Phillip Herron was a single father raising his three children, struggling with crushing debt of over $20,000, and was desperately waiting for a Payday loan he'd applied for.
But it was paid in arrears, with a 5-week wait time but the desperate father could not wait for that long which drove him even deeper into debt, and when he died he had $4.61 in his bank account and clearly couldn't see any other way out.
Like many people, especially men, he kept all of this to himself, nobody else knew how bad things were getting. This poor man even had to tell his children that Santa Claus wouldn’t come this year, and in his suicide note, he wrote that they'd be better off if he weren't around anymore.
Moments before his death, Herron posted a photo on social media on March 18 of him sitting in his car as he wept.
He left a note that was found by his mother, Sheena Derbyshire: in it, he said that his family "would be better off without him."
“His death was a total shock. I couldn't understand why I would do this," Derbyshire said in an interview with Daily Mirror in an interview.
Since no one knew of Phillip Herron's problems, his mother linked the events that led to his suicide.
Derbyshire found an eviction notice hidden in her son's house. Then, she cracked the password on her phone. Phillip's phone password, and discovered hundreds of phone calls where he was aggressive with his interlocutors.
"I heard him talk about suicide. I wish she had told us how she felt, but we never knew," the mother lamented.