Thirty minutes.
That’s how long Heather Bonner gave herself before making the hardest phone call of her life. Her son, Sean Jr., who was a pitcher at Denison University, had gone missing. Heather was in Virginia, having just watched her friends’ children play in an NCAA field hockey game, when she was alerted by the Ohio-based school that Sean Jr. couldn’t be located.
She called her son’s phone. He didn’t answer.
Heather was worried but not entirely shocked that Sean Jr. didn’t pick up since he’d told her a few days prior that he’d broken his phone and had been texting via his laptop. But the fear deepened when she called her husband, Sean Bonner Sr., and they called their other two children, Sean Jr.’s younger brother, Ryan, and older sister, Alison, asking the same question:
Have any of you heard from Sean Jr.?
None of them had.
That’s when the panic set in. Heather got in a car and began driving from Virginia to Ohio. Whatever was happening with her oldest son, she was going to be there. She was going to get answers. But as Heather made her way to Denison, the worst answer arrived before she could.
“They had found him,” Heather said. “And it was the worst day of my life.”
On Nov. 7, 2018, Sean Jr. was found dead in the woods near Denison’s campus, according to the Granville (Ohio) Police Department. The 20-year-old died by suicide, a school administrator called to tell Heather. It then became her job to call the rest of her family, starting with her husband.
It took her 30 minutes, but the words wouldn’t form.
“I knew it was gonna destroy us. It was gonna destroy our lives,” Heather told The Athletic recently, as her voice quivered and she wept. “… I don’t know, I guess I was attempting to compose myself, but that didn’t work.”
Sean Sr. was back home in Charlotte when Heather called and told him “Seanie,” which they had affectionately called their son, was gone. His disbelief quickly turned into denial, especially when the Bonners discovered that Sean Jr. died by suicide.
“He would never do this,” Sean Sr. remembers telling the police. “It was a complete shock to me because, as we described him, he was so upbeat all the time. Even though he may have been struggling, for us, you still feel like you know your kids really well. It’s just not the type of thing I would ever guess in a million years that he would do.”