Border Patrol suicides cause alarm; Professional, personal reasons cited for more agents killing selves
After a bad day on the job as a Border Patrol agent, Eddie DeLaCruz went home and began discussing with his wife how to celebrate her upcoming birthday. Then he casually pressed his government-issued handgun under his chin and pulled the trigger.</br></br>"It was the ugliest sound I ever heard in my life," his widow, Toni DeLaCruz, recalled of that day last November. "He just collapsed." A month later, one of DeLaCruz's colleagues at the Fort Hancock border post shot himself, too.</br></br>Suicides such as these have set off alarms throughout the agency responsible for policing the nation's borders. After nearly four years without a single suicide in its ranks, the Border Patrol has had at least 15 agents take their own lives since February 2008.</br></br>It's unclear why the agents killed themselves. Few of them left notes. And the agency seems somewhat at odds with itself over the issue.</br></br>Federal officials insist that the deaths have nothing to do with the Border Patrol, which has doubled in size since 2004, or the increasingly volatile U.S.-Mexican border. But administrators have quietly undertaken urgent suicide-prevention initiatives, including special training for supervisors, videos about warning signs and educational programs for 22,000 agents nationwide.