Sgt. Thomas Connelly’s brief but traumatic career
reveals the hidden toll on officers, who often don’t
seek help — even when stress becomes unbearable.

Barbara Connelly visits the grave of her son Tom Connelly

THREE LAKES, Wis. —ON THE MORNING of the funeral, scores of police officers and sheriff’s deputies filed toward the front of St. Theresa Catholic Church, silently saluting as they passed a black plaque and a silver urn.

The plaque commemorated the summer morning in 2016 when, after only a few months on the job, Sgt. Thomas Connelly opened fire on a suspect during a deadly standoff.

The urn marked the autumn evening 14 months later when Connelly turned his weapon on himself.

The 29-year-old’s death had deeply shaken the Langlade County Sheriff’s Department, whose 18 sworn officers were accustomed to dealing with suicides in this vast rural stretch of northern Wisconsin, but never one of their own. And it had stunned his parents, who had seen few hints that he was suffering.

Of their 11 children, he had always been the sober, steady one. What, his mother and father wondered, had they missed in those 14 months?

For answers, they’d turned to Dave Korus, a family friend and retired police commander who now stepped to the altar to deliver the eulogy.

Police work took officers to “some of the darkest places in America,” he said, and few were darker than the scenes of officer-involved shootings, often called “critical incidents.”

“Tom had a critical incident as a police officer,” Korus continued, and afterward his father had worried about how it would affect him.

Although most officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty, police fatally shoot about 1,000 people each year in the United States, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.

 here for data      -=====https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police-shootings-2018/?utm_term=.aa96dc092b22

Some of those incidents trigger public outrage or prosecutions. But even when officers are cleared of wrongdoing, even when they are hailed as heroes for their actions, they can come away from shootings deeply damaged.

Korus knew that firsthand. His own son — a patrolman in St. Paul, Minn. — had been involved in a fatal confrontation with an armed suspect only a few weeks before Connelly, he told the mourners.

What he didn’t say was that he had heard his son’s shouts on the police scanner hours before he could hug him to make sure he was okay. Or how, afterward, his son had stopped telling people he was a police officer and started wearing his concealed weapon everywhere, just in case. Or how the stress became so severe that his jaw began to lock up.

But where his son sought help, Connelly had not.

“The problem with us as first responders,” Korus continued, “is that we don’t take care of ourselves very well. We take care of others, but we don’t want to be other people’s problem. We want to be that brave person. We want to be the one that is standing tall.”

Connelly’s suicide had spurred Korus to ask his own son how he was coping, he said. Now he begged the church full of officers and their relatives to do the same.

“Those things that we pick up throughout our career can get heavy,” Korus said. “The badge that proves we serve can get heavy.”

Jeff Korus, a police officer in St. Paul, Minn., returns to the site where he and fellow officers in May 2016 killed a man who fired a gun at them. 

TOM CONNELLY WAS a small-town electrician, itching for something bigger.

Fifth among the 11 children, he had always been the quiet, observant center of the boisterous Connelly clan. But the short, slightly built boy with dark hair and green eyes also displayed a protective streak, once chasing down a bully who’d insulted one of his seven sisters. When another sister got engaged, her suitor went to Connelly to seek the family’s approval.

By his mid-20s, Connelly was tired of installing wiring. When an older cousin became a sheriff’s deputy and began sharing stories of car chases and drug busts, Connelly was inspired to follow suit.

His father excitedly called Dave Korus with the news. They had met on a North Dakota Air Force base in 1977. Later, when George Connelly became a commercial pilot and Korus became a cop, they kept in close touch by telephone. Each was fascinated by the other’s job.

Korus and three other officers, all white, had shot Smith, who was black, at least a dozen times. Flowers, who survived but lost an eye, is also black.

Soon there was a swarm of other officers, paramedics and state investigators from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

“I’m okay,” was all Korus could tell his fiancee, Elizabeth Nolden, when he rang her at 4 a.m. When she called his father, the retired cop began dialing his buddies, trying to piece together the shooting. Someone had uploaded a recording of the call online, and Dave Korus could hear his son shouting at Smith, then gunshots.

By then, Korus was in an office at the police station, where he sat for hours replaying the incident in his mind. After meeting with a union lawyer, he was taken to an interview room to answer questions from state investigators.

It wasn’t until the adrenaline wore off a few days later, he said, that he realized, “I was basically being investigated for a homicide.”

When authorities released the names of the four officers the following day, Korus worried that he would be next in the national spotlight. Smith was compared to Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray on Twitter. Protesters would later carry cardboard tombstones bearing his name in demonstrations against police brutality.

But the story quickly faded from the headlines, and Korus was told to return to work after only three days off. First, he had to meet with a St. Paul police psychologist — one of three mandatory meetings for officers involved in shootings.

Jeff Korus, who was involved in a fatal shooting as a police officer in St. Paul, Minn., plays with his son William at home. The stress of the shooting took a toll on his health. 

“My head was still spinning,” he said. “I didn’t know what was going on.”

His father also tried to help by taking him to the scene of the shooting before his first night back on patrol. But there was a gulf between the father who, during his 30 years as an officer, had never shot someone, and the son who in six years already had.

Although Jeff Korus would eventually be recommended for a medal of honor by his police chief, he stopped telling neighbors that he was an officer. After Ferguson, he had stopped driving to work in his uniform and tinted his car widows. Now he started carrying his concealed weapon everywhere — even to the grocery store.

Within a few weeks, his jaw began to lock up. He was grinding his teeth in his sleep.

Two months later, when a police officer in a St. Paul suburb fatally shot Philando Castile as he tried to show his license, the Twin Cities erupted in protests. Korus began to think about leaving the force, he said.

His jaw got worse, and his father sent him to a police psychologist specializing in the use of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing to treat trauma.

After three visits, Korus’s symptoms had begun to subside when, on July 26, 2016, his dad called to say that Tom Connelly had just been involved in a fatal shooting.

Tom Connelly fired one shot at this spot in rural Lincoln County, Wis. Fourteen months after officers killed Scot Minard, Connelly shot himself. 

FOR AN HOUR, Tom Connelly watched through the sights of his AR-15 as Scot Minard begged officers to shoot him.

Minard’s life was a mess. The 50-year-old had a long criminal record, mostly for theft, and had spent several years in prison. He struggled with addiction that only deepened after his daughter killed herself four years earlier. Police had recently begun investigating him again over a stolen gun, and Minard told friends he’d rather be shot than return to jail.

Then, on July 26, 2016, an officer spotted him driving a stolen car and pulled him over in Antigo, Wis. Minard — drunk and high — stuck the stolen gun out the window and fired wildly before speeding off.

A 120 mph chase through the countryside had ended here: on a dead-end road at the edge of a field of grain as a family of seven huddled in a farmhouse basement nearby.

Connelly seemed shaken when he told his girlfriend about the shooting that evening. He began to cry before quickly burying his emotions.

“He didn’t bring it up again,” recalled Brittany Thrall. “We went on like it was a normal night.”

When he went over to his mother’s for dinner, Connelly joked, “Looks like I might have some time off.” But he said little else about the shooting.

As the days of leave wore on, however, Connelly’s mood darkened.

“He was really stressed out in the time he was off,” said his younger brother, Jack, 19.

“It was a long time to have a potential homicide charge hanging over his head,” Gensler said. “He didn’t even know if he hit the guy.”

He hadn’t, concluded state investigators, who ruled in October 2016 that the shooting was justified.

Connelly returned to patrol after two months off. Almost immediately, he joined a search for a missing 3-year-old boy, who was found alive the next morning. The incident — and others involving children — weighed on him, said younger sister Laura Bailey, a nurse at a children’s hospital in Milwaukee.

“I don’t know the extent of the tools he was given to cope with these kinds of things,” she said.

Barbara Connelly displays memorabilia in honor of her son Tom Connelly, including footprints from his birth. 

Then, on April 9, 2017, his beloved 6-year-old cousin, Gracie, drowned during a birthday pool party just a few miles from where Connelly lived.

“I never heard him cry,” his mother recalled. “But when I had to tell him about Gracie, he sobbed. He was absolutely devastated.”

Weeks after the little girl’s funeral, Connelly was promoted to sergeant. But his relationship with his girlfriend was unraveling, partly, Thrall said, because his job had left him afraid to have kids.

In September, he surprised his superiors by giving up his sergeant’s rank to work during the day. He seemed exhausted, recalled Sgt. Kevin Ison, who responded to an eviction call with Connelly.

“He said he didn’t know if he could do this anymore,” Ison said. “Job pressures, internal pressures, I think it was all ganging up on him at once.”

A few days later, Bailey was in town visiting their mother. She and Connelly had made plans to have lunch, but when his sister texted him, he said he was busy.

Upset, Bailey invited him over for dinner, but Connelly — who’d always dropped everything to see her — never came out.

Instead, he began drinking. Thrall came over, and they got into an argument. When she left, Connelly went into his basement, where he kept his guns.

With her son’s photo on the console, Barbara Connelly drives to visit Tom Connelly’s grave. “I want people to understand how tormented these guys get after just years and years of this drip, drip, drip of evil and unappreciation,” she said. 

AS SOON AS he picked up the phone, Dave Korus could tell that something was wrong. All George Connelly could do was sob.

Tom, he said, had killed himself.

Suicide catches many families by surprise, but experts say police officers are often particularly adept at hiding the warning signs. They are practiced at burying their emotions on the job. And as one of the few professions where mental health is a prerequisite, police have extra incentive to stay quiet, said Miriam Heyman of the Ruderman Family Foundation, who has studied police suicides.

“They are scared of losing their guns if they speak openly about their mental illness,” she said, “and that fear is not unfounded.”

As a result, many departments develop a culture of silence.

Connelly had hidden his distress even from those closest to him.

“He was just so steady that I didn’t worry that he was going to do something stupid,” Bailey said. “That wasn’t even on my radar.”

The family had first heard the news from a friend, not the police, and so for several frantic hours they tried to confirm if it was true.

But then Gensler had gone to his cousin’s house and found it surrounded by fellow officers.

George Connelly insisted on driving up from Milwaukee to clean up the scene of the suicide himself. He stopped at a dollar store on the way and bought equipment. The next morning, he went down into the basement and scrubbed his son’s blood.

“I cleaned up a thousand messes of his when he was a kid,” he said. “I wanted to be the one to clean up his last one.”

Barb Connelly went through his things. She found a letter commending his actions during the prom shooting and the black plaque praising his bravery during the deadly standoff.

“I don’t think anyone in the family knew they existed,” she said.

George Connelly, left, and Barbara Connelly attend the funeral of their son, Langlade County sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Connelly. 

She found the bike in the attic he’d stopped riding after the teacher’s cycling accident and a single printed photo of Tom holding Gracie as a toddler. When she searched his computer, she found something else that surprised her: a meme he’d saved of a squad car with an officer inside.

“Our job is keeping 99 percent of the population safe from the other one percent,” it said. “The problem is we have to spend half our lives with that one percent, and the better we do our job, the less the other 99 think they need us. They are clueless. The only ones paying attention on the streets are the cops and the criminals. Everyone else is just going somewhere or shopping.”

It was a side of her son she had never seen.

When Dave Korus told George that many officers felt that way and that many had suicidal thoughts, Barb decided that even though the retired police commander had never met her son, he should deliver the eulogy.

“I want people to hear this,” she told him. “I want people to understand how tormented these guys get after just years and years of this drip, drip, drip of evil and unappreciation.”

Connelly’s parents worried, however, about how his department would react.

“Are you ashamed of him for what he did?” his father had asked the officers who came to the door after the suicide.

“God, no,” one answered. “This could have been any one of us.”

Sheriff’s deputies present a flag to Tom Connelly’s mother. More than 100 officers attended the funeral. (

On the morning of the funeral, the entire Langlade County Sheriff’s Department came out in uniform. So, too, did Antigo police and first responders from Oneida County, where Connelly lived. So many officers attended that two neighboring counties were called in to cover.

Among the more than 100 officers that filed through the church and saluted the urn and plaque were the three other officers who’d fired that day, two of whom did not respond to requests to talk for this article. The third, Joseph Husnick, initially agreed to speak but changed his mind.

“It’s been a long road since July of ’16 and no matter what I share in my story with you, it would not be close enough for anyone to be able to experience or even grasp what us [law enforcement officers] do on a daily basis,” he wrote in an email. “I’m proud of my boys in blue and have chosen to speak only with them and my wife about the incident.”

After the funeral, an honor guard carried the ashes to the cemetery, where they were put atop a grave right next to Gracie’s. The officers touched a flag to the urn three times and handed it to Connelly’s mother.

Then it was time for the last call.

“Langlade calling 444,” said a dispatcher who’d gotten to know Connelly during long nights on the radio. There was silence.

“Sergeant Thomas Connelly, you are now cleared to end tour,” she said. “May you rest in peace. We have the watch from here.”

Tom Connelly’s emotional funeral ceremony

 1:30

(Trisha Faber)

About this story

Graphics by Laris Karklis. Video editing by Amber Ferguson, Peter W. Stevenson, and Adriana Usero. Story editing by Lynda Robinson. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Design and development by Kazi Awal.