A Minnesota father is speaking out about his firefighter son's suicide in hopes it will help others.
“I think from my experience now is to make it as easy as possible for these folks who are big and stubborn and proud to get in and get the help they need,” Tom McDonough, a former longtime training chief for the St. Paul Fire Department and currently the coordinator for the state's Emergency Response Teams, told WCCO-TV.
McDonough's young son—Tommy McDonough or Junior, as he was known—had been a St. Paul firefighter. He took his life Aug. 2 at 28.
"He wanted to be a firefighter as long as any of us could remember,” he told WCCO. “Everybody who talks about him talks about this massive smile he always had on his face but deep down you didn’t see what he was struggling with.”
Before Tommy McDonough's death, the job had been weighing on him, according to his father. Even though both had been firefighters, the younger McDonough had experiences that his father had not encountered on the job.
“I’d been in the fire service since ’83, and I hadn’t seen some of the stuff he had seen,” Tom McDonough told WCCO.
Tommy McDonough's alcohol use and sudden short temper had begun to worry his family. Eventually, they were able to convince him to seek professional help.
“He was really trying to get some help in March and what happened in March? COVID locked everything down,” Tom McDonough told WCCO.
Although one Minnesota firefighter dies on duty every other year, suicide claims four to six state firefighters annually, according to George Esbensen, president of the Minnesota Firefighter Initiative. The state, however, does not have a good support system for these first responders.
“When we talk about what we ask these firefighters to do 24/7, 365 and then when the rigors of the job get to them there’s no support,” Esbensen told WCCO.
