(Editor’s note: This is the second part of a three-part series from Capital & Main.)
If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide or experiencing a mental health crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org
Sarah Fay was in her grandmother’s garage when she heard screams coming from the front yard. It was just before noon on Feb. 21, 2022, and her brother’s former girlfriend was wailing, “Sarah! Sarah!”
Maybe they are arguing again, Sarah thought, as she and a cousin ran toward the camper-truck that her brother lived in on the street in front of the mid-century ranch-style house in Culver City.
When they opened the door to the camper, they found Chad dangling from some sort of tie-down strap. Her younger brother had hanged himself.
Their ailing mother, Karon Fay, also heard the screams and ran out to see her only son suspended in the air in the camper.
Sarah tried to get her 64-year-old mom — who sometimes uses an oxygen mask to breathe — back inside the two-car garage where she lives, but Karon passed out in her daughter’s arms.
When Sarah and her cousin managed to get Chad down, his heart was still beating. They dragged him to the front lawn hoping to save him. But by the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late.
Chad’s lifeless body stayed on the lawn for six hours.
“The cops were standing next to him the whole entire time,” Sarah explains through tears in the garage nine months later. “There was no tape,…
