Shining a light after tragedy follows birth

Christmas wreaths hung on the front of the historic Avondale home and tree lights twinkled through a front window in mid-December, giving no sign of the tragedy that would occur.

Likewise, the beautiful and normally buoyant Jenny Gibbs Bankston gave few clues of the post-partum illness tormenting her.

On Dec. 19, shortly after 7 p.m., her husband, Chip, came home and found his wife and their 7-week-old son, Graham, in the backyard, fatally shot. Only then did Jenny Bankston's family realize that the 33-year-old, first-time mother had been in the grips of a serious illness that caused her to take her son's life and then her own.

It's something her loved ones say they could have never imagined. Bankston's mother had just talked to her daughter an hour and a half before. Jenny talked about getting ready for Christmas and how cute the baby was. She did not reveal that she had been to a sporting goods store earlier in the day and purchased a gun.

"It was completely out of the blue," her fraternal twin sister, Becky Lavelle, said in a recorded interview with Endurance Planet, an Internet-based news source for athletes. "She was just so positive and outgoing and upbeat, caring, creative ... really the complete opposite when you think of a depressed person."

Almost immediately after the deaths, Bankston's family decided to create a nonprofit organization, Jenny's Light, to raise awareness about perinatal mood disorders - depression, psychosis and other mental problems that develop during pregnancy and up to one year after childbirth. The goal is to help other suffering mothers move out of darkness and into light.

"It gave us a cause to try to make something good out of something tragic," said Jenny's mother, Sandy Gibbs of Minneapolis.

The first large fundraiser for Jenny's Light was Saturday. The golf tournament at Highland Park Golf Course raised more than $50,000, doubling what the nonprofit had previously raised....