Pastor Son Who Killed Himself

Pastor Rick Warren has opened up about his son’s suicide for the first time, telling how he and his wife both had a feeling that he had taken his life.

Matthew Warren suffered from mental illness and constant bouts of depression before shooting himself dead in April at the age of 27.

‘The day that I had feared might happen one day since he'd been born and the day that I had prayed would never happen, happened,’ Pastor Warren said in a tell-all interview with Piers Morgan that aired on Tuesday on CNN.

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The evangelical Christian pastor has become a household name across the United States for the creation of the Saddleback Church, which has about 20,000 followers in California.

He and his wife Kay talked about the lead-up to their son’s death and how they turned to prayer and social media to help them through the grieving process.

One of the most revealing portions of the interview came as they explained how they knew that he was so close to killing himself so many times- and that they were fully aware that he had bought a gun online with the intention of ending his life.

‘Well he didn't get it legally- the gun laws in California are very strict and they worked and he couldn't get a gun legally,’ Kay Warren said.

‘He told me everything and he told me he found someone finally on the internet and it had to be super encrypted and it had to be you know this whole process and he begged me to help him because he couldn’t understand the process (of buying the gun).

Someone on the internet sold Matthew an unregistered gun.I pray he seeks God's forgiveness. I forgive him.

Parents With CNN Anchor Piers

She had to stop helping him there, telling how she told her son: ‘I will do anything to help you live I cannot help you take your life’.

Mrs Warren said that she knew he had the gun up to a month before he killed himself. On top of that, he told them specifically that if they ever called police and reported that he was threatening to kill himself that he would shoot himself then and there. 

Like many families who deal with the suicide of a loved one, the timing of Matthew’s death came as both a shock and unsurprising. His mother said that he had so much going on in his life at the time- he had started a new job and had a date lined up for that weekend- but she also knew he was in extreme mental pain.

During the interview, Kay Warren told how she looked at her son’s phone when she gave it back to police and how she saw that on the evening when he killed himself, Matthew had texted the girl he was going on a date with and less than ten minutes later he texted Kay saying how difficult life was. She knew he was headed down a horrible path. 

She and Rick drove to Matthew’s house following the text conversation and found that ‘lights were on and I started ringing the doorbell… Typically he would have said go away, or come to the door and invite me in- he did nothing. That was not his pattern and so I had a pretty good sense that perhaps something catastrophic had happened.’

‘He had also told us that if he had called the police that he would take his own life instantly so a call to the police was an instant suicide so I was living with that horrible, horrible choice of do I call the police and perhaps intervene or do I take that risk that if I call that he instantly kills himself so I just had to wait for a few hours,’ she said.

The next morning they returned to the house and found the same lights on and scene unchanged: they knew something had happened.

The parents let the police in the house and they were not the ones to discover the body. 

The damage was so extreme that the officers told the parents that they would not want to have an open casket at his funeral, and said that they may not want to see the body. They refused and Kay hugged her son’s lifeless body 'for all it was worth'.

people related to guns and mental illness

In the end, they were able to cover Matthew’s head with a beanie hat and they were happy to have an open casket to give friends and family a final farewell at his funeral.

‘Matthew was not afraid to die. He was afraid of pain. I remember 10 years ago, when he was 17, he came to me sobbing and he said, “Daddy,” he said, “it's really clear, I'm not going to get any better. You know, we've gone to the best doctors, the best hospitals, the best treatment therapists. Everything- prayer, everything you could imagine, good support.” And he says, “it's real clear I'm not going to get any better, so why can't I just die. I know I'm going to heaven so why can't I just die?”’ Rick said on CNN.

Now the couple have created a foundation in Matthew’s name to raise awareness about mental illness, an issue that has come back into the headlines in the latest mass shooting as it has been revealed that contractor Aaron Alexis heard ‘voices’ in the months leading up to the attack on Washington D.C.’s Navy Yard on Monday.