Kristin Cooper had all of the symptoms of a broken-hearted girl.
From swollen, puffy eyes to the desire of being left alone, Andrea Cooper, Kristin’s mother, assumed her daughter’s broken heart was only caused by a recent break-up with a boyfriend. However, it turned out that was only half of it.
“When I took her to Baker in the fall of 1994, I never dreamed that a year and five months later, she would be dead,” Cooper said. Kristin Cooper was 20 years old when she committed suicide on New Year’s Eve. It was shocking news that left her family speechless. With help from the Greek organizations Delta Delta Delta and Alpha Chi Omega, since 1998, Andrea Cooper has been given the chance to travel across the nation to share her daughter’s tragic story. She made a stop at Central Michigan University to give her presentation while CMU hosted Domestic Violence Awareness Week.
Cooper kicked off the presentation revealing pictures of Kristen, from her baby picture to the picture of her as a member of the sorority, Alpha Chi Omega. In 1994, Kristin started her freshman year of college at Baker University. Kristin pledged the sorority, Alpha Chi Omega and fell in love with a student who was a sophomore. Though, when Kristin’s boyfriend of a year broke up with her, Cooper just assumed she was suffering from a broken heart.
“When she came home in October after the breakup, she was very, very upset,” Cooper said. “She just cried all the time. She stayed in her room.” Instead of talking to her friends and family, Kristin stayed in her room and wrote in her journal. She would escape her room sometimes and go out skiing with her family, but there was no denying the fact that was still unhappy.
Unexpectedly, when Christmas break had arrived, Kristin was happier than ever. It’s was as if a complete turnaround had happened where her sorrow bloomed into joy. Cooper assumed her daughter was finally over her ex, and that she had moved on with her life. “She told us she was over him,” Cooper said. “She said she would be ready to go back to Baker.” Even after they suggested she could take a semester off, Kristin said she was fine. During New Year’s Eve, Cooper and her husband, Mike, went out with a few of their friends to celebrate. Kristin decided she would go to a party with a few of her friends as well.
Around 2:00 a.m., Cooper walked into the room to find her daughter lying down looking comfortable and peaceful. It wasn’t until Cooper asked her daughter why the music was so “awfully loud” that she realized her daughter wasn’t conscious. “I thought ‘Oh my gosh, she has died of alcohol poisoning and it was just the worst feeling in the world,” Cooper said. “So I walked all the way up to her to really check her out and I felt for a pulse. There was no pulse and there was a gun in her hands.” Cooper noticed the wound of a gunshot on Kristin’s head and began to scream. She yelled to her husband “Kristin’s dead, she shot herself” repeatedly until he ran down the stairs and knelt down by Kristen’s side sobbing.
Cooper remembers calling the police and the four hours it took them to investigate felt like “pure hell.” The detective noticed Kristin’s journal had a message talking about a possible suicide. Cooper said the journal started out happy until she began reading the pages in the middle of the journal, where there was a three-page suicide note that had been written in October.
It was in that instance, while she was reading, she discovered that her daughter had been raped. Inside the journal was even a poem written by Kristen that described the feeling of being raped.
An excerpt of the poem reads:
A friend for comfort or maybe not
A smile, a touch
Relaxing
What is he thinking of?
A smile, persistence
And then my comfort has flown away.
The pain, the stench, the look of hate in his eyes
It’s finally over and now a blackness has come over me.
At this point, Cooper put the pieces of the puzzle together and discovered her daughter’s broken heart had transformed into depression not only because of the break-up, but because she was raped. In the journal, Kristin never mentioned the name of the man who raped her. When Kristin told her then-boyfriend she was raped, he dumped her. “That was the worst thing that could have happened to her,” Cooper said. Kristin began to skip class, lose interest in things she loved, and these symptoms, and others, lead to her act of suicide. “She was living 10 hours away and I didn’t see her on a daily basis, I did not realize she had just about every single symptom,” Cooper said.
Cooper also realized the reason her daughter had been so surprisingly in December. “If they have been severely depressed, when they have a plan, they have a sense of relief and almost happiness,” she said. Cooper called Kristin’s close friends and each of them revealed they had known Kristin was raped and did not tell probably because they did not want to go behind Kristin’s back and make her mad. Kristin’s best friend told Cooper, when Kristin was a lifeguard at age sixteen, she attended a lifeguard party and while she and a close guy friend were watching a movie, he raped her.
None of Kristen’s friends could remember the guy’s name, however they did remember what he looked like. When given a few pictures to identify the rapist, Kristin’s friends chose the same man they thought raped her. Cooper also thinks the same man may have been the one Kristin trusted the most and was her closest guy friend. Cooper wrote a letter to the guy she believed raped Kristin explaining Kristin’s suicide and how “she was raped by someone she thought she could trust and she could not live with the pain and hurt.”
Though she never heard back from him, she said she has forgiven whoever raped her daughter. “I have been able to forgive the rapist,” Cooper said. “Some people find that very unusual, but I have a very strong faith and I have a very forgiving heart and I believe we will be judged in the end.”
Cooper’s philosophy is “When God closes a window, He opens a door.” Instead of letting the pain and frustration of a negative situation get the best of her, she turned it into a positive one. According to kristinsstory.com, Cooper has traveled to more than 325 college campuses and 27 conferences to share Kristin’s story. She’s taken the tragic death of her daughter to hopefully inspire those feeling depressed to seek help and educate others on how they can help their friends or loved ones who are depressed.