BROOKLINE, Vt. — Whenever Jessica Kyle, a Vermont resident, dropped her stepson Zachery Stolpp off at school, she would overhear the other parents say, “Have a good day,” before their children skipped off to class.
Instead, she would tell Stolpp, the oldest of her three children, “Do good things.” It was a sendoff that he took to heart.
For example, on Stolpp’s seventh birthday, when the radio station organized a fundraiser for kids who lost their toys in Hurricane Katrina’s wreckage, Stolpp insisted on donating his “motorcycle money” from his crayon-shaped piggy bank. Or more recently, when Kyle’s car suddenly stopped working in Brattleboro, Vermont, Stolpp, who was living in town, pushed the vehicle out of the intersection and called a tow truck.
“He was an excellent son. He was a guy you could count on,” Kyle said. “In this process, I’m hearing from people I don’t know that my kid was doing good things.”
Stolpp, 27, was reported missing on July 20 after he “left statements including self-harm” in Brattleboro, according to a Facebook post from the Deerfield Police Department. About a week later, he was found dead in Deerfield. The Northwestern District Attorney’s Office, in a July 31 statement, confirmed there was no indication of foul play.
Since her stepson’s death by suicide, Kyle said she has heard from those who knew Stolpp, including a couple who had put out a donation jar in their restaurant in hopes of covering the cost of several rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF). According to Kyle, when the tips were not enough, Stolpp paid his friends the $500 difference.
Or at his job at Climates by Pomeroy, a heating, ventilation and air conditioning company with an office in South Deerfield, Stolpp took a new employee “under his wing,” according to his boss, Grey Marchese, co-owner of the company.
“He’s quiet, but his very soft and sweet personality would shine through,” Marchese said in a phone interview. “We really miss him. … We’re a small, family-run business, and Zachery was family. We lost a family member.”
For his mother, the news of her stepson’s death came as a shock. Stolpp had recently earned a raise at work, where he was a “very determined” employee who fixed broken equipment, as his boss described. Stolpp, a sailor, had also brought up chartering another boat for deep-sea fishing at the end of the summer in a conversation with Kyle and his grandmother.
“He kept to himself, didn’t want to rock the boat, didn’t want to be the one that disrupted with his own stuff,” Kyle said, adding that her stepson was “always very focused on other people’s needs and their well-being.”
According to Kyle, Stolpp struggled with his mental health from a young age, but with a quiet shell, and he rarely talked about it.
“We don’t talk about men’s mental health. We talk about mental health in broad strokes,” she said. “We say a lot about what we don’t want men to do, and who we don’t want men to be, but we don’t really say, ‘Hey, here’s your option.'”
According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, nearly one in 10 men experience depression or anxiety, but less than half receive treatment.
In 2024, reported suicide-related deaths were four times higher for men than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
“Maybe he felt very lonely and very stuck, but I’m sorry that he couldn’t feel the connection that he made with other people,” Kyle said. “It’s easy in this moment to remember the really hard parts.”
Besides fixing and tinkering with tools and toys — a constant trait that later led to his career in HVAC after a few false starts — Stolpp jumped at the chance to clean the dishes in his youth, Kyle insisted.
“He was not the person that was going to stomp through ant hills,” she continued with a smile. “He would go out of his way to not.”
For one of his first jobs, Stolpp cared for abandoned animals at One Stop Country Pet Supply, when he begged his parents to take in a lonely rat — a request Kyle admired but did not accept.
Kyle said she does not want to stop talking about her stepson, who she described as “the quintessential big brother” to his siblings, Greg and Lucas. Looking ahead, she envisions planting trees in nearby community touchstones using leftover money raised via an ongoing GoFundMe, and then posting QR codes for mental health resources and a statement about who Stolpp was on the trees. The effort, she said, aims to create a “beautiful space to be for a moment” where people “feel like you get a mom hug.”
“I know how hard it is sometimes to be a person and to be here, to be human, and I want to acknowledge the hurt that people have and carry,” Kyle said. “Sometimes just sharing genuinely how you feel when somebody asks the obligatory ‘How’s it going?’… it can feel good just to say that you’re not feeling good.”
She hopes her stepson’s story will help break the silence she hears around men’s mental health and remind people of the peer support, hotlines and other resources that are available for people “struggling with feeling like it’s really hard to be here.”
“I want people to know who Zach was,” she continued, crediting the “mom-strength” for pushing her forward as she looks to honor her stepson. “There is hope and support, and you don’t have to hold all the secrets.”
Kyle and her husband, Donald Stolpp, organized a GoFundMe to “help cover Zachery’s final expenses,” according to the site. As of Tuesday afternoon, the fundraiser, available at tinyurl.com/2pw9aewe, had collected $7,238 toward an $8,000 goal.
To connect with crisis centers for 24/7 free, confidential support, call or text the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988. Local crisis services are listed on Clinical & Support Option’s website at csoinc.org/emergency-crisis-stabilization-services.
