The nightmare that consumed Emily Hackett-Fiske’s life began with a phone call. She and her husband, Jason, a police officer, were spending time in New Hampshire, two and a half hours from their home in Williston, Vt., when her cell phone rang late in the afternoon in September 2020.
A cousin’s neighbor — where her son Ryan Fortin, 12, was staying for the weekend — informed her that “Ryan was hurt and the paramedics were working on him, and we had to go back to Vermont,” she recalls. “I told myself he must have broken his leg or hurt his head.”
Within minutes, the pair were speeding home at 90 mph as Hackett-Fiske frantically called for more details, but no one would tell her what happened. After talking to the police and noticing that they were not sending her to the hospital, she felt nauseous. “I knew what it meant,” she says. “They were telling me that my son was dead, without telling me that my son was dead.”
Later that evening, the devastated mother of six learned that her oldest son had taken his own life with an unsecured 9mm handgun he found in the house where he was staying. “He was the most composed kid,” says Hackett-Fiske, who was later told that Ryan had been watching an online video about suicide methods minutes before his death. “We will never know what led to this impulsive moment – the most impulsive moment Ryan has ever had.”
“Ryan was one of those kids that everyone loved,” Emily says of her oldest child (with his siblings in 2018).
Courtesy of Emily Hackett-Fiske
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Months after her son’s death, the 47-year-old environmental engineer found her way to Vermont House Rep. Alyssa Black — whose son also killed himself with a gun — to try to protect the 30 million other children living in homes with firearms.
Last July, Black’s law — which creates criminal penalties for unsafe gun storage, mandates a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases and allows family and household members to petition the court for a temporary gun confiscation — became law in Vermont.
“Grief is always with you, especially when you lose a child who has taken their own life,” says Hackett-Fiske. “If my advocacy saves one person, if it prevents one parent from going through this…that’s why I’m doing it.”
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Memories of Ryan’s adoption from South Korea in 2008 still bring a smile to his mother’s face. “I just wanted to be a mom,” says Hackett-Fiske, who was married to her first husband at the time.
“I was over the moon in love with this kid before he even came home.” The compassionate boy with a quirky sense of humor and a stutter was intense – whether he was learning about sharks, fly fishing or dribbling a basketball. “He would dive deep into a subject until he knew everything about it,” says Hackett-Fiske. “Then he would move on.”
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Ryan Fortin on the 2019 hike.
Courtesy of Emily Hackett-Fiske
Ryan was staying with a relative (PEOPLE is not naming the person per Hackett-Fiske’s request) when he used a dining room chair to access an unloaded handgun and several rounds from the top shelf of a closet in the home.
“I didn’t even know he knew how to load a gun. We don’t shoot guns at our house,” says Hackett-Fiske. “I found out that he was searching the internet and found a video about the most effective method for suicide minutes before it happened.”
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A few months after Ryan’s burial – in his favorite basketball jersey and Adidas – Hackett-Fiske was stunned to learn that the owner of the unsecured gun that killed her son would face no legal consequences.
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The ripple effect never ceases to ripple,” says Hackett-Fiske (holding a photo of her late son at the Vermont Statehouse on Feb. 23).
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“It pissed me off,” says Hackett-Fiske, who soon discovered that Vermont had no child access prevention (CAP) laws to support the prosecution of gun owners. “I don’t want to punish anyone, but we are all adults. If you are caught drinking and driving, you will be fined. This should be no different.”
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Her research led her to Black, whose 23-year-old son Andrew killed himself in 2018 with a gun that took him just 20 minutes to buy at a grocery store. Black, a 54-year-old former health care administrator, says her trauma and desire to change things “is what ultimately led me to the legislature.”
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Black sees their shared experience of losing their sons as a kind of “superpower” that allowed them to effectively humanize the importance of firearms security, an issue that often divides people. “When you’re able to publicly express your pain and show the horrific devastation caused by gun violence,” she says, “people listen and you can effectively make a difference.”
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He was extremely kind to others,” Black says of his son Andrew in 2018, who died by suicide that year.
Courtesy of Alyssa Black
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The two mothers felt an instant connection as they worked together on a bill they both insist is more about public health than gun control. “I couldn’t have asked for a better friend to fight for this with me,” says Hackett-Fiske.
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The law that resulted from their efforts will, among other things, hold owners of uninsured firearms used by persons 18 or younger in a suicide, crime or accidental death or injury liable, with fines and up to five years in prison. Although there are no federal CAP laws, Vermont now joins 25 other states and Washington, D.C., in passing safe storage laws, a move that Jonathan Singer, a professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Social Work, believes will reduce gun-related suicides among youth in the state.
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“Nine out of 10 suicide attempts with a firearm are fatal,” says Singer. “These laws create protection against a suicidal crisis, this impulsive moment when a child thinks the only solution to their problem is to kill themselves. This buys the child some time to access his thinking brain to come up with another alternative to his distress, anger, sadness or loneliness.”
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Encouraged by the passage of the law, Hackett-Fiske — who hasn’t had the strength to enter Ryan’s bedroom since his death three and a half years ago — says she’s just getting started. Her next goal is to establish laws that ban online content like the video Ryan watched before his death.
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“I know people call us suicide survivors,” she says, “but I don’t really see us as survivors. We are more like warriors — because every day is a battle.”
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If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Line by dialing 988, texting “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Line at 741741 or going to 988lifeline.org.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education