Jason Featherston was in the final month of his 25-year career in the Texas Army National Guard when he heard the news. A text message: John “Kenny” Crutcher, a 45-year-old sergeant in the Guard, had died by suicide on November 12, 2021, leaving behind a wife and young daughter. “It’s still a shock,” Featherston says. “I think it just goes to prove everybody can be susceptible in the right circumstances, but it’s hard to believe.”
Crutcher, a North Texas native, was an “outstanding” soldier and infantry instructor, Featherston says. He suffered from post-traumatic stress from his military service in Afghanistan, according to his wife, but another factor at the time of his death was a military excursion closer to home: Operation Lone Star, Governor Greg Abbott’s massive, problem-plagued, and possibly unconstitutional mobilization of state troopers and military personnel to the U.S.-Mexico border. Crutcher had received permission to temporarily delay deployment to the border—so he could help care for a brother-in-law with a disability—but this permission was scheduled to expire when he took his life.
For Featherston, a 44-year-old who ended his service as the Guard’s senior enlisted advisor, a position at the heights of the 19,000-member force, Crutcher’s passing would prove a breaking point. Two other soldiers tied to Operation Lone Star had killed themselves around the same time; another would do so about a month later. Featherston had watched as the initiative—the latest and largest in a long line of state surges to confront refugees and migrants seeking entry to America—exploded from a deployment of about 1,000 in June to 10,000 in November. To pull this off, the state ordered Guard members, under threat of possible arrest, to separate from families and civilian jobs, sometimes with just days’ notice, for an assignment set to last a year.
