Family Searches For Ryan Larkin Answer

Frank and Jill Larkin’s son, Ryan, died on a spring day in 2017 in their home in Davidsonville, Maryland.

They found him in the basement. He’d put on his Navy SEAL Team 7 T-shirt and his red, white and blue board shorts and then asphyxiated himself next to a shadow box of the medals, patches and insignias from his service as a sniper and medic. He was 29.

“I have no words to say anymore and I feel like nobody has truly listened to my story,” Ryan wrote in 2016, while in treatment for alcohol abuse. For years he was plagued by headaches, sleeplessness and memory loss. In all caps and underlined, he wrote, “I NEED TREATMENT FOR PTSD & TBI.”

Ryan was certain something was wrong with his brain and just as frustrated by his inability to prove it. He searched fruitlessly online for more and more information about traumatic brain injuries and “breacher syndrome,” so-named for the problems that plague the military personnel responsible for “breaching” — or using explosives to enter — a building.

He longed for his headaches to end. He longed for a good night’s sleep.

In the years before his death, Ryan saw multiple doctors, first through the Navy and then the Department of Veterans Affairs. But tests for a brain injury came back negative. Whatever suspicion he had, the doctors agreed, was just in his head.

But he wasn’t convinced. He instructed his family that, when he did die, they were to donate his brain to research.

“He knew exactly what he was doing the day he took his life,” dad Frank tells PEOPLE. “He was trying to call attention to teammates who were struggling. He didn’t want his boys to go through what he was going through.”

You can read the rest of this article at:  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/keep-telling-m-crazy-navy-111819766.html