What the Phoenix mother who watched her 12-year-old kill himself wants you to know

Almost 15 years have passed since Patti Colbath walked into her backyard and saw her 12-year-old son Max put a handgun to his forehead and pull the trigger.

It hasn’t gotten any easier, she said, no matter what people say about time healing all wounds. It’s just not true.

“I’m not doing well, and I’m going to tell you very honestly, I have a couple of drinks every night, and there have been times when I have said very mean things to my husband,” Patti said.

The meanest thing: “If you hadn’t left the gun out, Max wouldn’t be dead.”

In the beginning, in the months just after Max killed himself, her husband would point out that their son could have stepped in front of a car or swallowed a bottle of pills.

Patti said she would retort: “At least there would have been a chance. There was no chance with a .357 magnum bullet in his forehead.”

Now, when she brings it up, he answers simply, “I know.”

The Colbaths are one of the families people say their hearts and prayers go out to when there is a tragedy like this. The stories stay in the news for a few days, there are vigils and memorials, and then the families are left for a lifetime to try to make sense of what happened. As in so many cases like this, Patti and Scott saw no signs of what was to come.

Off-the-cuff remark at lunchtime

On a Friday in October 2001, during lunch at Desert Shadows Middle School in Phoenix, Max, an eighth-grader, said something profane about the vice principal, unaware that the administrator was in the cafeteria.

It would turn out that the vice principal didn’t hear Max. But other kids told Max he was going to get into trouble.

So Max left campus. The vice principal called Patti at the insurance office where she worked when Max didn’t show up for his first class after lunch. He explained what had happened at lunch, about the remarks, about leaving campus. Patti called her husband, Scott, a computer programmer analyst, to tell him what had happened. He said he'd head home, too.

Max had never been in trouble before. The truth was, Patti said, he wasn’t in trouble now. Kids say stupid things at times. Patti hoped her son wasn’t too upset.

A chess champion who loved 'Star Wars'

Max was a good kid, and smart. He was a wicked chess player, qualifying for a state championship at 6. By 8, he was taking classes at Arizona State University — Introductory Algebra, Algebra 101 and virtual basic programming. He knew everything there was to know about "Star Wars." He was a brown belt in karate. He played the violin.

He was sensitive, too, the kind of kid who wanted to donate his savings to the families of the victims of 9/11.

When Max would get home from school, he'd call his mom at work to tell her about his day. "I love you," he always said, and then he would report what the cats or dogs were doing.

As Patti drove home that day, the 2 ½ miles from her office to her house, she thought, Please don’t run away, Max. Please don’t run away. That was the worst she could imagine. The worst.

At home, she called out for her son. No answer. The house sat on a half-acre, and she went out back and then around to the side of the house.

Like it was yesterday, she can see him still.

“There was Max, 5-foot-10 and size 10 feet — he wasn’t wearing shoes; we don’t like shoes — with big shorts and a T-shirt and his beautiful glasses and a gun.

“A big gun.

“A .357 magnum.”

Getting ahold of a gun

Scott adored his son. He remembers carrying Max around like a football when he was baby and then on his shoulder when he was a toddler. Scott took Max to karate and chess tournaments and for rides on his motorcycle. He had been teaching Max to ride a dirt bike; the first time he had driven it into the tool shed.

Sometimes, on Fridays, Scott would pick up Max early from school to go to the movies.

“I loved having him with me so much that sometimes I’d wake him up on a Saturday morning and say, ‘Dude, let’s go to Home Depot,’ just because I wanted him with me," Scott said.

Patti and Scott grew up in New England, where they both learned to shoot rifles at shooting ranges. When Max was 11, Scott wanted to teach his son.

"I said to my husband, 'OK, here’s the deal: you get a gun safe, a good one, and the guns are locked up at all times, and no one has access to the key but you.' I didn’t even want access,” Patti said.

Scott took Max to gun safety classes at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility. They went to the shooting range almost every weekend. Max took it seriously.He was a pretty good shot, his dad said.

The week Max died, he and his father had been to the shooting range. Scott had loaded six guns into the safe in the garage. He had set down a bag holding two more on the ground — and forgot about them.

It was how Max got hold of a gun.

In an instant

Max was about 20 feet away from his mother when she came around the corner of the house. He looked confused and scared.

Somehow Patti covered the distance. She reached out with two fingers of her right hand and touched his wrist.

“Max,” she said, “what’s this?” He said, “No," and pulled away.

And then her son put the gun to his forehead. His mom shrieked, “I love you!” And he pulled the trigger.

Everything changed in that moment.

Somehow Patti got to the phone and called 911, her son’s blood on her hands. Like a mantra, she spoke the words to the 911 operator, “He’s so smart. He’s so loving. I love him so much.” The 911 operator told her to feel for a pulse. She thought she felt one.

Emergency crews arrived quickly. Someone steered Patti into the house and sat her on the couch. “How’s Max?” she had asked one of them. “He’s dead,” the emergency responder had said simply.

“That was that,” Patti said. And again, more softly, “That was that.”

By the time Scott arrived, his office 40 minutes from home, his son lay dead in the backyard under a blanket.

A lesson to learn

Nearly 400 people attended Max's memorial service. Patti and Scott donated all of Max’s savings, $175.63, to a disaster relief fund as he wanted. They also donated Max’s organs.

Patti asked if she could speak to Max’s classmates afterward. School administrators suggested she write a letter instead. In part, she told them, “If Max had been able to remember, for just one moment, how much he was loved and how much he meant to so many people, he would still be here. Please remember no matter how desperate things may seem, there is always an answer and a person you can turn to.”

That’s the lesson she wanted the children to learn from Max’s death.

Within a year, two girls at the school Max had attended also committed suicide. After the second case, 500 parents attended a school meeting about suicide.

What Patti wanted the grown-ups in those kids' lives to realize was that it could happen to any family.

No one could believe that Max would commit suicide. Not his family. Not his chess master or his sensei. Not his teachers. Not his friends. They have all said it hundreds of times in the years since.

“You think your kid isn’t that kid. It can be any kid. You never know," Patti said.

“Believe me, you don’t want to live with this,” she said.

“It’s never over.”

 Never the same again

Scott had always been meticulous about locking up their guns. Both he and Patti said what happened was a rare and horrible mistake. But Scott knows his son wouldn't have been able to get a gun if he hadn't left the guns out. He had the only key to the gun safe.

Patti blames herself, too. “Why didn’t I grab his arm? Why didn’t I tackle him?”

People grieve in different ways. Patti is heartbroken. She knows Scott hurts, too. But they don’t talk about it.

They have been married for 30 years, but Max’s death changed the way they talk to each other. It changed the way they love each other, Patti said.

“I’ll never be the same again,” she said. Before Max died, nothing scared her. As a kid, she climbed the highest trees. She rode horses her entire life. But not anymore. She doesn't even like to leave the house.

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"I’m afraid. I’m afraid all the time,” Patti said. She’s been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She has panic attacks.

Everything is different now.

They have moved twice and now live in northeast Phoenix. The houses always feel empty.

Patti has much to be grateful for. She knows that. In particular, her daughter who lives in San Diego and her 4-year-old granddaughter. But no amount of talking, of counseling, of time can change what she lost. “Twelve steps? Twelve steps? My kid’s dead.”

“I miss him so desperately,” Patti says. “He was my soul mate. He was. We got each other.”

It has been harder for Patti because of what she saw, Scott said. He keeps busy, between work and photography work he does on the side. “You have to keep moving,” he said. “Sitting still has never been my thing.”

Of course he misses Max, too. “When I think of him, I smile. I don’t get sad.”

Sometimes it surprises him. Like when he first saw the trailer for the newest “Star Wars” movie. Max would have loved that. And last year when he was working on a television show and stepped onto the boardwalk at Cocoa Beach, Fla., where he had vacationed with Patti and Max and where, in 2002, they had spread some of Max's ashes.

“The memories that came back hit me like a ton of bricks,” Scott said. “I was sad, but then I remembered that it was one of the best days we ever had."

The day Max died, or maybe it was the next day, Patti told Scott to empty the gun safe. Give the guns away. Throw them away. She didn’t care which.

He got rid of them all.

Except one that Patti kept. She kept the one Max used to shoot himself. It's there in her dresser drawer, the chamber empty. She knows it seems insane.

But she keeps it anyway. It is the last thing her son touched.

Reach Bland at karina.bland@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8614. Read her blog.