On January 3, 2023, Amy Childress found her youngest son, Garrison, dead in his bedroom. He was 21. He had been an all-star athlete at Fairhope High School, a college student at the University of Alabama with a partial academic scholarship, and by every outward appearance a young man with a full life ahead of him. His toxicology report showed no alcohol or drugs. Nothing about that afternoon announced itself in advance.
What the Childress family has done in the years since is the reason their story matters beyond Baldwin County. Amy and her husband Emery, along with their older son Chancellor, created the Edward Garrison Childress Foundation, which raises money for mental health counseling vouchers for young adults, funds memorial scholarships at Fairhope High School, and sponsors suicide-prevention walks on the Gulf Coast. Their mission, in Amy’s words: to make sure Garrison’s loss can help others avoid the same grief.
“He Didn’t Want Us to Know He Was Struggling”
Garrison Childress grew up in a family with deep Baldwin County roots — his father’s family heritage in the county runs long, and Emery runs a construction business. Garrison played baseball and football for the Fairhope Pirates before heading to Tuscaloosa, where he enrolled in the School of Education and lived with Chancellor and a friend. He was popular, well-liked, and close to both parents; he and his father hunted and fished together.
What his parents could not see was happening out of view. After Garrison’s death, his transcripts showed he had stopped attending class for roughly three semesters before any academic warning caught up with him in the fall of 2022. Federal privacy law meant his parents never saw his grades. He told them he would sit out his final spring semester because a required class wasn’t offered, and that he would work construction with his father and return to school later.
The isolation of the pandemic years had taken a toll earlier, too. The family pulled him out of school in the spring of 2021, and for more than a year he seemed to recover — working with his dad, receiving therapy, appearing, in his mother’s words, normal. When he returned to campus, Amy and Emery believed he was back on track. He never told them he was still struggling.
“As a mother, you are always asking questions,” Amy says. “Most of it is irrational. You have to constantly remind yourself intellectually that it wasn’t your fault.”
The first days after Garrison’s death were a blur. The family could not stay in their home; a close friend opened his entire upstairs to them. That friend, who had lost his own sister in a tragic accident as a teenager, offered the advice Amy still repeats: a family can fall apart, or decide to trudge through together. Their son Chancellor needed his parents. Emery and Amy will mark 31 years of marriage this year.
Back to Work, and Out of the Darkness
Amy is a nurse and team leader in the Cardiovascular Intervention Unit at Thomas Hospital in Fairhope. She returned to work six weeks after Garrison died. “The work was healing,” she says, “but as soon as I left the building, I’d break down and sob.” She is also candid about another number: 13 years of sobriety, which she calls the best thing she has ever done for herself.
This summer, Amy, her mother, her sister and a close friend joined more than 2,000 people in New York City for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Out of the Darkness Overnight Walk — a 17-mile walk through Manhattan that lasted from nightfall to dawn and raised $2.9 million for mental health awareness and suicide prevention. At the end of the route, luminaries bearing the faces of people lost to suicide lined the path. “That was powerful,” she says. “If I have to live the rest of my life without my child, I’m going to go and do something to help someone else.”
What the Foundation Does
The foundation’s work took shape with help from Amy’s younger sister, Molly Stone, a professional fundraiser in Birmingham, who suggested creating a memorial scholarship through the Community Foundation of South Alabama. Since 2024, two $2,500 scholarships have been awarded each year — one to a boy and one to a girl — for Fairhope High School graduates.
The Edward Garrison Childress Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3), then partnered with AltaPointe Health to attack the problem more directly: paying for mental health sessions. Through the partnership, vouchers cover roughly 90 percent of the cost of counseling for eligible students and young adults in Baldwin County, awarded based on individual need.
The fundraising engine is a pair of annual events. A fall clay shoot at Bushy Creek Clays and Events near Bay Minette has been successful enough to grow from 25 team slots toward 50. A spring golf tournament — the second annual “Driving for Hope” was held in June 2026 at Rock Creek Golf Club in Fairhope — draws a full field of foursomes. Together the events have cleared upwards of $30,000, which funds both the scholarship program and the AltaPointe vouchers. The foundation also sponsors the Out of the Darkness Community Walk in Daphne each October and supports the Pensacola walk.
Why the Numbers Demand the Conversation
The foundation cites a University of Michigan study finding that 44 percent of college students report symptoms of depression, 37 percent report anxiety disorders, and 15 percent have seriously considered suicide in the past year. Nationally, suicide is among the leading causes of death for high school and college-aged people, and Amy says parents are often stunned to learn how many families around them have lost children between 18 and 30 — particularly boys.
“It’s a very uncomfortable subject for people to talk about,” Amy says. “We hope to make it more acceptable.” Her own research taught her how invisible the struggle can be: depression that isn’t on display, grades that parents aren’t allowed to see, a facade that holds until it doesn’t. “We were a regular family. We are relatable. People think, if it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone.”
Anyone struggling, or worried about someone who is, can call or text the national Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988 — free, confidential, and available around the clock. The Edward Garrison Childress Foundation’s events and donation information are available through its website, and the family invites anyone who wants to join to sign up with Team Garrison at the next walk.
“We decided as a family that Garrison’s life’s purpose would be to help people better understand mental illness and prevent suicide,” Amy says. “It’s a healing process for us to do something positive out of our tragedy.”