The Suicide
From James Donahue’s Journal
In my years of police reporting I have been at the scene of several suicides, but none was quite as messy as that of Sandusky Fire Chief Tony Doerr. This man, who owned and operated the local Ace Hardware store, chose to use a .12 gauge shotgun to blow his brains out. He did it while standing in front of the cash register in his store. The blast blew brain and bone fragments everywhere.
After the shock of finding Doerr’s body and dealing with the fact that this well-liked community leader had, for unexplained reasons, chosen to take his own life, we had to wonder why he chose to make such a mess of it. The store remained closed for weeks while workers attempted to clean up the place.
That was a relatively large store, as 100-year-old stores in Michigan towns go, and Doerr had it packed with the kind of merchandise you find in modern as well as the old-fashioned kinds of hardware stores. You could go into that hardware and buy specific nuts and bolts for just about any job, or buy toys, clocks, mirrors, garden tools and supplies, lawn mowers, shovels and an amazing assortment of just about everything.
Imagine trying to clean brain and bone fragments from the midst of all of that.
They say that after the store reopened, people continued to buy parts of Tony still attached to the items they purchased for years afterward.
From James Donahue’s Journal
In my years of police reporting I have been at the scene of several suicides, but none was quite as messy as that of Sandusky Fire Chief Tony Doerr. This man, who owned and operated the local Ace Hardware store, chose to use a .12 gauge shotgun to blow his brains out. He did it while standing in front of the cash register in his store. The blast blew brain and bone fragments everywhere.
After the shock of finding Doerr’s body and dealing with the fact that this well-liked community leader had, for unexplained reasons, chosen to take his own life, we had to wonder why he chose to make such a mess of it. The store remained closed for weeks while workers attempted to clean up the place.
That was a relatively large store, as 100-year-old stores in Michigan towns go, and Doerr had it packed with the kind of merchandise you find in modern as well as the old-fashioned kinds of hardware stores. You could go into that hardware and buy specific nuts and bolts for just about any job, or buy toys, clocks, mirrors, garden tools and supplies, lawn mowers, shovels and an amazing assortment of just about everything.
Imagine trying to clean brain and bone fragments from the midst of all of that.
They say that after the store reopened, people continued to buy parts of Tony still attached to the items they purchased for years afterward.