And my next guest says he had a two word
reaction to Barnett's apparent suicide.
No way. Bob Ketchum was a close friend of John
Barnett for 15 years and he joins me live now
in this Banfield exclusive.
Thank you so much, Bob,
for being on the program.
And first and foremost, my condolences to you
losing your friend. And of course,
it being such a public
story, it's I'm sure it's very hard for you to
process
all at the same time.
I I think you're processing a story that you don't
believe.
What is your take on what you're hearing?
It's it's a little bit on the difficult side because
of John being the person that he was.
Super nice guy, never really got mad at anyone
and
we raced together as our was our big deal and
that's all we did together.
We did party together. John was a very good cook.
We'd go out to Camino Island,
to his place and he'd have
parties out there. There'd be as many as 50 plus
people there.
But John being John, everything had to be correct.
Especially when you're racing cars at the track,
your car has to be perfect
and or you're not racing
and you're not number one.
But with John we had a lot of fun.
I mean it was great.
He always a good humorous guy,
always with a smile on his face,
so it's difficult to understand
why he's dead now. It's sad
and going back and talking to a lot of the
race guys that we raced with.
We've, I've been on the phone for the last couple
days
with a lot of friends from the track from back
in the day,
but did anybody say anything
Bob did they did. Did they give you any hints
or clues or red flags of late saying that maybe
just recently he he's been struggling.
His brother said he might have had
PPDSD and anxiety.
Yeah, but we didn't. We didn't see that part of
it
because we were racing back,
you know years ago together.
So later on prior to
John's retirement was worth the frustration started with him and
what was going on.
I did call a, a
inspector at Boeing, a friend of his,
and said did you hear what happened And they said,
yeah, we just got the information and she,
she was all upset. She really couldn't talk for
at least 24 hours and then we communicated the next
day.
But it's it's sad. The other race,
the people that we raced with,
we were all on the phone with one another
talking about what had happened and how did it happen.
Do we really believe this?
What it was there a set up?
We don't know.
We just don't know. Well,
there's a big call for further investigation of the forensics
in that car.
And if there's any development,
Bob, I'd love to call you back and have you
on the program to to see what they might
on earth. Thank you for doing this.
And again, my condolences to you
and all of his friends who knew him.
Yes. And they've all
called and wish their condolences.
That's a tough one. I do want to let our
audience know as well that you know,
if you are thinking about
suicide, if you out there somewhere are worried about somebody
else,
you can dial 988 to talk to someone at the
Lifeline Network any time of the day or
at night as well.