UC Berkeley California Local Reporting Fellow at Shasta Scout, 2024-2026
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At the time, Kelly couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But she said that looking back, the signs were there. Anxiety, depression and alcoholism run in the family; her father was the third man in the Rocha line to die by suicide. And he was a gun owner. His death is emblematic of an endemic problem in the northern part of California, which has both the state’s highest rates of suicide and highest rates of gun ownership. In Shasta county, three-quarters of the people who died by suicide in 2024 were men, and nearly every one of them used a firearm. It’s something that clinicians, local politicians, county workers – and most of all, bereaved families – are attempting to grapple with and work toward preventing.