‘We can make a difference’: After four deaths, Nebraska family searches for hope amid tragedy

Content warning: This story discusses suicide. Call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline if you or a loved one needs help.

For more than a decade, she funneled hope, fear and frustration into thousands of Facebook posts on the ups and downs of her husband’s depression, his suicide attempts, how they were telling their story to help others. 

Bailey Koch ended so many of them with a photo. Her with a wide smile that scrunched up her eyes and her husband Jeremy with an easy grin.

Good and bad, tragedy and hope, seemed inseparable.

On Saturday morning, May 10, the Dawson County Sheriff’s Office found the Koch family dead inside their lakeside home near Cozad. In a press release, the Nebraska State Patrol said it thinks Jeremy Koch, 42, stabbed Bailey, 41, and their two children, Hudson, 18, and Asher, 16, before killing himself. In an earlier Facebook past, Bailey said their eldest son was set to graduate from high school that day.

Bailey had tried to save Jeremy, the family wrote in a statement. After years of treatments, they said, the illness, like cancer or heart disease, won. But their story doesn’t end here.

“We can make a difference,” the family wrote. “Bailey believed that with all her heart. We can help our fellow human beings. Don’t give up. Bailey didn’t. Right up to her last breath.”

Bailey cataloged her family’s life through “Anchoring Hope for Mental Health,” a Facebook page, followed by thousands, that she ran for years. The Flatwater Free Press in 2024 wrote about the Koch family raising awareness in rural Nebraska, where resources are thinner and suicide rates are higher than in cities. 

People often commented on the page, saying they felt seen, empowered. Bailey said she answered hundreds of messages from people looking for help.

On May 9, she posted for the last time at 12:30 p.m. Jeremy was waiting for insurance to approve treatment at a facility in Kearney. In the post, Bailey wrote she was optimistic that this was “where we are being led.”

The next day, news started spreading about the family’s deaths.

“The air was sucked out of my chest,” said Olivia Johnson, who lives in McCook. “I followed her words. I read everything she posted. She had such a way of inviting people into the deepest and hardest parts of her entire life … And she made people feel a little less alone.”

In the past year, the page cataloged Jeremy’s struggles.

In March, Bailey woke up to her husband “ready to end his life” with a knife, she wrote on a GoFundMe on May 3. She had created the account to help pay bills because Jeremy had not worked consistently in months. She took him to inpatient care multiple times, most recently in early May. When they left on May 7, she wrote, they had a safety plan. The next day, things had gotten worse, but Bailey hoped they could find a new treatment and make it to their son’s Saturday graduation.

A minority of people who struggle with mental health are violent, though the greatest risk for self harm is in the 10 days after leaving a hospital, said Dr. Dave Miers, founder of the Nebraska Suicide Prevention Coalition and senior director of behavioral health services at Bryan Medical Center in Lincoln. 

Since founding the coalition in 1999, Miers has seen many communities rocked by suicide and left with questions. 

The truth is complex, he said. When someone dies of a heart attack, people might encourage others to train in CPR. If someone’s death is mental health-related, he said, people should be encouraged to take QPR training, which Miers said stands for question, persuade and refer training. More people also need to know about 988, a suicide and crisis hotline launched in 2022.

The Kochs’ story has always been about raising awareness. That remains, said Miers, who has followed the family’s story for years.

“You’re always going to ask the what ifs and the whys,” he said. “People are probably going to dig into that. But you have to look at the totality of that individual’s journey.”

Renae Zimmer saw the effect the Kochs had on people through their shared mental health work in central Nebraska. In 2014, Zimmer started a team to support families in the aftermath of suicides in and around Kearney. 

Zimmer met Bailey and Jeremy when they spoke at a conference for the state’s Local Outreach to Suicide Loss Survivors teams. After that, she followed the Kochs’ blog. Their honesty and vulnerability had an impact on the community, she said.

“I think that also created a space for others to be able to be open about it as well,” Zimmer said, “and not to be ashamed.” 

Some recent stories published nationwide seemed focused on suggesting Bailey should have done something different, said Stacey Cahill, Jeremy’s therapist for 16 years. Cahill said she has those questions about herself — she’s only human. People want to assign responsibility to someone to make difficult things easier to understand, she said. The truth is less convenient.

“I’m angry that people are taking the story and twisting it and blaming Jeremy and Bailey or mental health practitioners or people who should have, would have, could have done something,” she said, “because I feel like that is based out of fear, and Jeremy and Bailey’s mission was based on love and taking shame away from mental illness.”

In their statement, the Kochs’ relatives said the deaths of Bailey, Jeremy, Hudson and Asher are the result of a broken mental health system. Ninety percent of Americans think there’s a mental health care crisis in America, according to a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation and CNN. The family said they will continue advocating and implored others to do the same.

Cahill hopes that message reaches all the new people introduced to Bailey and Jeremy’s story. Aside from the publicity it has gotten on the websites of the New York Post, People and NBC, thousands of people have also started following their page since May 10.

The notoriety brings a mix of emotions for Cahill — not unlike how she felt when Bailey first said she wanted to take her and Jeremy’s story public, which she started posting about on Facebook in 2014.

Cahill, who lives in Lexington, had been seeing Jeremy for a few years. By that time, he’d already attempted suicide several times. But Cahill couldn’t pry him open. Jeremy told Flatwater he’d been raised not to talk about his thoughts and feelings, a pervasive stigma Cahill said she sees in a lot of clients. Over time, he started talking.

Bailey was different. She had to talk, and not just in therapy. 

“Fear,” Cahill said of her first reaction when Bailey talked about starting a blog. “Because I know how people react.”

But Bailey wouldn’t quit. Eventually, Jeremy got on board. Cahill gave her blessing and said what they created was “absolutely beautiful.”

It was never a perfect story, and people judged their decisions, Bailey wrote. But through Jeremy’s experiences and Bailey’s words, they never stopped talking.

“Whether my husband lives with mental health or dies by mental illness, we will never be quiet,” she wrote in one of her last posts. “More need to know they’re not alone.”