Gina Elliott and Brent Simpson had been together almost 20 years. Photo / Travis Dove, The New York Times
Brent Simpson is the first US police officer known to have CTE. He showed signs of the disease in the last few years of his life.
Gina Elliott’s phone buzzed with a text message from a friend. It was a link to a news article about the gunman who opened fire in a midtown Manhattan office building in late July, killing four people and then himself.
He had left a note in his wallet that said he believed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head that has been found in hundreds of deceased football players and can be diagnosed only after death.
“Study my brain please,” the note said.
It was an unsettling echo for Elliott, whose husband, Brent Simpson, a police officer in Charlotte, North Carolina, died by suicide last year. In the months before his death, he repeated to her daily, “Something is wrong with my brain.”
Elliott and Simpson had been together almost 20 years and had known each other even longer. But the man she lived with in the last few years of his life was not the same man she met in 2001.
“It’s like he became a different person,” she said. “Like somebody I didn’t know.”
Simpson started as a patrol officer at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in 2006, working the night shift. In 2011, he moved to the police academy as an instructor, teaching defensive tactics, and helped train multiple classes of 40 to 60 recruits each year.
The most intense part was called RedMan training, named after the brand of gear that instructors or volunteer officers wear in fights with recruits. Simpson wore headgear and padding but would nonetheless return home looking tired and beat up, Elliott said. Often, there were not enough volunteers, so Simpson would have to spar with many recruits.
RedMan training happened four to six times a year, but there were other drills that involved physical contact.
“I was very concerned about getting a concussion or getting injured because of the amount of shaking or hitting,” Shannon Finis, a former CMPD officer, said of her academy training. “I can only imagine what kind of toll that would take on somebody over time.”
A spokesperson for the Charlotte police department declined to comment on Simpson’s career or whether any blows sustained as a defensive tactics instructor might have contributed to his cognitive decline.
Elliott started to notice small changes in Simpson in 2020, when he was 43. He lost interest in his hobbies and described having “foggy memories”. By then, he had moved on from his role at the police academy and was a K-9 officer.
His woodworking tools gathered dust in the garage; he wanted to stop training for his black belt in jujitsu. He told Elliott he would retire early from the police department, even though it had been his longtime dream to work in a K-9 unit.
“You finally got the job that you love, but you want to leave. Why?” Elliott remembers asking.
He did not have an answer.
When a friend died and Simpson was asked to speak at the funeral, he paused.
“I’m having trouble remembering things from my childhood,” he told Elliott. “I don’t know whether what I’m remembering is real or imagined.”
She began to keep a journal, diligently noting when he uncharacteristically broke into tears, told her he could not feel joy or complained of an intense pressure in the right side of his head.
In January 2023, Simpson saw a psychologist who persuaded him to attend a month-long inpatient rehab focused on mental health treatment for law enforcement and first responders. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and therapy was recommended.
His problems worsened. For the last 18 months of his life, Simpson could not sleep more than three hours a night, Elliott said. Nothing helped – not the over-the-counter medications he took at first or the Ambien he was prescribed later.
He became suspicious of neighbours he did not recognise. He stockpiled water and food for a coming doomsday. After work, he would sit on the couch for hours, staring at the wall.
“It was like Brent was being tortured,” Elliott said. “It was like something was torturing him daily.”
The couple had long been non-traditional; neither believed that marriage was more than a piece of paper. But in May 2023, they travelled to a neighbouring county to obtain a same-day marriage certificate, largely spurred by concerns over his illness.
“I wanted to make sure that I could always take care of him,” Elliott said.
Simpson went to another inpatient programme for law enforcement officers in March 2024, where he was told he had a mood disorder. There, he tried ketamine therapy and was put on antidepressants.
Simpson saw dentists, eye doctors, cardiologists. He did blood tests, underwent four MRIs. An explanation for his cognitive decline remained elusive. Elliott could feel him slipping away from her.
One July morning before he went to work, he kissed her goodbye and told her he loved her. Two hours later, his boss knocked on her door, accompanied by a few officers. They told her Simpson had died by suicide, at a nearby cemetery, while on a shift.
“I lost him twice,” Elliott said. “He was gone years before he was physically gone.”
One researcher who has studied police suicides has concluded that law enforcement officers are 54% more likely to die by suicide than the average American worker.
Stephanie Samuels, a psychotherapist who works with police officers and developed a hotline for them, has believed for years that the conversation around high suicide rates among officers has been missing something: an awareness of the possibility that traumatic brain injuries might be a factor.
Samuels has seen hundreds of patients, many of whom have dealt with impulsivity and rage, which can be signs of CTE. And she knew that many law enforcement officers deal with head impacts on a daily basis through training, blast injuries, vehicle accidents or other incidents while on duty.
After seeing news of Simpson’s death, Samuels reached out to one of his coworkers to facilitate the donation of his brain for research. Elliott agreed to donate his brain to Boston University’s CTE centre, the lab that has examined hundreds of brains of former athletes and members of the military.
A few weeks before the midtown Manhattan shooting, Elliott learned that Simpson, 47, had CTE. He is the first publicly known law enforcement officer to be diagnosed with the disease.
“I knew that there was something not right,” she said. “Brent did, too. We just couldn’t find an answer in time.”
When she learned of his diagnosis, she felt many things, she said. Shock, that her husband had a disease she had heard of afflicting only NFL players. Relief, that she might finally have an answer to why her kind, quiet partner of almost two decades experienced a downward spiral that involved memory problems, sleepless nights and dramatic personality changes. And she felt a desire to make sure people understood.
Ann McKee, the neuropathologist who studied Simpson’s brain, said she found lesions on his frontal and temporal lobes, indicating a mild stage of CTE that could explain many of his symptoms.
“People in these early stages of CTE can have fairly profound behavioural changes and sometimes personality changes,” McKee said.
She pointed to his law enforcement experience, training in jujitsu, a few years serving in the Navy and playing high school football – a combination of high-impact activities that made it likely he had “significant exposure” to be at risk for CTE, she said.
McKee added that often, people with early forms of the disease complain that there is something wrong with their brain, like Simpson did.
It has been more than a year since Simpson’s death, but his dirty clothes still sit in his hamper in their closet. Elliott hasn’t been able to bring herself to wash them. When she drives his truck, sometimes she reaches across the console, for a moment, pretending he’s there to hold her hand.
Simpson’s diagnosis haunts her. She pores over her notes documenting his decline, looking at them through this new lens. She spends hours every day wondering what they could have done differently, had a doctor looked at the signs and his history and connected the dots.
“My sweet baby had to die thinking he was going insane,” she said. “And he wasn’t. He had a brain injury.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
If you are someone living with loss, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention offers grief support.
Where to get help:
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sonia A. Rao
Photographs by: Travis Dove
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