Shay Torgerson Suicide, Saint Paul MN, Shay Torgerson Has Died – Death Cause
Shay Torgerson Suicide – It breaks both Dawn and my heart to have to tell you that our son, Shay, passed away recently. He took his own life in the early morning hours of Monday, March 27, 2023, after struggling for three years with the incapacitating mental disease of schizoaffective disorder – bipolar 1, which is also known as manic depression. Shay spent his childhood in Saint Cloud and Maple Grove, Minnesota, and his mother and I took turns being his primary caregivers. He was a proud member of the Maple Grove High School Crimson varsity baseball team and earned a diploma with honors from the Maple Grove High School.
He was a proud member of the Saint Paul’s Hamline University Pipers baseball team and, in his final year, the university’s track and field team. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in business and finance from Saint Paul’s Hamline University, where he also competed in track and field. Upon his graduation from college, Shay began a career in the financial services industry while also continuing to play amateur baseball for a number of different teams, the Saint Anthony Hogs being the most notable of these.
The things that people will remember most about Shay are his laugh and smile, his modest intellect, his wit and sense of humor, his loyalty, kindness, and thoughtfulness, and the fact that he was sensitive to the feelings of others. Shay loved his sports, but not as much as he loved his family and his friends. And the sick curveball he threw. One of the countless stories that I remember — one of many that represent who he was and would become as an adult — is of him when he was around four or five years old and he noticed two older children he had never met playing in the outside playground at the Saint Cloud McDonalds near the Saint August exit to I-94. This particular story is one of many that represent who he was and would become as an adult.
These other two youngsters were brothers, and their ages ranged between between seven and nine. The younger brother did nothing to assist his older sibling, who was completely unable to see anything and was walking around the playground with his arms stretched out in front of him. Shay got up from our picnic table before he had finished his dinner and walked straight to the older brother, grabbing his hand and calmly walking the boy through the various playground fixtures while telling him what they were. He did this without asking for permission or declaring his plan.
Following that, the three boys had a wonderful time playing together for the next half an hour, with the blind youngster having absolutely nothing to hold him back from having a fantastic time. I relate the anecdote not as an unique occurrence but rather as illustrative material for the manner in which Shay would interact with other people and react to circumstances of a similar nature for the rest of his life.
Shay positioned himself as a young adult to enjoy a future filled with limitless love, great happiness, purpose and meaning, and opportunities to make a positive difference in his community through hard work, responsible living, and focus on and commitment to the people and things that matter – including his renewed commitment to his Christian faith. He did this by positioning himself to enjoy a future filled with these things. That future was about to be taken away from him.
On the Thanksgiving holiday weekend of 2019, Shay experienced his first psychotic episode, which came at a time when his future appeared to be so promising. Over the next three years, he would have a number of more episodes, and several of these would result in him being held in local hospitals for a period of 72 hours. In one of the episodes, there was an attempt that was not successful to climb onto and jump from a highway overpass. It was the bravery of a Saint Paul Police officer named Fahim Mursal that is credited with not only saving his life but also bringing him to Regions Hospital. It was there that psychiatrists were able to diagnose Shay and prescribe him the medication that would allow him to live without episodes for an entire year — until this past weekend.
