Former Cleveland Browns running back George Atkinson III took his own life Monday almost one year after his twin brother Josh Atkinson committed suicide.
Their mother Michelle Martin also died two months before Josh’s death from complications of Crohn’s disease.
Two months before George’s death, he published a powerful letter on The Unsealed, which he discussed Josh’s feelings of guilt over their mother’s death, as they had decided together to pull the plug on her life support. He also talked about his own mental health struggles.
The twins grew up with their mother — who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and drug addiction, and was at one point institutionalized — but at age 13, they were sent to live with their father, former Oakland Raiders safety George Atkinson II.
George said he leaned on Josh in those trying times, but the pair struggled, as they were uncomfortable expressing their feelings.
“For me and my twin brother Josh, each other was really all we had,” he wrote. “Through the years we grew closer and closer. But neither of us were ever taught to talk about our feelings. For me, I felt like I had to be this tough guy and show no emotion.”
Though the boys found stability as teenagers after they went to live with their father, the pain they’d suffered in their early years remained repressed — and came to a head on Christmas Eve 2018, when Josh went missing.
According to PEOPLE, George wrote that he was able to find his brother using GPS, but that Josh was “drunk and upset [and] on the verge of driving to the bridge and doing something stupid.”
He was able to talk him down, but Josh still committed suicide on Christmas Day.
George was subsequently institutionalized after he tried to harm himself over feelings of pain surrounding Josh’s death.
“Filled with anger and guilt, I was on an emotional roller coaster and in a real dark place,” he wrote.
Eventually, George wrote, he found his motivation to keep fighting in his 2-year-old daughter, who inspired him to seek treatment and talk through his feelings with a psychologist.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough to keep him in this world. Depression is a serious issue and as comedian Earthquakes says, we must all continue to check on our loved ones.
Praying for the Atkinson family as they mourn the deaths of their loved ones.
George Atkinson III was 27.
