The last telephone conversation he had with his suicidal son recurs like a nightmare for Carroll O'Connor.
Just before Hugh O'Connor killed himself on March 28, his father urged him to seek professional help again for his drug addiction. "And he said, `No, I think I'm going to cap myself today,' " O'Connor says in Saturday's TV Guide."I said, `Hugh, why do you say those things? Why don't you let me come and get you?' And he said, `No Pops, gotta go. So long.' "
O'Connor, best known for his role as Archie Bunker on the 1970s show "All in the Family," called police, who arrived at Hugh's Los Angeles home just in time to hear the gunshot that ended his life.
"I keep thinking that maybe if I had done the right thing, refused that last phone call, he wouldn't have shot himself," O'Connor says. "I ask myself if telling me added to his compulsion to do it."