“Everyone thinks that the family has, like, shunned him,” Bear said, “but that’s not actually the case. He didn’t want anything to do with the family.”
Bear then shared how his and Matt’s relationship grew more distant, with only the occasional phone call between them.
“I always try to just encourage him to stay on his path, you know, keep on his sobriety stuff,” he said, recalling the last time he’d seen his brother was for a few minutes at a Walmart. “He called me after that, and he said that he had fallen off the wagon, and I was like, ‘Get back on, man. Everybody falls off, you know, just getting back on it. Go rehab if you’ve got to, you’ve got this, you fought it a lot before.’”
However, “That was the last call I had with him,” Bear said. “I know that he’s had problems and struggles and stuff like that, but I’ve never thought that he would take his own life.”
At the end of his video, Bear shared the reason he decided to open up about his family’s difficult time during their ongoing search.
“I wanted your guys to hear it from the family first,” he concluded. “I will let y’all guys know more, as I know more, but I will ask for you to please be respectful to the family, to my mom especially.”