June Sarpong emotionally admitted 2015 had been the "worst year" of her life as she opened up about her brother Sam Sarpong’s death on ‘Loose Women’ on Thursday (07.01.16).
The 38-year-old TV star was making her first appearance back on the panel of the daytime series since her older sibling Sam – who worked as an actor, model and presenter – died at the age of 40 in October after jumping from a bridge in Pasadena, California.
The grief June and her parents have experienced has been unbearable and has been made worse by the fact none of them had any inkling that Sam was feeling suicidal.
Talking to her co-stars Linda Robson, Jane Moore and Andrea McLean, a tearful June bravely shared: "It’s horrible, I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I mean it’s been such a tough time for my family and I. 2015 was the worst year of our lives, like the worst, nobody could ever have predicted this … Nobody could have ever predicted this … He’d given no signs, we were shell-shocked, this is the person that you would never associate this with. In a world full of seven billion people, I feel so blessed to be able to say that my favourite person in the world was my brother. I mean he was so good. He was such a kind human being who just loved people and who treated everybody the same and was the life and soul of the party and whenever you had a problem he was the guy you turn to … The thing that really sort of brought it home to us, just how loved he was, was at his memorial, over 2,000 people turned up to celebrate his life."
June also revealed her Christian faith had given her the strength to pull through her darkest days since Sam passed.
She explained: "The only thing that gets me through the day, because some days you just can’t, is my faith, is a belief in God, my Christian faith. Reading Psalm 23, Psalm 91, to know that there’s just something, a being that’s going to get us through because you just can’t do it on your own."
June still can’t understand why her brother would have wanted to take his own life and she and her family were told by American police who tried to talk him off the bridge that ‘Yo Momma’ host Sam was "hallucinating" before his death.
She said: "This was a happy guy. He wasn’t on medication, he doesn’t even drink. All we know that on the day it happened, something just took over his mind. So the Sammy that we knew was not that boy on the bridge, the person that jumped off the bridge was not the man that we had loved for over 40 years. It was a moment of madness .., something just went off and he lost complete control over his mind…The police wouldn’t let my father up there. For seven hours he was up there … he was completely hallucinating. He was not there. He was not in charge of his faculties."
June Sarpong completely devastated by brother Sam’s death
