Partner of Colorado man who died by suicide documents failures of mental health system

Jeff Trowbridge was taking down Christmas decorations on the morning he got the call that wrecked him.

The love of his life, Ian Horner, was missing. One of Horner’s relatives had called to ask Trowbridge if he knew the license plate number on Horner’s car. Soon after, Trowbridge would learn that Horner, 33, died by suicide in the middle of the night. His body was found by a cottonwood tree in Cherry Creek State Park, along the paths where Trowbridge and Horner had walked and talked on their first date, nine years earlier. 

Trowbridge had feared for this day for more than a year. So had Horner, who had tried to end his life multiple times before that January night, 10 months ago. Horner had pleaded for help to get better from mental health clinics and hospitals all over Denver. He had tried ketamine, electroconvulsive therapy, transcranial magnetic stimulation and at least 17 medications. He even tried to sign up for an experimental brain treatment in China. 

What happened to Horner is a story of a failed, fragmented mental health system that could not save a man who was literally begging for help. 

And for Trowbridge, identifying the ways the system failed has become an obsession. 

Trowbridge is hardly alone when it comes to trying to make sense of a suicide of a loved one. About 1,300 people have died by suicide in Colorado each of the past five years, according the state health department. But for Trowbridge, the search for a reason led to months spent building a meticulous timeline of the last year of Horner’s life, reading the emails Horner wrote before he died, and a collection of medical records. The documents, some of which Trowbridge shared with The Colorado Sun, are a paper trail of Horner’s fight to overcome a deep depression. 

They reveal a man desperate for help but without a central point of connection to coordinate various medications and therapies. Horner spent a few days, sometimes weeks, at multiple psychiatric hospitals and behavioral health clinics that didn’t communicate with each other, and was discharged even as he said he feared he would kill himself. In between suicide attempts, he fought for insurance coverage and appealed denials for treatment. 

“How could one person seek so much help, pass through so many levels of care, survive multiple warning events — and still be left without the sustained intervention needed to keep him alive?” Trowbridge asked.

In one stack of documents, Trowbridge wrote down all the questions for which he wished he had answers. 

What if all the therapists and doctors who treated Horner had talked to each other? What if Horner had not had to wait so long for prior authorization from his insurance company before he could start transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment? And, perhaps grasping, but still: What if Cherry Creek State Park had a gate that kept cars from entering in the middle of the night? 

Backing out of relationships

Trowbridge and Horner met in 2017 on an app called OkCupid. On their first date, as they walked through the park, they bonded over a shared love of David Lynch horror movies and filmmaker’s best-known show, the supernatural and freaky “Twin Peaks.” 

For Trowbridge, who had spent a career in the U.S. Navy and was in his 50s, the relationship was the first time he had a boyfriend. They moved in together after about a year, vacationed around the world, and hosted friends for game and movie nights. 

“I could have continued forever how we were,” Trowbridge said in an interview at a coffee shop, “because he was really good for me. We had zero problems for nearly eight years. We used to make fun of straight couples, like we had the perfect relationship.” 

Horner came across shy at first, but loved fiercely, was quick-witted and had a kind soul, his family wrote in his obituary. “Ian loved weird, unique, or immersive experiences: pop culture-con, the Stanley Hotel, the Sasquatch museum, or going to a haunted bridge in the middle of the night and insisting on ‘following the voices I hear under the bridge,’ much to the others’ dismay,” they wrote.

But near the end of 2024, Horner had something like a breakdown, or what Trowbridge called a “frightening deterioration.”

“Anxiety and depression overtook him,” he said. 

Trowbridge, 61, had known that Horner in the past had been depressed and gone to a mental health hospital in 2017, before they met. But they had been happy together for years, until near until Horner’s anxiety had gotten so bad that he asked to go to an AllHealth Network treatment center in Littleton. He stayed for five days before he was released on an increased dosage of an antidepressant, Trintellix. 

Then on Christmas Day a few weeks later, Horner told Trowbridge that he was thinking about taking his own life. He had a plan, which he described in so much detail that Trowbridge was terrified. 

“I was just horrified,” Trowbridge said, “just horrified.” 

Horner, a software programmer and information technology specialist, was unhappy at work, including at Toastmasters, then a remote job with Arapahoe County, then back at Toastmasters. In the months before he died, Horned took an extended leave of absence and eventually quit. The changes in employment meant he switched insurance companies a few times, and in the end applied for Medicaid. 

He was unhappy in their relationship, unhappy in life, Trowbridge recalled. On a trip to Mexico with friends in February 2025, Horner was so depressed that he didn’t want to get out of bed. Horner left the trip early, alone. In March, Horner moved out. They broke up and decided to share custody of their dog, a rescue from Texas named Janey. 

“He was backing out of all of his relationships,” Trowbridge said. 

Ten months later, he was gone.

“To feel at peace with my existence”

The way Trowbridge sees it now, Horner did everything he was supposed to do to get help. The system, however, did not respond. 

“He did what patients are constantly told to do,” Trowbridge said. “He asked for help, attended treatment, took medications, practiced coping skills, and repeatedly disclosed that he was losing hope.”

Horner explained how he felt in November 2024, when anxiety was all-consuming, in an email he wrote to a therapist that Trowbridge now keeps in his stack of records. “I kept getting obsessive thoughts telling me that I need to break up with Jeff, even though we both love each other,” Horner wrote. 

The antidepressant he was taking was ramping up his anxiety, he said, and he “couldn’t make the thoughts stop.” 

After the men broke up, in March 2025, Horner spent about a month in a partial hospitalization program at Highlands Behavioral Health. In June, he enrolled in an intensive outpatient program at Pathlight Mood and Anxiety Center. He was in the program again in July, the same month he tried to end his life with an overdose of an anti-anxiety drug.

At the end of July, while staying at the Raleigh House, a residential treatment center in Denver, Horner left the center in an Uber with a bed sheet stuffed in his backpack. He called Trowbridge from Cherry Creek State Park, where Horner was picked up by law enforcement officers and taken to the emergency department at Parker Adventist Hospital for a 24-hour mental health hold. 

“I’m out of ideas for what to do,” Horner wrote in an email to a therapist in July. “I can’t go back to my job because it’s too anxiety inducing, and living alone in my apartment is not good for me. I am 100% done with group therapy. I’ve already done way too much of it and it’s no longer helpful.

“I’m done trying to control my thoughts and feelings, because it doesn’t help. I still just want to die. I don’t care about anything anymore. I just want to be able to feel at peace with my existence.”

The next several months are a disconnected jumble of treatments at various clinics, stays at hospitals and psychiatric centers in multiple networks, overlapping appointments, and battles over insurance coverage and prior authorization requirements. 

Centennial Peaks Hospital. HCA HealthONE in Aurora. Independent therapists. SonderMind, a Denver, mostly virtual, mental health company. A holistic health clinic to test for Lyme disease and “mold toxicity.” Vitamin supplements and probiotics, walks and journaling. Doses of psilocybin tea. A prescription for ketamine. Requests that insurance cover transcranial magnetic stimulation. A request to participate in a clinical trial in China on deep brain stimulation, an experimental treatment to stimulate the gray matter of the brain. 

Trowbridge wonders now if the delay in insurance approval for transcranial magnetic stimulation compounded Horner’s stress and prevented his potential progress. Horner first requested brain stimulation treatment, which uses coils on a person’s head to send electric pulses to nerves in the brain, in May 2025. Five months later, in October, he was still trying to obtain the prior authorization his insurance company required, records show.

One of his therapists argued in a letter to UnitedHealthcare that the magnetic stimulation treatment was the “next-line intervention” for his “treatment-resistant depression.” She listed 17 medications that Horner had tried without success. 

Meanwhile, Horner continued to report thoughts of suicide. One medical record described him as in an “almost catatonic-like” state. 

Another mental health professional recorded Horner’s suicide risk as “low,” despite him telling the therapist that he was having suicidal thoughts. The day after the appointment, he tried to take his life, one of several documented attempts. It was Halloween, and Horner and Trowbridge had planned to watch horror movies. 

Trails near the Pipeline Trailhead at Cherry Creek State Park in October 2021. (Michael Booth, The Colorado Sun)

In November 2025, a therapist noted that some of Horner’s disjointed treatments could cause adverse reactions, specifically the mixture of intravenous infusions of ketamine, esketamine dosed as a nasal spray, and magnetic stimulation of the brain. Horner, working with various clinics, had booked a ketamine infusion and an esketamine treatment on the same day. Doubling up on the same kind of drug can lead to impaired judgement, confusion and excessive sedation. 

His records make note of a litany of medications, including lithium for treatment-resistant depression, off-label gabapentin, which is approved for nerve pain and seizures, Luvox, approved for obsessive compulsive disorder, and Vyvanse, for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 

Horner told one of his therapists about three months before he died that he was having trouble concentrating and that his “brain just feels empty a lot of the time.” 

The “safety plan” listed on the last page of a medical record from one of Horner’s doctor’s appointments said to call 988, the national suicide hot line, if he felt like killing himself. “Call 988!! WTF!” Trowbridge scribbled in the margin after Horner’s death. “Weak. How about call provider 24/7???”

“My first patient lost to suicide”

By the time Horner saw Kayla Sharpe, a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner, Horner had gone through so many medications and treatments Sharpe found it mind-blowing. To her shock, not one had looked into autism or other neurodivergent issues, which she suspected was the root cause of his mental health troubles. “It was blaring to me,” she said in an interview. 

And for all the behavioral health centers and hospitals Horner had visited, he had no real safety plan, she noted. He left some of those facilities worse off than when he arrived, and many of his outpatient appointments had been virtual, which she thought was a mistake. The only reason “he did as well as he could for some time” was that he was highly intelligent and able to navigate the system better than most, Sharpe said.  

“He had resources, insight and was wanting to get better. In all that time, no one really sat and looked at his information. He was the most motivated patient I had seen in quite some time and he did absolutely everything he needed to do and more. He deserved so much better.”

Horner died about six months after meeting Sharpe, who at the time worked at a mental health clinic in Aurora. 

When Sharpe found out that Horner had died, she went home because she “couldn’t think straight.” Not long after, she quit the clinic. Sharpe was drowning in work, she said, because the clinic was trying to push providers to see 16 patients per day. Now she works for the Colorado Department of Corrections, helping inmates with opioid addiction get better with suboxone. 

“Ian was my first patient lost to suicide,” she said, crying in her car outside a Denver prison facility during a lunch break. “It still gives me a visceral sick-to-my-stomach reaction. It’s bound to happen, unfortunately, in the field we are in. 

“It was really difficult for me because of the person he was. He was a special case to me. It’s always the most beautiful people that can’t see their beauty. That just sucks.” 

Sharpe was trying to get Horner scheduled for neurodiversity testing when he died. The waitlists are long, as is the insurance approval process. 

“Our mental health system sucks,” she said. “Recognizing someone may need help and actually getting them connected to that help are two very different things.” 

While Colorado is improving coordination of care so that fewer people fall through the cracks, it still happens all the time, said Vincent Atchity, president of Mental Health Colorado. Atchity said he recently heard from a mother who called for emergency help because she was worried her son was going to take his own life. It took an entire day for her to get a return phone call, he said. 

Still, even though malpractice sometimes occurs, it’s not usually reasonable to hold a medical professional accountable for someone’s “path to self destruction,” Atchity said.

Horner’s story shows that there is still so much unknown when it comes to fixing the brain. 

“Can you blame the system? Or was something going on that was never going to be reached?” Atchity asked. “We can never know. We can just feel the tragedy of it.

“There has just never been zero suicide. You can miss all the signs. You can respond to all the signs. It’s just impossible to get to the bottom of it.” 

“Last time I see him alive”

The last time Trowbridge saw Horner was Christmas Eve, when Horner came over to watch the season finale of “Pluribus,” a post-apocalyptic show where virus-infected humans think with a hive mind. “Actually cuddle in bed, Ian acts a little odd and it’s unusual, last time I see him alive,” Trowbridge wrote in his notes about that day, part of his yearlong timeline. 

They talked and texted throughout the next week, including on New Year’s Eve. It was three days later, on Jan. 3, when Horner drove to Cherry Creek State Park and ended his life around 3 a.m.

As part of his journey toward answers, or blame, Trowbridge later wrote to the state park, asking why park officials don’t lock the gate when the park is closed from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Campers and boaters have 24-hour access, and the park can’t lock them in for safety reasons, was the reply. “Nonetheless,” responded operations manager Vylan Than, “I am sincerely sorry for your loss.” 

From 2022-26, there were 22 suicides or attempted suicides in Cherry Creek State Park, The Sun found after filing a records request with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office. Among those were three deaths this year, including Horner’s. 

Trowbridge went to the tree after he found out Horner was dead. He found an empty can from an energy drink that he suspects Horner drank while trying to stay awake in the freezing cold night.

Trowbridge has been back many times since, usually with a small gift. He once left stickers from one of Horner’s favorite bands, Death Grips. Another time Trowbridge stuck a rock into a crack in the tree’s trunk after having it engraved: “Ian, from the moment we met, it was you.”