Wells Fargo executive Greg Beckett seemed to have it all. Big job; solid relationship.
Then he ended it.
Beckett, 46, died Jan. 19 after he jumped to his death from the 14th floor boardroom at the Wells Fargo headquarters building in Wilmington, Delaware, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
There was no note; no explanation; no triggering crisis that has emerged almost nine months after his death.
A Sunday report in The Wall Street Journal sought to find answers and homed in on the increasing workload facing Beckett.
His brother, Dave Beckett, had little good to say about Wells Fargo after his brother’s death.
“He had personal accountability to that place, and that place had no accountability to him,” Dave Beckett said.
Greg Beckett was assigned to work on the bank’s internal controls that protect it from risks.
His work hours had been increasing beginning in mid-December, along with his stress, the Journal reported. Dinner was sandwiched between hours of work. Meetings could last until 11 p.m.
Greg Beckett would be juggling meeting calls and text messages demanding he move from one meeting to another, Dave Beckett said his brother told him.
The Journal reported that after Greg Beckett died, a manager whose team focuses on controls said Beckett “had been working on a number of high importance, high stress projects at work for an extended period of time.”
He told his team to be wary of stress. “If we don’t find healthy ways to address it, there will be negative consequences of one form or another,” he wrote according to the Journal.
On the night of his death, Beckett texted his girlfriend, Giovanna Muraca, and told her to go ahead with dinner without him.
“I was told to ‘not leave if possible,’” he wrote. Muraca continued to have dinner with her two daughters.
It was not until hours later that worry set in when Beckett did not answer calls or text messages. His brother and sister-in-law learned what had happened when they went to the office building to find his car and found police there instead.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 49,449 people died from suicide in 2022, up 2.6 percent from 2021, when a 5 percent increase took place over 2020 and 48,183 Americans killed themselves.
Pinpointing the cause of those who end their lives at work is difficult because there can be many stressors on an individual, said Larry Barton, a behavioral scientist who works with companies in the wake of workplace suicides, according to the Journal.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said that employers should be certain that managers are aware of potential signs of suicide or a mental health crisis and also establish a workplace culture where such issues do not have a stigma.
After Greg Beckett died, Dave Beckett said, no one from the company attended his funeral.
“We’re deeply saddened by the loss of our colleague,” a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo said in a statement. “Greg was a valued member of our team. As we all know, it’s virtually impossible to identify a reason when a tragedy like this occurs. There is nothing more important to all of us at Wells Fargo than our colleagues’ well being.”
