Missing Shay Torgerson Suicide – It breaks both Dawn and my heart to have to tell you that our son, Shay, passed away recently. He took his own life in the early morning hours of Monday, March 27, 2023, after struggling for three years with the incapacitating mental disease of schizoaffective disorder – bipolar 1, which is also known as manic depression. Shay spent his childhood in Saint Cloud and Maple Grove, Minnesota, and his mother and I took turns being his primary caregivers.
He was a proud member of the Maple Grove High School Crimson varsity baseball team and received a diploma with honors from the Maple Grove High School. He was a proud member of the Saint Paul’s Hamline University Pipers baseball team and, in his final year, the university’s track and field team. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in business and finance from Saint Paul’s Hamline University, where he also competed in track and field. Upon his graduation from college, Shay began a career in the financial services industry while also continuing to play amateur baseball for a number of different teams, the Saint Anthony Hogs being the most notable of these.
The things that people will remember most about Shay are his laugh and smile, his modest intellect, his wit and sense of humor, his loyalty, kindness, and thoughtfulness, and the fact that he was sensitive to the feelings of others. Shay loved his sports, but not as much as he loved his family and his friends. And the sick curveball he threw. One of the countless stories that I remember — one of many that represent who he was and would become as an adult — is of him when he was around four or five years old and he noticed two older children he had never met playing in the outside playground at the Saint Cloud McDonalds near the Saint August exit to I-94.
This particular story is one of many that represent who he was and would become as an adult. These other two youngsters appeared to be brothers and were perhaps seven and nine years old. The younger brother did nothing to assist his older sibling, who was completely unable to see anything and was walking around the playground with his arms stretched out in front of him.