California tribal mental health advocate dies in murder-suicide

from Nickel DuraCalMatters

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A member of the Yurok tribe who advocated for better mental health treatment and suicide intervention in rural Northern California has died in an apparent murder-suicide.

Celinda Gonzalez was 59 years old.

In 2020, CalMatters wrote about her job in Humboldt County where about 2 and a half times as many residents die by suicide per capita as the rest of the state.

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office said they found two bodies at a home in Weitchpec Village on the Yurok Reservation on Feb. 3.

“Based on the preliminary investigation, the incident appears to be consistent with a murder-suicide,” the sheriff’s office said in a news release.

The sheriff’s office declined to provide details about the nature of the crime scene or the identity of the people they found.

The Yurok tribe confirmed Gonzalez’s identity in a monument.

“She was a beloved friend to many tribal council members, staff and community members,” the tribe said in the memorial. “This is a huge tragedy for the tribe.”

Gonzalez once had a grant-funded role as a suicide intervention specialist, working with local police and fire departments to recognize potential signs of intent to self-harm.

In 2019, the federal funds that pay for her pro bono position ran out, so she went out on her own.

Gonzalez lost her son, Paul, to suicide when he was 19. Her 43-year-old brother, Gaylord Lewis Jr., died by suicide five years later, in 2014.

As the pandemic swept across California and levels of anxiety and suicidal ideation skyrocketed, Gonzalez was motivated by her own losses to help in Humboldt County, where access to mental health services is already difficult, compounded by a shortage of psychiatrists willing to relocate to rural California.

2016 Humboldt County grand jury investigation found that the county’s behavioral health board was not adequately serving county residents.

Gonzalez believed that despite the challenges of the pandemic, her community was resilient.

“They’ve lived through wars, floods, fires and landslides,” she told a CalMatters reporter in 2020.

The Yurok tribe offers grief counseling at the village clinic.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.