Veteran's Heartbreaking Suicide Note Left Behind

Veteran's suicide draws attention to Veterans Affairs' use of painkillers
Roanoke News
By Laurence Hammack
Sunday, September 7, 2014

REBECCA BARNETT | The Roanoke Times
Kevin Keller left a suicide note on Marty Austin’s couch before he took his own life in front of the Wytheville Veterans Affairs clinic. The note read “MARTY SORRY I BROKE INTO YOUR HOUSE AND TOOK YOUR GUN TO END THE PAIN! FU VA!! CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.” Austin said Keller told him repeatedly he was unsatisfied with the care he received at the VA clinic.

BLAND — Nearly everything that Kevin Keller did in his final years bore the mark of constant pain, even the note he left in the end.

His right arm rendered useless by a crippling stroke, Keller used an unsteady left hand to scrawl a brief letter to his best friend.

“MARTY,” it read. “SORRY I BROKE INTO YOUR HOUSE AND TOOK YOUR GUN TO END THE PAIN! FU VA!!! CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE”

By the time Marty Austin found the note in his Bland home late on the night of July 25, Keller had already driven to a Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in nearby Wytheville, where the U.S. Navy veteran was a patient. Keller parked his red pickup truck at a pharmacy next door, walked to the front of the closed medical office, pounded on the locked doors in a final act of frustration and then used Austin’s 9 mm handgun to shoot himself in the head.

VA officials declined to talk about Keller’s case, but Austin and two other friends of the 52-year-old said he had spoken to them many times about the suffering he endured after doctors and nurses at the VA clinic in Wytheville began to wean him off painkillers.

“The medications were the only thing that was helping him, and when they took that away from him, his life just went downhill,” Austin said.

Keller’s suicide comes as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs seeks to reduce the amount of opioid painkillers prescribed to patients at veterans hospitals and clinics across the country.
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