Kelly Plasker, a reporter with NBC affiliate KCBD, died on Sunday, and the station said it may have been suicide.
The Texas news station, in a statement, said that Plasker “died suddenly on August 30th.”
“What you couldn’t see on TV was a broken heart. I remember one day two years ago when she and I sat and talked in the studio and she told me her world would never be the same. She said, ‘He was 19 years old, 2 weeks [a]way from turning 20.’ Kelly was referring to her son, Thomas, who took his life in February of 2018,” KCBD’s Karin McKay wrote.
According to McCay, Plasker “took her own life” in “a cry for help that she made very public on her Facebook page.” But it stipulated that there were times that she “used Facebook in an effort to help other people avoid the road to suicide.”
In her last Facebook post, Plasker shared a “final confession for the sins I am responsible for,” reported the New York Post.
The Lubbock County Medical Examiner told People magazine that Pasker’s official cause of death has not been released.
“The KCBD family extends our sympathy to Kelly Plasker’s family,” McKay concluded in the tribute. “But we also express our gratitude for the time we shared with Kelly, someone who always brought joy to the newsroom.”
Sharon Maines of KCBD wrote after Plasker’s death that she had “a heart of gold.”
“My friend (and co-worker) died this morning and I’m absolutely heartbroken,” she wrote. “Kelly Plasker had a smile as big as Texas and a heart of gold. She loved big and hurt deeply. Her heart was broken from the suicide death of her son Thomas, and then her father’s sudden death just months later.”
Suicide Hotlines
If you are in an emergency in the United States or Canada, please call 911. You can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 1-800-273-8255. Youth can call the Kids Help Phone on 1-800-668-6868.
In the United Kingdom, call Samaritans at 116 123, Papyrus at 0800 068 41 41, or Childline at 0800 1111.
In Australia, the suicide prevention hotline at Lifeline is 13 11 14. You can also visit the Lifeline website at lifeline.org.au. Youth can contact the Kids Helpline by phoning 1-800-551-800 or visiting headspace.org.au/yarn-safe
If you are in an emergency in India, call Befrienders India—National Association at +91 33 2474 4704.
