Andrea Fuller Cooper and her husband came home to a parent’s worst nightmare late one night in 1995.

After attending a New Year’s Eve party, they found their 20-year-old daughter lying on the floor of their family room.

“At first I thought she was asleep but when she didn’t respond I thought that she had drank too much and had passed out, which was strange because I didn’t think Kristin drank,” Cooper said. “When I went to turn her over, I found the gun in her hand. She had died from a gunshot wound.”

Her daughter, Kristin, had committed suicide.

She was supposed to have been at a party that evening and her parents later found out she had never gone.

“I didn’t think I would have lived through that night,” Cooper said.

Kristin ended her life after being raped by a friend at a lifeguard party when she came home from college for the summer. She only told a few very close friends and refused to seek counseling. Depression set in, resulting in her suicide, Cooper said. Her parents slowly put together the pieces of what had happened to their daughter through her journal and what her friends told them.

“Parents are really clueless,” Cooper said.

“I was volunteering at a sorority and even I was clueless about the kind of pressures college women go through.”

Three years after her only child committed suicide, Cooper began speaking out about acquaintance rape, depression and suicide.

“It’s almost like an epidemic,” Cooper said.

Many parents speak to their daughters about rape when they go off to college, but Cooper said they often don’t mention the possibility of sexual assault from someone the daughter already knows.

“I went through the whole thing,” Cooper said. “You know, don’t walk alone at night, park under a light, watch your drink at parties.

If parents knew how prevalent acquaintance rape was at college they probably wouldn’t ship them off.”

Cooper said the one thing that may have helped prevent her suicide was counseling.

“One of her roommates had made an appointment for her but she refused to go,” she said. “It’s 2005 and there is still a stigma of going to counseling.”

Kris Olds, Story County Sexual Assault Response Team program coordinator, said the first step to recovering from something like rape is saying it’s not OK and asking for help.

Olds said rape can leave someone feeling devastated and alone, but counseling can play a crucial role in ending the depression.

“They have to ask for the help that they need,” he said.

Cortney Schram, junior in pre-journalism and mass communication, said she had already heard Cooper speak, and, as a result, had developed a newfound respect for her parents.

“It was very hard to listen to [her speak],” Schram said. “But it really gets you to think about why we’re here and how precious life really is.”

Cooper will be giving a talk at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union.