Death
In Alaska, Roosevelt committed suicide on June 4, 1943, by a self-inflicted gunshot. He was discovered in his house with a gunshot wound in the head by Dr. Sanford Couch Monroe who later filed the autopsy report. His death was reported to his mother Edith, whose favorite son he had been, as a heart attack. Given the sensitive nature of his death, for many years the cause of death continued to be described as heart disease. Only in later years did the true circumstances of his death become known. He was interred in Fort Richardson National Cemetery near Anchorage, where a memorial stone gateway was erected in his honor in 1949.
He was survived by his wife Belle and four children: Kermit "Kim" Roosevelt, Jr., Joseph Willard Roosevelt, Belle Wyatt Roosevelt, and Dirck Roosevelt.
The town of Kermit, Texas, was named for him (he had visited Winkler County, Texas, a few months earlier to hunt antelope). The town of Kermit, West Virginia, is also named after him. Finally, the Luzon-class repair ship USS Kermit Roosevelt (ARG-16) was named in his honor.
Read more about this topic: Kermit Roosevelt
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death?”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)