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Gina Elliott’s phone buzzed with a text message from a friend. It was a link to a news article about the gunman who opened fire in a Midtown Manhattan office building in late July, killing four people and then himself.
He had left a note in his wallet that said he believed he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head that has been found in hundreds of deceased football players and can be diagnosed only after death.
“Study my brain please,” the note said.
It was an unsettling echo for Ms. Elliott, whose husband, Brent Simpson, a police officer in Charlotte, N.C., died by suicide last year. In the months before his death, he repeated to her daily: “Something is wrong with my brain.”
Ms. Elliott and Mr. Simpson had been together almost 20 years, and had known each other even longer. But the man she lived with in the last few years of his life was not the same man she met in 2001.
“It’s like he became a different person,” she said. “Like somebody I didn’t know.”
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Mr. Simpson started as a patrol officer at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in 2006, working the night shift. In 2011, he moved to the police academy as an instructor, teaching defensive tactics, and helped train multiple classes of 40 to 60 recruits each year.
