Below is an excerpt from our interview with James Donaldson in which he talked about his past depression and the methods of suicide he contemplated, including ‘suicide by cop’. James was an NBA basketball player and long-time owner of a physical therapy business. Now he is an advocate for mental health and suicide prevention, and he is running for mayor of Seattle.
Above is a 5-minute video of James Donaldson speaking to WIBM. Below is an edited transcript of the video.
Victimizing others in the act of suicide
WIBM: Back when I was having suicidal ideations, the main way I recall wanting to die was by jumping in front of a bus or a truck. If I did that, it would have meant directly victimizing a second person in the act of my suicide, because it would have traumatized the driver of the vehicle I jumped in front of.
In the video “The Big Man’s Hurt” produced by Eric Johnson of KOMO 4 News, it mentions that one of the ways you contemplated trying to end your life was by attacking a cop in the hopes of getting shot dead. Can you share more about your thought process at the time regarding that idea?
James Donaldson: I knew that method would be one surefire way to get me out of here. My other couple ways were hanging myself in my garage, or connecting a tube from my car’s exhaust pipe into the car window and me just sitting in the car waiting to die. (I’m not a gun owner, so I don’t have access to guns.)
Just thinking about those three methods…it makes me emotional just thinking that I reached that level of desperation. That’s the danger of when you don’t have a healthy mindset: you can’t think clearly. Going back to the homelessness issue we discussed earlier, a lot of homeless people don’t have a healthy mindset. They cannot think clearly.
Read related WIBM post: Bellevue dad opens up about experiences with OCD and depression, aims to help others
Suicide by cop
James Donaldson: I follow and I’ve studied all the social movements and racial issues since my college days. I was a sociology and psychology major, so I studied a lot of these social aspects.
I have a lot of friends who are police officers in Seattle. Police officers want to get home safely to their families. They are putting their lives on the line just about every single day for us – to protect and serve us.
I knew that being an extra large African-American man, there would not be much mercy on me if I was coming at them with a great deal of rage and anger, and I was really reaching for their gun or wouldn’t stop attacking them. The only way to stop me would have been to shoot me, and most likely shoot me dead.
I feel bad about even having those thoughts back in 2018. But it’s true, and it’s real.
I look at the shootings around the country of African-American men by police officers, and I wonder sometimes how many of them might be suicide by cop, cloaked under some aggression or some animated acts, resistance, running away. I just wonder sometimes how many of those are suicide by cop, but put under several layers of other things. Did the Black man want to live? Why is he resisting arrest? Why is he not complying? What’s going on in his mind? You can’t help but wonder what makes people do certain things.
I also thought about the ramifications if I had died by attacking a cop. It would have been another Black man being shot by a police officer. Here I am, a former NBA basketball player. It’s national news, national headlines, it’s controversial, it’s strategy, it’s conspiracies, it’s all kinds of stuff. And nobody would really know what happened except for me, and I would no longer be around to tell the story. Even the police officer wouldn’t know why I attacked him. They would just know that I attacked, and they did their job. So I didn’t want to put our society through that kind of thing, with my death making headlines and people trying to deconstruct and put back together what made James do this.
How Tyler Hilinski’s suicide impacted James
James Donaldson: I thought about Tyler Hilinski, and how after he died everybody was out there trying to tell his story. How great a kid he was. How much he had to live for. They never saw it coming. What more could they have done? I didn’t want those conversations surrounding my death. It’s one of the reasons I fought so hard to make it through. After Tyler took his life, I read all the reports the next couple of weeks about the great kid Tyler was, and I decided, No, I’m not going to end my life. I’m going to stick around and tell my story. I don’t want to take my own life and then have everybody talk about how great of a guy I was. No. I’ll talk about that. I’ll let people know I made it through difficult times, and I’m here to tell the story and to let them know that they can make it through very difficult times too.
Read related WIBM post: 4 out of 5 youth suicides in Washington state are males: Our testimony to legislators in Olympia [Video]