Missing Baytown police officer found dead from apparent suicide

Nearly a week after he walked out of his Chambers County home and vanished, search teams on Tuesday found the body of Baytown police officer John Stewart Beasley, obscured from view in remote field near Baytown.

The 23-year veteran officer, described by his colleagues as "positive" and "upbeat" had apparently killed himself.

His suicide - likely from a self-inflicted gunshot wound - sent shock waves through the department where his colleagues couldn't even remember another officer who committed suicide.

"This hurts," said Baytown police Detective Bill Nelson, a local union chapter president who was friends with Beasley. "It hits close to home for a lot of people."

Nationwide, police suicides appear to be on the rise, though it's difficult to find concrete statistics as many departments don't track the data - especially in small offices like the 176-person Baytown force.

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In the weeks leading up to his death, Beasley's colleagues didn't see anything amiss. The 46-year-old was a weightlifting enthusiast and personal trainer who loved baseball and blogged about fitness on the department's intranet system.

"He was one of the those guys, he would talk to just about anybody," said Lt. Steve Dorris. "A friend of mind - a friend of anybody in the organization."

Beasley handled some of the department's community relations work and had just bought a three-acre piece of property, where spent all his free time mowing and clearing out brush in hopes of building a house for his wife and son.

Hours before his disappearance on Thursday, he'd gone out and visited the lot, then stopped by the police station.

He never returned.

When his family realized he was missing Thursday afternoon, they called police. From the start, authorities said there were no signs of foul play. Investigators at the house in Cove had spotted troubling "indications" about the cause of the officer's disappearance, according to Chambers County Sheriff Brian Hawthorne.

"He'd laid out his gun belt," the sheriff said. He declined to specify what other red flags worried investigators and family members.

"We were in hopes that he was just trying to take some time away from the stress of work and life," Hawthorne added. "That's not what it turned into."

For days, authorities mounted a search, summoning the manpower of the sheriff's office, Baytown police, canines, and the Austin-based volunteer group Texas Search & Rescue. When they came back empty-handed the first time, search crews kept on trying.

"Each time we searched we just kept expanding," Hawthorne said.

Early on, investigators recovered Beasley's cell phone in a field - a development that gave them false hope.

"We thought maybe that his intent was to go off the grid," Hawthorne said. But the hunt continued, and on Tuesday morning search crews decided to take another pass over the area in a helicopter.

In an agricultural field three-quarters of a mile from the missing man's home, searchers made the discovery they'd feared.

Far enough from the house to avoid being spotted, and close enough to the highway to cover the sound, Beasley had apparently shot himself.

"We're all just kind of numb and shocked by it," Dorris said.

Suicide has been a growing problem in police ranks. Nationally, the number of officer suicides outpaced line-of-duty deaths last year. The nonprofit group Badge of Life - which informally tracks such fatalities - reported 140 officers died at their own hands in 2017, up from 108 in 2016.

But it's hard to get a more precise figures because there's no federal database on police suicides, and many departments across the country don't officially track those deaths, according to a Chronicle review earlier this year.

"We could be losing 300 to 400 officers a year to suicide but that is only my professional opinion because we don't really know," Robert Douglas, executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation, said in April. "None of us truly know how serious the issue is."

Aside from lax tracking, many departments don't have targeted mental health support for suicidal officers, according to a Ruderman Family Foundation study. Just 3 to 5 percent of police departments have suicide prevention training programs, the foundation's analysis found.

Baytown Police Department has chaplains, peer counseling, and an Employee Assistance Program for mental health referrals. But as a small department the city doesn't have the funding for full-time staff psychologists the way that larger departments like Houston police do.

And even when there is help available, Dorris said, sometimes seasoned officers are reluctant to make use of it.

"We're supposed to be the ones that stand in the face of evil and deal with the chaos and trauma and problems of society," he said. "But we don't want to admit we have a problem when it comes to that."