A leader in the Black Lives Matter movement ended his life by shooting himself on the steps of Ohio’s statehouse, Columbus police said late Monday.
MarShawn McCarrel, who was only 23 years old, shot himself in front of the capitol building at around 6 p.m. Monday night. His death has no known witnesses, but police quickly arrived at the scene and found his body, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
Just last Friday, McCarrel had attended the NAACP Image Awards for his work with Pursuing Our Dreams, a mentorship group he founded. McCarrel also launched a “Feed the Streets” campaign to help Columbus’s homeless population, and he helped organize protests in Ohio following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
McCarrel’s final tweet, made just hours before his death, shows a certain gallows humor in retrospect:
Let the record show that I pissed on the state house before i left.
— SPICY (@MC_CARREL11) February 8, 2016
He made other cryptic remarks on Twitter, such as “If we don’t have to live through hell just to get to heaven. I’ma stay right here with you.”
Around the same time, he also made a short Facebook post that essentially doubled as a suicide note: “My demons won today. I’m sorry.”
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