Doctors gave a prematurely born Ella Thomas a 50 percent chance of survival. But she proved them wrong, and lived 24 big, impactful years before taking her own life in 2018. “She was feisty,” says Martha Thomas, whose forearm is etched with a tattoo of an “I love you” note her daughter once left for her. “She was a big giver, too,” adds Martha’s husband Chris. “She loved helping those who couldn’t help themselves.”
Chris says his daughter often struggled to find the balance between aiding others and helping herself. “The day she died, she was helping two friends get help with their mental illness,” he says.
When the Thomas kids—Ella and her brother Solomon—were young, the family bounced around the globe. Chris worked for Procter & Gamble, overseeing markets in Australia and New Zealand and sales and marketing in Asia. Martha worked as a teacher—a career she prolonged for 30 years.
When the family moved back to the U.S. from Australia in 2002, the kids had developed thick accents. So much so that Ella and Solomon’s teachers put them in speech therapy. “Nobody could understand them or figure out what they were,” Martha recalls. “Everyone thought they were Aboriginal Australian kids.”
As the two siblings came of age, they bonded over sports, with Ella shining in basketball and Solomon, the quiet, younger child taking up football, eventually turning it into a career. A star defender at Stanford University, he was the No. 3 overall draft pick in 2017 when the San Francisco 49ers picked him up in the first round of the NFL Draft.
Through it all, his big sister was there to provide guidance and support. “When I first got drafted, she was someone who told me to stay true to myself,” Solomon says. “This life in the NFL comes with a lot. Her telling me to love myself and be me was most important.”
After four years with the 49ers, he went on to play for the Las Vegas Raiders and New York Jets, where for three straight years, he was nominated by his team for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award. The league’s most prestigious individual honor, it recognizes a player’s on-field excellence and impact in the community. Earlier this year, Solomon signed a two-year deal with his hometown team, the Dallas Cowboys.
He and his parents are co-founders of The Defensive Line, an organization the family launched in 2021 to honor Ella and raise awareness for suicide prevention, predominately in minority communities. According to the CDC, the suicide rate among Black youth is rising faster than any other major race or ethnic group. Overall, the suicide rate in the U.S. has increased 36 percent over the last 20 years. “When Ella died, I didn’t think that Black people died by suicide,” Chris says. “I think that’s a common thought amongst African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. We need to make people aware that this is an issue.”
Solomon has leaned on his therapist to help him through the pain of losing his sister. “Being able to talk to someone who’s in a safe place and has good advice and feedback helps me reflect,” he says. “It helps me get recentered.”
Martha has leveraged her extensive experience as an educator to help teachers and schools develop action plans for supporting students who are struggling with suicidal thoughts. Picking up on the signs is difficult. Not every kid exhibits the same actions. “It’s not just someone being sad in the corner,” Martha says. “It could be a kid who comes in who is louder than normal or someone who doesn’t fit into everything. We encourage people to look at behavior as a mental health issue.”
The Defensive Line works with organizations like the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Mental Health Coalition to develop its suicide prevention workshops. The nonprofit has provided training and resources to universities such as TCU, Stanford, the University of Virginia, and local ISDs such as Dallas, Richardson, and Coppell.
The organization is gaining momentum through speaking engagements at corporations. Chris notes that each year, there are 200 million missed workdays due to mental health conditions across the U.S. “That’s $44 billion in lost productivity and absenteeism,” he says. The nonprofit also partners with Solomon’s new teammate, Dak Prescott, the Cowboys’ starting quarterback and an NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year winner. Prescott’s Faith Fight Finish foundation was formed in 2019 following the loss of his mother, Peggy, to colon cancer, and his brother, Jace, in 2020 to suicide.
Recently, the Thomas family and The Defensive Line were nominated by the Clinton Global Initiative, a program within the Clinton Foundation founded by former President Bill Clinton, to be one of its commitment action partners and address longstanding barriers and issues. The alignment allows The Defensive Line to add 2,000 trainers. The end goal? Reach 3.2 million people in the next five years to share the importance of mental health and suicide prevention.
“I think she would be so proud of us,” Solomon says of Ella. “She’d probably be doing most of the work. She would have all these ideas for us … actually, she would want to be running the show.”
