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By age 16, Jake was playing with the Canadian junior national baseball team. By age 17, big league baseball scouts were buzzing about the new prospect from the Toronto suburbs. Jake was selected 68th overall by his hometown Blue Jays in the June 2009 draft, just two weeks after his eighteenth birthday. He was a kid on the cusp at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, wearing a Blue Jays jersey with his last name and his lucky number 15 on the back.

Now his father is in his old bedroom in a Toronto bungalow half-wrecked by grief, watching home movies and talking about his boy’s life and the mental illness that ultimately robbed him of it. Jake Eliopoulos died on April 29, 2013, after a fifth suicide attempt accomplished what the previous four could not.

He was 21 years old.

“We are people in a club that nobody wants to be a part of,” Jim says. “But once you are in it the question becomes, what are you going to do about it?”

Jim has never spoken to the media about his son’s death. He only agreed to do so now because enough time has passed and because while talking about Jake won’t bring him back, it could help some other family with a Jake of their own. Between 10 and 20 per cent of Canadian youth will be afflicted by some form of mental illness. Suicide is second only to accidents as a leading cause of death among Canadians age 15-24, claiming about 500 lives annually, the majority of them male.

“I am going to fight the thing that did this to my son,” Jim says.

Another home movie: The kid with the tousle of blond hair is at preschool near his parents’ place on Bastedo Avenue in Toronto. His father arrives, telling him there is a surprise at home: a baby brother, Derek. Little Jake wheels about the class, saying goodbye and repeating in a singsong voice: “Derek is home, Derek is home, Derek is home.” A baby sister, Zoe, followed a few years later.