The prominent MarShawn McCarrel II, a young Ohio activist from the Black Lives Matter movement committed suicide on the steps of the State House in Columbus, Ohio.
The young activist and leader member of the movement was only 23 years old when he shot himself on Monday night, according to Lt. Craig Cvetan of the State Highway Patrol. He committed suicide outside the capitol’s entrance at about 6pm and was pronounced dead at the scene. He was from Franklin Township, Ohio.
McCarrell’s last post on Facebook was a message to be worried about: “My demons won today, I’m sorry.” he wrote. Since his death, the post has been shared over 1,000 times.
There were various signals on social media that showed the young man was struggling with something. He posted on Twitter a series of messages that emotionally varied too much. His last messages said:
“If we don’t have to live through hell just to get to heaven”, “Let the record show that I pissed on the state house before i left”, he wrote moments later in a darker tone. Was he actually saying what he had planned?
The activist’s last message was the one published on Facebook with the darkest tones of them all.
According to Cvetan, no one witnessed the incident and say that the motives behind McCarrell’s suicide are unknown.
However, others who participated in the protests alongside him say he did it to send a message. Molly Shack, an organizer with the Ohio Student Association, said McCarrell’s suicide was no accident: “We’ve been working so hard, and yet the conditions for the people in our community and the people that he loved and cared about are still so hard. I have to imagine that that burden weighed a lot on him.”
Source: Washington Post