An infant has been left orphaned after his parents, both Florida sheriff’s deputies, died by suicide just days apart.
St Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara announced on Tuesday, Jan. 4, the deaths of deputies Clayton Osteen and Victoria Pacheco. They had served on the force since November 2019 and February 2020, respectively.
Mascara said that shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve, the sheriff’s office got a call about an attempted suicide.
Investigators learned that the person who had tried to take his own life was one of their deputies, Osteen, who was off-duty at the time.
Osteen initially survived and was taken to a hospital, where two days later his family made the decision to remove him from life support.
A day later, Osteen’s partner, colleague and the mother of his one-month-old son, Pacheco, took her own life.
“Words cannot express the tremendous loss we all feel after losing these two members of our sheriff’s office family,” Mascara wrote.