Troy Sand's suicide devastated his large, close-knit family. His death also represented a growing manifestation of despair in rural America – the number of farmers taking their own lives.
On a mild spring day, Troy Sand took his middle son, Connor, out for lunch and to shop for a new laptop for college. Then he returned home, wrapped a single-shot shotgun in a rug, drove to his girlfriend’s house in nearby Cherokee, walked into the backyard and shot himself in the head.
As the presidential campaign barreled through Iowa in advance of the state’s caucuses, candidates including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker raised the problem as the end result of hopelessness in rural regions and unjust economic policies. “I have relatives on just about every street,” she said. “Your neighbors know everything you do. Everybody watches out for everybody.”
“It is just a crying need that somehow we seem to be unable to bring to the forefront,” said Patty Judge, Iowa’s former lieutenant governor and agriculture secretary.The Iowa Legislature is expected to consider increasing funding for mental health services. Dairy farmers in eastern Iowa received milk checks last year with a suicide-prevention hotline number printed on it.
Tall and handsome, Troy loved the outdoors, taking after their father, John, who left school in 10th grade to work on the family farm. Troy started helping out on the farm as a teenager and then returned full-time in his 20s, feeding the hogs, driving the combine, spraying the crops. He struggled in recent years, losing money because of falling crop prices and taking loans from his father to care for his sons.
Troy would stop by their grandmother’s home to make coffee and eggs before work. He would roast a whole hog for friends on weekends or make calico beans and pecan pies for enormous family gatherings. Through it all, he was a gregarious presence, the life of the party, always telling jokes, sometimes bawdy.
The next hours, days and weeks were a blur. At the hospital, Vrieze made sure her brother’s skin, bones and tissues were donated so she could tell his sons that some good could come from this tragedy. Returning to Marcus, she remembers seeing Troy’s sons’ classmates gathered outside their home, weeping and hugging, a show of support for her nephews.
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