When you walk into the Herndon’s home in Sale Creek, there’s a memorial of photos and artwork to Silas, a 14-year-old whose light went out too soon.
Silas, a student at the Chattanooga School for Arts and Sciences from Kindergarten through the first day of ninth grade, died by suicide in August of 2025.
Speaking out weeks after losing his child, Mark Herndon said there are too many stories like this one his family now faces.
“We cannot sit here and not do anything anymore,” Herndon said. “They’re crying out to us, you know? There are things that we are missing by not hearing. It is merciless, it is cruel, how dangerous and how little attention we give to depression.”
Herndon described Silas as a quiet kid, who had a smile that “spoke.” In a peaceful, loving, and spiritual home, with caring sisters and supportive friends, Silas, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, struggled with identity.
Seeing faces he didn’t recognize at his child’s memorial moved Herndon.
“There’s a lot of places and people in this city that not even knowing Silas, came to say, ‘I see this,'” he said.
Suicide continues to plague communities everywhere, but at an alarming rate in Hamilton County.
The increase is noted in Tennessee’s 2025 Suicide Prevention Report.
The 2025 Tennessee Suicide Prevention Report says Hamilton County saw the largest increase statewide in the overall suicide rate, jumping by 56%. In 2023, the average rate of suicide was 17.9 per 100,000 people.
Among Tennessee youth ages 10 to 17, the suicide rate increased 47%, between 2019 and 2023. The Suicide Prevention Report reflects 31 suicide deaths in 2019, rising to 47 in 2023.
Herndon said he has lessons to learn too, but parents must do a better job of listening to the youth.
“Because of the anxieties of life that we don’t understand, because we grew up in another time with situations that we swept under the rug a whole lot more than we do now,” he said. “Our stubbornness is very harmful to them, and it’s harmful in a way that we as a family are unwilling to hear anymore.”
The decade-long partnership came at no cost to the school system, and served about 2,500 students each year.
This call to action comes just weeks after the Hamilton County Board of Education narrowly voted to cut funding to Centerstone, a non-profit that provided in-school counseling to students for a decade. Silas did not see a counselor through Centerstone, but Herndon said the loss of any resource could be detrimental to students. He plans to attend the next school board meeting, set for Sept. 18.
“That thing is waking up in me, and unfortunately for those around me, I’m a pretty loud guy,” he said.
Silas, passionate about social justice, did begin to seek a sense of belonging outside of school. They started looking into getting involved with the Seed Theatre, an organization that started as a community theatre, but blossomed into a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community.
“Regardless of who you are as a person, what your background is, what your class is, what kind of money is in your family, what kind of resources you have, everybody is at risk for mental health illness,” said Elizabeth Haley, the theatre’s executive director. “Everybody is at risk for suicide ideation. If everybody has a safe place to process and to deal with those emotions, then everybody can be safe.”
He urges people to do a better job of understanding people’s differences.
“Understanding or hearing somebody’s differences isn’t assimilating those,” he said. “And as a society, we have stopped seeing each other’s differences. And if it’s a difference, it’s an opposition. That’s what we’ve got to get away from… We don’t have to make other people’s beliefs our own. But we sure can love each other as we are learning to love in life.”
Just at the beginning of his learning and advocacy, Herndon hopes to keep Silas’s light shining.
“I’m proud as a dad, to see a community of people come out and say that they’re sad to see a light go out that shouldn’t have gone out,” he said. “He was that smile that spoke. I think that’s what people saw the most in him. In them. See how I’m learning too?”
If you, or someone you know, is experiencing suicidal thoughts, there are many free resources available.
You can call 988 and press 0 to be routed to someone to help.