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Editors note: This story addresses suicide and other mental health issues and may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

On the last night of his life, Mark Pavelich played his guitar in his room at the veterans facility where hed lived for the past six months. The notes were comforting to the housemate who paused just beyond the door. It was the kind of melody that drifted from Pavelichs guitar each evening, nestling into a place that had become home to the wounded souls that found their way there.

Pavelichs music was everywhere at the Eagles Healing Nest in the chapel after service, around the bonfire, or alone in his room at night. In his time at the center, Pav had become part of a family of veterans despite being the homes only civilian guest. Taz, his black border collie, was always by his side, whether he was on his way to a pre-dawn workout or heading out onto Sauk Lake to fish.

For the first time since he was arrested and accused of assaulting his neighbor with a metal pipe in August 2019, Pavelich seemed to have found peace and comfort in Sauk Centre, Minn. He was declared mentally incompetent to stand trial for the assault, which left the victim with a bruised kidney, two cracked ribs and a fractured vertebra. Pavelich was deemed to have a serious and persistent mental illness and labeled dangerous.

Once celebrated as part of the U.S. Olympic mens hockey teams Miracle on Ice in 1980, Pavelich was uneasy in the spotlight. Now he made headlines as a villain, gripped by the despair and confusion of several mental health disorders. He was another former hockey player with unhealed wounds, unseen until they spilled out in destructive fits.

That wasnt this Pav though.

More:

The quiet life and the sad death of the 'Miracle on Ice' team's Mark Pavelich - The Athletic