Keith Lee gets candid with Shannon Sharpe while discussing the moment he survived a suicide attempt.
Lee, 28, talked about the kind of relationship he had with his father and said that his father had an old-school way of parenting. “As a kid, we didn’t really have much of a relationship at all,” he said. “He was very typical. Go to work, bring the bacon home, get the biggest plate, get the biggest chicken wings, go up stairs, go to sleep, do the same thing the next day.”
The Tik-Tok influencer went on to describe the moment he and his father had a heated altercation during his senior year of high school. After the argument his father told him that he couldn’t go anymore to which Lee responded, “Who are you telling me I ain’t going somewhere?”
“I was in a very deep dark depression, to a place where nothing mattered anymore,” he recalled. “He was like, ‘Let’s go to the backyard.’ We got into it, did whatever we was about to do. He got in the car, left, went with his friends, and he told me that his friends was like, ‘He gotta go. He can’t live in your house and treat you like that, speak to you like that. You gotta go home and get him out of there.’”
Keith Lee said that his father returned home in the middle of the night with an unspecified object as he sat on the bed and said, “If you move, something’s about to happen.”
“I remember sitting up and that’s when he told me like, ‘We ain’t gotta have no relationship…You don’t ever talk to me like that, and we won’t have no problems. But if it happens again, it’s over with.’ You can read between the lines,” Lee said. “That put me into a place of like, ‘If you gon’ do it, I’m gonna do it before you do it.’”
He said that he went on to make a noose from his father’s collection of ties, stood on a cooler, and then pushed his feet off of it. “I’m in the air for maybe like what felt like 10 seconds,” Lee said. “I’m at the point where you start trying to regress but it’s too late. So I’m trying to grab the tie, I’m trying to pull myself up. My dad sees me… He came, picked me up, took me off them ties, and told me how much he loved me. And that’s why I’m here today.”
Lee said it was the first time that he felt his father’s love and said that his suicide attempt helped them to mend their relationship. “It was awkward after that, like, he just saw his son try to take his own life. So it was like, it can’t just get back to normal immediately, right? But there was a level of like, ‘We both got to try this.’”
The men are currently in a much better place.