Cowboys QB Dak Prescott reveals that his brother Jace died of suicide
In April, the Dallas Cowboys announced that Dak Prescott’s brother Jace Prescott died at 31 years old.
The Cowboys quarterback discussed his brother’s death in an interview published Wednesday and revealed that the cause of death was suicide. Prescott and his brother Tad made the revelation in an interview with “In Depth with Graham Bensinger.”
“I’ll never get another hug in my life like the ones he gave,” Prescott told Bensinger.
Dak and Tad told Bensinger that their mother’s colon cancer took a heavy toll on Jace. Peggy Prescott died after a long battle with the disease in 2013. Jace spent daily time with her as the cancer progressed and ravaged her body. Dak was in college at Mississippi State at the time.
‘Didn’t know how to be vulnerable’
“You can’t even put into words the burden,” Prescott told Bensinger. “It’s something only Jace knew. And he didn’t necessarily share that. Jace never was really much of a talker.
“When something like that was a huge burden on him, he didn’t know how to share it — didn’t know how to be vulnerable about it.”
How Dak found out
Prescott said he was experiencing his own bout of anxiety and depression that’s become familiar to many during the pandemic when he learned about his brother’s death. He said he woke up from his first night of good sleep in a while to missed calls from Tad and his father walking into his bedroom to break the news of Jace’s death.
Tad, in tears, told Bensinger that he didn’t recognize how much pain Jace was in prior to his death.
“I just saw my brother three days before it happened, and everything seemed fine,” Tad said.
Dak encourages others to seek help
Prescott encouraged people who are dealing with depression to reach out to loved ones to ease their burdens rather than hold things inside.
“He had a lot of burdens on him,” Prescott said of Jace. “He had a lot of tough things, and my sense of saying that is it showed me how vulnerable we have to be as humans, how open we have to be.
“Because our adversities, our struggles, what we go through is always gonna be too much for ourselves and maybe too much for even one or two people, but never too much for a community or too much for people in the family that you love. So you have to share these things.”
Anyone struggling with thoughts of suicide can all the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.
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