter has many of those pictures in his phone now, through different seasons — spring, fall and winter. He remains close with Jennifer Morgan.
She told me she still worries about him.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Read by Kirsten Potter
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Ted Blaisdell
The post Why Do More Police Officers Die by Suicide Than in the Line of Duty? appeared first on New York Times.
