Is your child living two lives?

On a Monday in June, 16-year-old Austin Croffoot left home sometime between midnight and 5 a.m.

It was just a week from the end of his freshman year at Coeur d’Alene High, and he was happy about that.

He seemed in great spirits, and was busy planning a Father’s Day affair for his dad, Kevin.

But in the wee hours of that morning, Kevin and his bike disappeared. The last post on his phone was a panorama photo looking east, and the time stamp said 5:19.

Kevin is a firefighter with plenty of contacts in the law enforcement community, so he was the first to hear that his son had been found.

Initially, he was spared the news that it was suicide.

Then came the hammer.

“I don’t know exactly what I thought,” he said. “I would have said Austin was the last kid in the world to do something like that.

“He was happy — we’d had a great family dinner the night before and he hugged us all before bed, as usual — so it didn’t make sense that way.

“But also, Austin could talk to me about anything. If he was struggling somehow, I was sure he’d have brought it up.”

That assumption turned out to be wrong.

Like so many young people, Austin was living two lives.

Fortunately for all the other families that the Croffoots hope to reach, Austin handed over a legacy of sorts.

He really did love his family deeply — and they found notes that said so specifically.

In a letter to his dad, Austin wrote that he’d gotten things wrong and that he believed his only “second chance” was death.

At the end, he added: “P.S. — I’ll let you know.”

But Austin also left plenty of clues about why this terrible end had occurred, and even asked them to help others avoid it.

Cyberbullying.

THERE IS more to the story, as there always turns out to be, but Kevin and Kathy Croffoot both sound like they believe that if smartphones had never been invented, Austin might have survived, working things out the way most teens did until the internet came along.

Face to face, in actual human conversation.

I spent hours with the Croffoots on Thursday afternoon.

They still couldn’t make total sense of Austin’s decision. This was a boy who once had counseled a friend against ending a life too young.

They kept coming back to the world of the internet, and how kids get swept in different directions by it.

They are not fans of smartphones in the hands of teenagers.

As Kathy put it: “You can still reach people with a good old-fashioned phone, but you can’t disappear into some app.”

To this day, Kevin and Kathy believe that something happened between the time Austin went to bed and 5 a.m.

Something that had occurred in that alternate world.

His smartphone.

Kevin: “It turned out there was a whole different reality Austin experienced online. Some of the stuff was brutal, just cruel — and this was a boy who had lots and lots of REAL friends.

“But if there are just a few who want to make you miserable, one can become 250 in just a few minutes online. That’s the scariest part.”

The Croffoots learned about the second lives of teens the hard way.

The hardest way of all.

“You know,” Kevin said, “we found out later that the person Austin confided in the most was a girl in Tennessee.

“They’d never met in real life. Since they found each other online, they trusted one another. In fact, the girl reached out to us — she was sad and disappointed that Austin hadn’t talked about what was hurting him, because he had helped her through a pretty tough time.

“I mean, a girl in Tennessee …”

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Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press.

A Brand New Day appears Wednesday through Saturday each week. Steve’s sports column runs on Tuesday.

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