HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Daniel Adamek had a very dark day on Thursday.

It marked a year since his final conversation with his son, Christian. The Sparkman High School student, just two weeks shy of his 16th birthday, hanged himself in the family's garage last Oct. 2. He died the following day.

Daniel Adamek reflects on the final days of his 15-year-old son, Christian, during an interview at the AL.com offices in Huntsville on Thursday. The date marked a year since Christian, suffering from deep depression, hanged himself in his family's garage. He died the following day. (Crystal Bonvillian/cbonvillian@al.com)

Christian had gotten into trouble at school, and was arrested, a few days prior to his death when he streaked naked across the Sparkman football field during a football game. His suicide made national headlines due to unfounded rumors that administrators had threatened him with being labeled a sex offender for the stunt.

Daniel Adamek, a single father of three, disputed the role the streaking incident had in Christian's death and has spent the past year telling his son's story, a story of depression so heavy that Christian would drink anything he could find - hard liquor, vanilla extract, mouthwash - to numb the pain. A couple of months before he died, the boy burned the skin on the back of his hand off, developing thick scars that remained the rest of his life.

Self-harm, most commonly manifested as cutting, is common among teens suffering from emotional pain.

"This kid doesn't need to go to jail, he needs to go to a doctor"

Adamek sat down with AL.com on Thursday to talk about his son's final days. When asked how he was holding up on the somber first anniversary, it took several moments for him to answer.

"It was a hard drive this morning," said Adamek, who recently relocated to the Atlanta area.

Adamek delved into detail about his last few days with his son, the youngest of his children. He said he had a good final weekend with Christian, despite the looming legal trouble. On the Monday before he died, however, Christian was being uncooperative and Adamek did as he'd been told by Christian's probation officer - he called the police to intervene.

Officers that arrived at the house talked to Christian, trying to calm him down. Afterward, an officer approached Adamek.

"This police officer told me, 'This kid doesn't need to go to jail, he needs to go to a doctor,'" Adamek said.

After consulting with Christian's private counselor, Adamek took him to the emergency room, where a representative from a local crisis stabilization center assessed his condition and determined he did not need to be hospitalized.

Christian was asked to sign a form stating he would not harm himself. Two days later, he would do just that.

Adamek said it was not Christian's first time seeking help from the crisis center. He had been hospitalized there for three days about a month before he died.

When he was no longer considered an immediate danger to himself, he was released. Adamek said he was offered no advice on how to continue to help his son; all he was told was that Christian was a "good kid" and that he didn't say much while he was there.

"Christian had gone there the month before, and thought he was going to get help the first time," Adamek said. "He didn't."

The Monday night before Christian died, after returning home from the ER, Adamek said he found his son sitting alone in the garage, in the same spot he would later be found hanging.

Christian's last Tuesday was spent much like the day before, with his father trying to find help. Unsure of what his punishment would be for the streaking incident, Adamek was trying to determine how to manage Christian's education and, if he would be expelled, how to make sure he was supervised at all times.

That night, Adamek again found his son sitting alone in the garage. This time, he was holding a soldering gun his father had bought him to work on robotics and rockets, something they often did together.

"I was trying to get him excited about things again," Adamek said.

As they walked back into the house together, Adamek said, he smelled burned flesh.

"I grabbed him in a hug and grabbed his hands, trying to figure out where he had burned himself again, but without him realizing what I was doing," Adamek said. "I couldn't find anything."

Adamek said he unknowingly saw another clue to his son's mental state in the garage that night -- an extension cord that was lying around, not in its usual spot. Again, only hindsight would reveal its significance.

"It was not a good day"

Ademek said that final day of Christian's life, a Wednesday, "was not a good day." He had spent the morning on the phone, still trying in vain to find inpatient treatment for his son. At 3 p.m. that day, Christian had a hearing before the school board to determine his punishment for the streaking incident the previous Friday night.

There was talk of Christian's future at that hearing, Adamek said.

"When they asked him what he wanted to do, he told them he wanted to go to Auburn University," Adamek said. "He wanted to go to Auburn and study engineering."

By the end of the hearing, however, Christian learned he was being expelled and sent to the Madison County school district's alternative school for a while.

"His demeanor immediately changed," Adamek said of his son. "He did not want to go there. He'd been there before, and did not want to go back."

Christian, typically an excellent student, had been in the alternative school in middle school after he was found in possession of prescription ibuprofen that did not belong to him, his father said.

When the school board decided to expel Christian and send him to the alternative school, Adamek said he was relieved because, at the very least, his son would have supervision while they worked on getting him adequate mental health care.

"I was finally able to relax a little and know there was at least a way forward," Adamek said, breaking down. "I was exhausted all the time. It was hard for me to just try to keep up, and to feel what my son was feeling."

Christian, he said, was not happy. "I wish they had just kicked me out of school," he told his father.

The Adameks went home, where Christian ate two bowls of cereal and lay on the couch. At one point, he talked to his probation officer on his father's cell phone.

A couple of hours after the disciplinary hearing, Adamek stepped outside to make a couple of phone calls. When he returned inside, he found his youngest child hanging in the garage, from the extension cord he'd seen the night before.

"He had been setting the stage for what he was going to do," Adamek said.

While Christian was in Huntsville Hospital's pediatric intensive care unit, doctors put him on antibiotics. They told Adamek the drugs were to treat infected burns.

Adamek drew back his son's bedsheets and saw about half a dozen long burns on Christian's inner thigh - made with his soldering gun.

"I didn't investigate far enough," Adamek said quietly.

The origin of Little Orange Fish

After his son's death, Adamek founded Little Orange Fish, a Huntsville-based nonprofit designed to advocate for more and better access to mental health care. The name comes from a story Christian wrote while hospitalized the month before he died.

In the story, a tiny orange fish is plagued by the darkness of the sea. The fish ultimately loses his life to a larger predator.

"'He's a good kid, but he doesn't say much,'" Adamek said, recalling what doctors at the crisis center told him when he picked Christian up. "He wrote this the day before they told me that."

Adamek did not know about the story until after Christian died, however, when he found a copy the crisis center had mailed Christian. The teen had tucked it away in a corner of his bedroom.

"I read this the first time while I was on the way to make his funeral arrangements," Adamek said.

The father sees the story of the little orange fish as a cry for help that no one bothered to listen to.

"There are so many points of failure in Christian's story," Adamek said. "From my own denial and fear that clouded my ability to help my son to the failures of the professionals who we expect to be there."

Though he said he thinks the administrators at Sparkman High School "mishandled" Christian's streaking case, he said that the principal, Michael Campbell, was not to blame for his son's death.

"He was a guy trying to do his job," Adamek said of Campbell. "He was doing what he had to do to satisfy the parents who were there (at the football game) and to prevent copycats.

"What was lost was paying attention to what my son needed," he said.

Adamek said it is extremely difficult it is to get help for someone suffering from ongoing, long-term depression.

"It is absurd that the only resources we have available are for when you're in a crisis," Adamek said.

Pointing to the far-reaching, but brief, discussion of depression following the Aug. 11 suicide of Robin Williams, Adamek said that discussion needs to continue.

"We react to these catastrophic things, when that is such a small part of the problem," he said. "There should be no separation between care for mental health and physical health. We need to know we can find an expert in mental health like we can find an expert in cardiac care."

Adamek said that awareness of mental illness needs to be universal, that it should not be a matter of "finding the right person" to talk to.

"Everybody should be the right person to ask for help," he said. "That's the mission of Little Orange Fish."