* Update: On April 9th, Rocky Huff received a 90-day sentence, with jail time to be served on weekends, and 18 months' probation. To read Daryl Slade's report for the Calgary Herald, click here. On the afternoon of Nov. 2, 2011, Rocky Huff was running late. It was a mild, cloudy Wednesday in Calgary, and he was to pick up his 13-year-old daughter, Keelee, from school. To her, the day seemed like any other. She was looking forward to ringette practice. Keelee and her older sister played on top-level volleyball, ringette and softball teams, and the family schedule was all sports, all the time. Rocky coached girls’ softball and volleyball, with weekends often consumed by out-of-town games. The softball team made nationals three years in a row. “Alberta’s best girls,” Rocky would boast, and the players and parents were equally fond of him. He seemed indefatigable. Keelee waited for her dad. An hour passed, then another. Rocky finally pulled up in his 2003 Pontiac Sunfire. Keelee spotted her old LG cellphone on the seat in the car. Weird, she thought. It had stopped working a year prior. Rocky muttered something about getting it fixed. He was acting strangely. That morning, he’d had a goatee. Now he did not. He told Keelee she couldn’t go to ringette today and they argued. After relenting and dropping Keelee off at practice, Rocky stopped at a liquor store for wine and beer. He called his wife, Debra. “Meet me at home,” he said. He was ready to tell the truth. The clothes he’d worn that morning, stained red, told part of it. He suspected his marriage would be over. At their home in Auburn Bay, on the southernmost edge of the city, Rocky poured a glass of wine for Debra. He said he’d done something terrible and began to weep. Debra’s world began its implosion. Did he hurt somebody? He’s not violent; did he hit somebody while driving? The awful possibilities clattered around her mind. An affair? That weekend, Debra composed an e-mail to be sent to family, friends, teachers and parents of kids Rocky had coached. “This is, without a doubt, the hardest e-mail I have ever written,” she typed. “The news is out—as some of you already may know—and it is the unfortunate truth. Rocky has been suffering from depression since his bout with cancer in 2006 and hit rock bottom on the morning of November 2nd. He robbed a bank.” Rocky is now 47 and drives a tow truck for a living. His face is carved with deep lines. Although he looks like he’s led a hardscrabble life, he speaks with the thoughtful softness of a librarian. He moved to Calgary at age 19 to work in a cardboard-manufacturing plant after growing up in Medicine Hat and Burstall, Sask. Debra met him at a slo-pitch tournament where he was umpiring. He made a call she didn’t like. Debra kicked shale at him. “The rest is history,” Debra told me. I learned of Rocky’s story unexpectedly this past January. I work with Debra, 49, at United Way of Calgary and Area, where she is an executive assistant. She’s the kind of person who ensures everyone on our team has a place to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, and if not, would they like to join her family for dinner? We assumed someone had quit when our team was summoned to a last-minute meeting one morning. That day’s Calgary Herald carried this headline: “Desperate, ill father pleads guilty to robbing bank.”

In 2006, after years of smoking, Rocky had received a bleak medical diagnosis: throat cancer. Subsequent radiation treatments destroyed his teeth, and he lived on Ensure, fed to him through a tube. Within months, he dropped from a beefy 255 pounds to a gaunt 156. He always felt cold and napped constantly. Sometimes he would sleep in the bathtub eight hours a day to stay warm, waking up briefly to add more hot water. Staff at the Tom Baker Cancer Centre informed Rocky and Debra of counselling options, but they never gave it any consideration. They thought they didn’t need it. Despite his illness, Rocky dragged himself to Keelee’s and Casey-May’s games. He felt a little self-conscious, being so thin, but he wanted to be there. His own parents had divorced when he was three, and when Rocky played baseball as a kid he did so alone. “I think my mom came out to one game,” Rocky said. “I always resented that somewhat, because there was nobody to back me up. I think maybe that’s why I’ve gone overboard with our girls.” He kept coaching, and in late 2007 it looked like the radiation treatments were successful. He gave his renewed energy to his daughters’ sports, starting a new volleyball club for girls who didn’t make other club teams. “The sports became almost an obsession,” said Debra. “He was very involved in a positive way, but that’s where he focused all of his attention. It was his escape. It was his happy place.” Parents valued Rocky’s passion but he was dedicated almost to a fault, as one family recalled later. How could you put that much energy toward youth sports and have anything left for yourself? At home, Rocky was different. “Unless it had to do with sports, it almost seemed like there wasn’t really a purpose or drive for him to be part of it,” Rocky’s 17-year-old daughter, Casey-May, told me. “He was just tired all the time.” After the cancer battle, he wound down a promotions company that he and Debra had run for more than a decade. He worked from home, buying jewelry from American companies hit by the recession, and reselling it online. He had some success with this and other ventures, but his post-cancer work efforts never really took off. He lacked focus and had trouble concentrating. Debra noticed him becoming more withdrawn, lying on the couch for hours at a time. Rocky stopped going to church and no longer wanted to visit family friends. When Debra brought up his reclusiveness, he’d say everything was fine. “I denied it,” Rocky said. “I just thought I was lazy, and still sick to some extent.” His behaviour annoyed Debra. She wanted to tell him: Get up and get going already. She figured he could cheer up if he chose to. “It was just that simple to me,” Debra said. “When I was growing up, if someone was depressed, we’d be like, ‘Come on. Shake your head. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Get off the pity pot.’ But it wasn’t that simple.” The couple had no language for what was happening.

Rocky started borrowing money rather than earning it, and he told Debra he had jobs he didn’t have. On weekdays, he woke up early and left the house until she went to work. Then he’d come back home, go to bed and sleep all day. Unbeknownst to Debra, the Huffs were going deep into debt. “I was on this self-destructive course,” Rocky said. “I was drinking every morning and covering up lie after lie after lie. Outside of softball, probably 90 per cent of my life that whole year was a lie.” Sports were his only truth, and in September 2011, after softball finished for the year, that was gone, too. He entered a deep darkness and saw no way out. On the morning of November 2nd, 2011, Rocky pulled his blue Sunfire into the parking lot of a Scotiabank in the southeast Calgary community of Cranston. His greying goatee was darkened with Debra’s mascara and he’d pulled a black baseball cap low over his eyes. Debra planned on going to Phoenix, Ariz. that weekend with a friend, her first real getaway since the nightmare of Rocky’s cancer. That same weekend, Keelee had a ringette tournament in Saskatoon. The family needed money and Debra was expecting him to cash a paycheque that day. He had nothing. Earlier that morning he tried to borrow some money from a friend, but was turned down. A new possibility occurred to him, and he hastily devised a reckless plan. “It’s amazing how the mind can work when you’re under stress,” he said. “You can rationalize anything.” Rocky walked into the bank around 11:30 a.m. but left abruptly, deciding to wait, hoping there would be fewer customers immediately before lunch. He drove around for a bit and soon returned, parking in front of the Berwick, a British pub. At 11:54 a.m. he entered the bank with Keelee’s broken cellphone pressed to his ear. He pretended to be conversing with someone. Sure enough, only one other customer was present. Wearing Levi’s and a dark jacket, Rocky approached the teller at the middle wicket, said he wanted to make a deposit and showed a hold-up note. “I have a gun,” it read. “Put all the money in the bag.” He handed her a black fabric bag and she filled it with $2,115, along with a dye-pack bundle, a stack of bills rigged to spray dye and stain stolen money. No gun was seen and Rocky told me he didn’t have one. He left the bank at 11:57 a.m., and as he stepped outside, the dye pack exploded on cue. Trailed by billowing red smoke, Rocky ran to his car and sped home. He says now that even as he drove away, he wished he could go back to return the money, but it was too late. The damage had been done. After parking in his garage, Rocky went into the house and started to scrub dye from the cash. It washed off but not entirely. The edges were still red, a giveaway. He thought of the paycheque Debra was expecting and planned to plug the bills into a VLT, then cash it out. As he thought of his family, he realized he needed to face the consequences not only of his sudden crime, but of his deceit. Until that day, he couldn’t see a way of coming clean. Now he had a place to start. “The bank robbery was a way to hang onto my family in some bizarre way,” Rocky said.

He told Debra everything that afternoon. “That hour-and-a-half conversation was totally earth-shattering,” said Debra. “I just went into shock. I couldn’t even think.” Rocky told her she needed to take him to the police station. Around 6:50 p.m., seven hours after robbing the bank, Rocky walked into the District 6 office holding a plastic Sobey’s bag containing the cash, minus the $138 he’d spent on liquor. “I think you’re looking for me,” he said to an officer who had a puzzled look on his face, and turned himself in. One in five Canadians will experience a mental illness at some point in life. That concept was foreign to the Huffs until the robbery. That night, police came and spoke with Debra. She recalls them saying Rocky was no hardened criminal, that he was likely suffering from depression. She initially dismissed that analysis. “I was bitter, scared, confused and said, ‘Well, whatever—he’s got to get over this.’ And they said, ‘No, he’s got to get help. There’s something else there.’” Thanks to his obvious remorse, Rocky was released the following morning without bail. Debra recalls him being very emotional in the days following. He was diagnosed with clinical depression a week after robbing the bank, but there was more. Lab work revealed he had hypothyroidism, which meant his thyroid gland wasn’t producing enough thyroid hormone, upsetting the chemical balance in his brain and body. Thyroid abnormalities can contribute to depression, and Rocky’s levels were well outside the normal range. His doctor explained that levels of thyroid-stimulating hormone—which tells the thyroid gland to make more thyroid hormone—are typically between 0.20 and 6.00. Rocky’s was 29.69. Furthermore, one cause of hypothyroidism is radiation treatments to the neck. Suddenly everything made more sense: the cancer, the radiation, his increasing sluggishness. Rocky met with a psychologist for counselling and started taking a synthetic thyroid-hormone replacement. Three months later, he landed a job as a tow-truck driver. Last year he brought in more revenue for the company than any other driver. He received company awards noting this was a “huge achievement” for a new hire to the industry. “He works long hours, but he loves it,” Casey-May said. “He likes the satisfaction he gets from each tow he does. It’s giving him something to strive for.” Today Rocky feels entirely different than he did in November 2011. “It’s night and day,” he said. “It’s all come back to almost normal. I still have my bad days. I can feel it, but I also know it’ll get better. It’s a one- or two-day thing. Now I’m able to identify it.” After the robbery, he was able to openly discuss his mental health without fear. But even as Rocky used this new freedom, he had a lingering concern: Tarron Fabbricino, the bank teller he had robbed. The night he was in custody, he asked a detective to let Fabbricino know that he was sorry. He was told the message had been successfully relayed. Still, whenever he thought about her, and how she might be affected by what he did that day, he felt sick.

In the media, Rocky was referred to as the “remorseful robber.” Remorseful or not, he had committed a serious crime, one that brought his family into the public eye. The Huffs decided early on that they would be transparent about what happened, rather than try to keep it quiet. “I needed everyone to be strong for my girls,” said Debra. “If they were having bad days at school, I needed teachers to be there to say, ‘Hey, it’s OK.’” After Debra sent her email explaining the situation, she was overwhelmed by replies of support. One phrase kept coming up: out of character. People seemed to understand that the robbery was a cry for help. Many shared their own stories of depression, stress and anxiety. “Life is so difficult,” reads one reply. “It breaks us down, challenges us, pushes us to the very depths of desperation and darkness. These are the times when we need each other the most.” When Rocky went to provincial court to face the charge of robbery on January 24 of this year, he was joined by family, friends and even kids that he’d coached. “It was a packed courtroom, and I’m talking packed,” said Alain Hepner, Rocky’s lawyer. The case had to be adjourned several times, but that didn’t deter Rocky’s supporters. “They all came back,” said Hepner. Many who came wrote letters of reference for Rocky, which were filed as exhibits in court. I have never seen someone so involved in their daughters’ lives as Rocky is… This is a person who has put in countless hours to benefit not only his own children but the children of others… I trusted Rocky with my 16-year-old daughter—the most valuable thing I have. I would trust him with her again… Rocky was moved, but still worried about Fabbricino. That morning in court, Crown prosecutor Julie Morgan read her victim-impact statement aloud. The Huffs braced for the worst. They had been told to expect a minimum jail sentence of three years, but it would depend on the victim-impact statement. “This was going to be the nail in the coffin,” Debra told me. What happened next was most unexpected. “If anything, this crime has opened my eyes to the varying and unique circumstances that we as a people encounter,” Fabbricino wrote. “I did not at any time feel threatened by Mr. Huff as this crime seemed to be driven more by circumstance than by character. I am very sad that anyone should be in such a situation as to warrant such a desperate response. My thoughts are with Mr. Huff. I have had no physical effects from this crime. I am more sensitive and trying to gain a better awareness of persons in my community that might require special help or assistance. If anything, I have a strong desire to volunteer my time in order to help alleviate some of the pressures these persons might face.” Debra recalls the courtroom going silent, except for the sound of people crying.