published on April 10, 2024 in today

Blake Swihart, Romell Jordan and the two families sharing the trauma of a young mans suicide

Blake Swihart’s voice quavers when he talks about that phone call.

Not the one he received, although that one hurts him plenty. The first call brought just about the worst news he could imagine – his brother, Romell Jordan, was dead of an apparent suicide. Yet the memory of that call is shrouded in the shock he felt in the moment, and he can speak about that without losing his composure. His brother’s death didn’t feel real until the next call, the one he had to make.

Swihart is not sure why he was the first of his family members to be contacted, why Jordan’s boss called him this past February with the news. Maybe it was because he was already awake, in Florida for spring training with the Red Sox while the sun was still hours from rising back home in New Mexico. But the reason didn’t matter so much as the knowledge of what he must do next: He had to wake his mother and father with a call and break their hearts.

“I was the one who had to call my parents to tell them,” Swihart said, the pain of the memory creeping into his voice. “I don’t know how I was able to do it, but I was.”

Six months have passed since Jordan took his own life at 23, but the passage of time has brought only a modicum of peace for the Swiharts, his surrogate family. His time with them was short but packed with love. They took him in when he was 16 so that he could finish high school in the community he knew. They watched him star on the Cleveland High football field in suburban Albuquerque and go on to play running back at the University of New Mexico. But mostly they basked in the happiness he brought into their lives and the lives of so many others, even as he ransacked their fridges.

Now, after Jordan’s suicide in a hotel room in a remote corner of New Mexico, they are left with questions. In this, the Swihart family – Blake, sister Kacie, brother Jace and parents Arlan and Carla – are not alone. They are joined in their grief by Romell’s father and his five siblings – three brothers and two sisters. All of them are simultaneously overcome with love for Romell, distraught to be without him and furious at him for not sharing his pain. And, perhaps most of all, they question why they never saw the hurt beneath his happy-go-lucky exterior.

“We just didn’t know he was in such a dark place,” Carla said. “That was the hardest part for me – how come we didn’t see that? But we didn’t. We didn’t see it.”

Suicide affects a great number of families, many of them left to pick up the pieces that will never fit back together. Despite its terrible prevalence, talking about it carries a stigma that often makes coping with a loved one’s suicide a debilitatingly lonely experience.

The Swiharts and the Jordans want to break through that silence and share their trauma. They want to talk about Romell, the joy he brought to their family and the sorrow he left them with. They want others affected by suicide – both those contemplating it and the families fractured in its wake – to know they are not alone.

“All we can really do is just continue to talk about him and the great person that he was and how he impacted all of our lives for the better,” Kacie said, “and just hope that somebody’s listening.”

Romell Jordan and Blake Swihart: Courtesy of Blake Swihart

Romell Jordan had fit into the Swihart family immediately.

It wasn’t always so easy for him to find a place to belong. His parents were divorced, and both had moved away from the Albuquerque suburb of Rio Rancho where he had attended middle school. After his freshman year of high school, he was forced to move to Denver with his dad, Robert. There, he began to lose his way. His oldest brother, Robert Jr., did not live in Denver at the time but talked to Romell regularly and sensed that Romell was “losing focus” away from Rio Rancho and was beginning to point himself “down the wrong path.” The third oldest, Raymon, did live with Romell and noticed that “he wasn’t really himself when he was out here.” (The 31-year-old Robert Jr. and Romell have different mothers. Raymon, 29, is the oldest of the four children shared by Robert Sr. and Romell’s mother, Tamala Cade-Manning.)

Romell realized he was adrift and pushed to move back to Rio Rancho, where he felt more in his element. He lived briefly there with his godparents the summer before his junior year and developed a deep friendship with Kacie. They were the same age and, along with a friend named Cody, were inseparable those few months. But the idyll didn’t last long.

Kacie remembers sitting with Romell on the balcony of the Swiharts’ home, enjoying a July summer night, when his mother called. Romell’s godparents could no longer afford to take care of him, she said, so he needed to move to Las Vegas to live with her. He had barely begun to feel like he was home, but now he would have to start all over again.

The news unmoored him. Arlan remembers Romell saying he would have to run away. Cleveland High football coach Heath Ridenour remembers Romell visiting him and crying on his front porch, wailing, “How come nobody loves me, nobody wants me? What’s wrong with me?” Romell’s brothers say he was being a bit dramatic – football was still an option in Denver or Las Vegas, they say – but they agreed that Romell was better off staying put.

That was Kacie’s opinion, too. She refused to accept such bad news. She and Romell had spent all their time together that summer, and he already felt like a brother. Romell wasn’t going anywhere if she had something to say about it, and she petitioned her parents to let him stay with them. Arlan said it took him and Carla “about 10 minutes” to say yes. Blake, who’d just begun his minor-league career, gave his endorsement. Romell moved in right away.

There were hoops to jump through. He could have lived with the Swiharts without any legal arrangements, but Arlan and Carla wanted to make sure he had health insurance if he was going to continue playing football. That meant becoming his legal guardians, which required some convincing of Robert Sr. and Cade-Manning. Rayven Jordan, the brother closest to Romell in age, said some members of the family were a bit stung by the idea, although they eventually came around.

“They were probably a little upset more than they wanted to be,” said Rayven, who is 26. “But at the same time, they knew what they were doing. They were doing this for the better of their child.” The paperwork took about four months to complete.

But what makes a family a family doesn’t require the stamp of a notary public, and Romell became a brother and son to the Swiharts overnight. Immediately, Arlan was “Dad” and Carla was “Mom.” Romell got his own room and lived by the same rules as the rest of the Swihart children. He had to get all A’s and B’s in school and, though the Swiharts would feed him and clothe him, he’d need to earn his own money to spend on movies with friends and dates with girls. He would gripe to Robert Jr. about it over the phone – he just wanted to play football – but his brother would remind him that he had things pretty good.

Romell picked up a job at a Wendy’s four miles away from where the Swiharts lived. He rode Kacie’s bike there. “Fortunately, our house is up a hill,” Carla said. “So, his four miles, he probably pedaled twice.” Most of the time, someone was able to pick him up and take him home, although not always. That meant a steep, strenuous ride back home, though Romell didn’t complain about it. “It is four miles up a three-percent grade,” Arlan said. “He’d come in huffing and puffing and be like, ‘Made it in 19 minutes and 14 seconds, Dad!’” When Romell got his paycheck, Carla made him put half of it into a savings account she opened for him.

The Swiharts were not his only safe harbor. Romell was a gregarious sort who became famous for making himself at home. “If you hadn’t seen him in forever, he’d walk right in, walk right by you, walk straight to your pantry to get a snack, and then he’d tell you hi,” Ridenour said. “That was just him.” Once Blake got his own house in the area, it wasn’t uncommon for him to come home to find Romell on his couch. The miracle of Romell’s personality was that it never felt like an intrusion.

“He had the personality that would just suck you in,” Carla said, “and make you want to give him a hug.”

(C. Morgan Engel / USA TODAY Sports)

That was the only version of Romell the Swiharts ever saw leading up to his death. When they look back, they find no hints that he was unhappy.

After Romell graduated from the University of New Mexico in 2017, his football career ended and real life began. But that didn’t seem to get him down. He took a job with Cintas, the industrial laundry company, and the Swiharts always heard good things about him from his bosses. Last fall, he was able to join the rest of the family in Los Angeles to watch all three of the World Series games at Dodger Stadium, culminating with the Red Sox’s title-clinching Game 5. (Blake pinch-hit twice, in Games 3 and 4.) Afterward, Romell excitedly called Ridenour to tell him all about it.

He always seemed upbeat. Ridenour ran into him in December in the small town of Hobbs in the southeast corner of the state, about five hours from Rio Rancho. The football coach was sitting in an almost-empty Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in the middle of the afternoon when Romell rolled in with a girl on his arm. Romell explained that Cintas had recently lost an employee in the area and he was picking up the slack, delivering fresh uniforms and supplies to oil and gas companies in the area. It meant weeks in a hotel room in a tiny town – and long drives home and back on the weekends – but he told Ridenour he loved it. He seemed his jolly self. The day before he died, he also raved to Kacie about his job. Plus, that day he’d gone to a restaurant and been given a huge steak for free, a fitting turn of events for a guy whose middle name is literally Lucky. “Everything seemed fine,” Kacie said.

The Jordans feel they have a few more pieces to the puzzle. Romell did leave a note, addressed to Robert Jr., Raymon and Rayven. Robert Jr. has a picture of it saved on his phone and figures he’ll never delete it. (The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention recommends against publicizing the contents of such notes.)

The Jordans don’t know exactly what led Romell to the precipice of despair. That choice to take one’s own life is usually the result of myriad factors. Romell was lonely in Hobbs, the Jordan brothers say, and left to his thoughts. That meant stewing over girl troubles, disappointed over his failing to make it to the NFL and still suffering latent grief over his mother’s death three years earlier. But they insist they never sensed he was contemplating suicide.

Robert Jr. would speak to Romell on the phone daily from California. They’d trade advice about girlfriends and Romell would express his homesickness, but mostly their conversations were happy. Still, Robert Jr. could sense that Romell longed for connection. The voices and faces of his friends and family were available at the click of a button, but that was hardly a substitute for their presence. “If that physical touch is right next to you,” Robert Jr. said, “you feel all that energy and you feel that love.” But Romell was a master of putting up a brave front. His brothers could probe only so deep. “He knew how to hide it very well. He was very private. Very private,” Raymon said. “Romell was one of those people, it was hard to crack him open.”

Robert Jr. feels like he was as plugged into Romell’s head as anyone, but even he was fooled by his brother’s disposition leading up to his death. The two spoke the night of Feb. 27 after Romell had returned to the hotel after the workday. The pair swapped girl problems and shared laughs over FaceTime before Romell begged off to take a shower. He promised he’d call back, but first he wanted to show off the muscle definition in his back. Robert Jr. laughed. “Yeah, it looks good,” Robert Jr. told him. “Stop being weird. Call me back.”

The next time the phone rang, though, it was their sister – Teann, the youngest of the siblings. Romell’s girlfriend had called her after having spoken to Romell and warned Teann that Romell had mentioned the idea of taking his own life. That didn’t quite click for Robert Jr., but he told Teann to call the police – she was in Denver, so it would require some interagency coordination – while he would try Romell to talk him down. Romell didn’t answer, but Robert Jr. left a message to remind his brother how much he loved him and to tell him that everything would be OK.

A few hours later, in the small hours of the next morning, Teann called again, screaming. The police had found Romell. He was dead. (Though the details of his death are public record, suicide prevention groups caution against describing the method because it might inspire others who may be harboring suicidal thoughts.) To Robert Jr., it felt surreal. Just hours earlier, they’d been laughing. Just hours earlier, Romell had been flexing his back in the mirror.

“I hang up the phone and was just sitting there like, ‘Am I dreaming?’’’ Robert Jr. said. “I touched myself and was like, ‘Fuck, I’m not dreaming.’ It was just so unreal, and I couldn’t really gather it together.”

Disbelief followed wherever the news of Romell’s death traveled. The happy front he’d presented made it all the more difficult to comprehend. It hit Robert Jr. when he talked to his father, hearing the man cry for the first time that he could remember. The Swiharts took turns conveying the news to each other. Blake told his parents. It crystallized for Carla when she called Kacie, who remembers repeatedly telling her mother to “shut up,” something for which Kacie still feels guilty. Kacie, in turn, had to reach out to a mutual friend of Romell’s to wrap her head around it. It was all so unthinkable.

The following days brought a few answers. When Kacie entered Romell’s apartment to collect clothes for his funeral, she learned that he’d been putting up a few extended family members. Then there was the whiteboard in his kitchen breaking down his monthly bills. There were the usuals – gas, water, electricity – but also several other expenses he was paying for other people. He was just one man, fresh out of college, trying to provide for others. “For a 23-year-old kid,” Arlan said, “that’s a lot of stress.”

But the biggest factor, the Jordan brothers think, was the trauma of his mother’s death. Cade-Manning died in September 2016, early into Romell’s junior season. She had moved back to the Albuquerque area but struggled with seizures that may have been the result of a serious car accident she’d been in several years earlier. She was his biggest cheerleader and best friend, always finding a way to come to her son’s games. Romell and his mother lived separately, but he checked on her regularly. The day she died, he’d popped by in the morning before class to say hello. Romell had considered skipping class to spend the day with her, according to Robert Jr., but decided against it.

When he returned in the afternoon, he found his mother dead. His brothers say the experience – and the guilt at having left her that day – troubled him persistently. “That messes with you a ton,” Robert Jr. said. “That’s traumatizing.” Raymon said he could see the difference in Romell’s emotional state on the football field. He didn’t seem to love the game as much and moved just a bit more slowly out there. Raymon also finds significance in the date of Romell’s suicide – the 27th day of the month. Cade-Manning died on the 27th of September.

(C. Morgan Engel / USA TODAY Sports)

Both families grasped for explanations as Romell was put to rest. Ridenour arranged for the service to be held at the concert hall at Cleveland High, and the place was so packed they had to put monitors out in the hallway so people could watch the service remotely. The lives of many of the hundreds gathered there had been brightened by the young man they’d come to mourn, and many of them would have done anything for Romell had they known he was in distress.

Carla thinks about that, all those shoulders unleaned upon, and finds herself getting mad at Romell. “I’ll periodically just be so angry,” she said. Both families have battled that emotion. Romell didn’t have to bear his burden alone. Any number of people – two families, plus an entire community that watched him grow up – would have helped him carry it if only he’d asked.

“Every one of those people, they weren’t just acquaintances, they were family, they were people who Romell legitimately loved,” Carla said. “How, with so many people, could you not just reach out to somebody? I get pissed off thinking, ‘What the heck, Romell? You did a permanent solve to a temporary situation.’”

The healing process has been slow and incomplete. It moves along in fits and starts.

Robert Jordan Jr. and Romell Jordan: Courtesy of Robert Jordan Jr.

Some, like Robert Jr. and Blake – now in the Diamondbacks organization after an early-season trade – have forced themselves to accept the situation. “He’s the one who chose that,” Robert Jr. said. There is a big picture of Romell in his house. His 3-year-old son knows his uncle is gone but often looks at the photo and asks if he’ll see Romell again. Although Robert Jr. knows that parts of the Bible say suicide is a fatal sin, he tells his son yes. The moral math doesn’t make sense for him otherwise. “I hope he did make it to heaven,” he said. “That’s the only thing I worry about. They’ve got to let him in.”

Blake, who is currently in Triple A, also tells himself that Romell is happier now, even if there might have been a path to that happiness in life. He finds serenity in the not knowing. He has not read the note and doesn’t want to know whether Romell’s death was quick or agonizing. “He’s in a better place, and he’s happy,” he said, “and that’s how I still have to think about it.”

Others have found a more uneasy peace. Rayven finds otherwise mundane days punctured by the sudden, recurring realization that he can’t just pick up the phone and call Romell. For Raymon, a continuous series of unanswerable questions play in a continuous loop in his mind. “Why? What made you? What was going through your head? Why didn’t you speak? Why didn’t you come to us?” Raymon said. “There’s so much going through my head.”

Kacie was the closest to Romell of all the Swiharts, and her parents think she still hasn’t fully processed losing him. She agrees. She was emotional leading up to his service, but she said everything went numb when she stepped to the lectern to speak. That emotional fog hasn’t lifted since. She works as an investigator at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, a job that inures her somewhat to traumatic situations. Her coworkers notice she still uses the present tense when talking about Romell. It’s been a while since she cried.

Romell’s legacy lives on with those he left behind. Swihart has adopted Romell’s motto: “Just show up.” He wants to be the guy who’s always cheerful, who always brightens the mood of any room he walks into, who’s always there when someone needs help. Ridenour – who keeps photos of Romell on his desks at work and at home, and sometimes finds himself talking to him through them – said the Cleveland High football helmets will feature suicide prevention ribbons along with Romell’s high school jersey number, 10. Ridenour also delivers a daily message to his team that he wishes Romell had heard six months ago: “You matter, no matter what you think.”

Some members of Romell’s family feel that even if they had known the depths of his torment, they would not have been able to dissuade him from taking his own life. They are in the impossible position of either repeatedly replaying the what-if scenarios in their mind or believing that Romell was immutably unhappy. But professionals stress that no one is beyond help and that suicidal thoughts or tendencies can be reduced with proper mental health treatment and support. Those resources exist, but they are not as widespread as they could be.

Raymon agrees. He views his brother’s death as a call for more resources devoted to direct intervention. It must transcend mere lip service. “In schools, we need to have somebody who can actually talk to kids, to get them to open up,” he said. “A lot of kids can’t open up.” Kacie is in a position to do just that, and he has already experienced the good it can do. She uses Romell’s story when working with kids who have exhibited suicidal thoughts or actions, sharing her pain so that they understand that there are always people who care, always people who forever lose slivers of themselves because of a loved one’s suicide. “I think it kind of clicks for them,” she said.

But broadcasting his story far and wide can’t hurt. So, they talk about Romell – how wonderful a kid he was, how much they miss him and how they wish he’d have let them help him. Perhaps the right person will see it at just the right time. Perhaps it inspires someone to check on a loved on.

“If one person can connect with it and make a change, if they were contemplating something…” Carla said before trailing off. “If we can save one person, that’s all you can ask for.”

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

(Top photo of Red Sox tribute to Romell Jordan on Opening Day in Seattle: Billie Weiss / Getty Images)

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