Cowboys QB Dak Prescott Says Brother Jace's Death Was a Suicide

Dak Prescott and his older brother Tad said during an appearance on In Depth with Graham Bensinger that their brother Jace's death in April was a suicide.

The Dallas Cowboys quarterback said he slept through several texts and messages alerting him to the news and that his father had to wake him up to give him "some of the worst news that I'll ever get."

Prescott also said he believes his mother's colon cancer diagnosis and death in 2013 had a huge effect on Jace, who he called his best friend and the most athletic person he'd ever seen:

"Jace at the time was finishing with school and was home, was with her and watched it. She couldn't necessarily hide it from Jace because he was there every day. He saw the times where she would have to spend probably 10-plus hours throwing up, this and that, and saw the medicine she had to take.

"And, almost, you can't even put into the words the burden. It's something only Jace knew. And he didn't necessarily share that. And Jace was never really much of a talker, so when something like that was a huge burden on him, he didn't know how to share it. He didn't know how to be vulnerable about it."

Prescott said the death of his brother, and the struggles his brother faced before taking his own life, opened him up to the importance of vulnerability:

"He had a lot of burdens on him. He had a lot of tough things and my sense of saying that is it showed me how vulnerable we have to be as humans. How open we have to be because our adversity, our struggles, what we go through is always going to be too much for ourselves and maybe too much for even one or two people. But never too much for a community or never too much for the people and the family that you love. So we have to share those things."

Jace Prescott was 31 years old when he died.