California Tribal Advocate Who Fought to Prevent Suicides Dies in Apparent Murder-Suicide

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

A member of the Yurok tribe who advocated for better mental health treatment and suicide intervention in rural Northern California has died in an apparent murder-suicide. 

Celinda Gonzales was 59. 

In 2020, CalMatters wrote about her work in Humboldt County, where about 2 and a half times as many residents die by suicide per capita as the rest of the state.  

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office said deputies found two bodies in a home in the Yurok reservation village of Weitchpec on Feb. 3. 

“Based on the preliminary investigation, the incident appears to be consistent with a murder-suicide,” the sheriff’s office said in a press release. 

On Feb. 12, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said, “it is believed Celinda was killed by her husband, Arthur Gonzales, who then took his own life.”

The Yurok tribe confirmed Gonzales’s identity in a memorial last week. 

“She was a beloved friend to many Tribal Councilmembers, staff and community members,” the tribe said in the memorial. “This is a tremendous tragedy for the Tribe.”

Gonzales once had a grant-funded role as a suicide intervention specialist, working with local police and fire departments to recognize potential signs of an intent to self-harm. 

In 2019, the federal funds that paid for her grant position ran out, so she started working on her own. 

Gonzales lost her son, Paul, to suicide, when he was 19. Her 43-year-old brother, Gaylord Lewis Jr., died by suicide five years later, in 2014.

As the pandemic swept through California and rates of anxiety and suicidal ideation skyrocketed, Gonzales was motivated by her own losses to help in Humboldt County, where access to mental health services is already difficult, compounded by the dearth of psychiatrists willing to relocate to rural California. 

A 2016 Humboldt County grand jury investigation found that the county behavioral health board did not adequately serve the county’s residents. 

Gonzales believed that, despite the challenges of the pandemic, her community was resilient. 

“They’ve survived wars, floods, fires and landslides,” she told a CalMatters reporter in 2020. 

The Yurok tribe is offering grief counseling at the village clinic. 

The name “MindSite News” is used with the express permission of Mindsight Institute, an educational organization offering online learning and in-person workshops in the field of mental health and wellbeing. MindSite News and Mindsight Institute are separate, unaffiliated entities that are aligned in making science accessible and promoting mental health globally.