Dennis Reeves was allegedly having an affair with his secretary.
The high school principal who made headlines last week after killing himself in the school parking lot did so after being confronted about allegations of adultery, officials told police.
Principal Dennis Reeves walked to his truck outside Kirbyville High in southeast Texas last Tuesday after Superintendent Tommy Wallis says he confronted the husband and father of two in a meeting about an alleged affair with another school district employee.
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According to local reports, Reeves resigned and left the building visibly shaken, before climbing inside his truck.
In a statement to police, Wallis said the employee told him Reeves previously said he would kill himself if their affair was ever revealed and that he'd make it look like an accident so his family would get the insurance.
That's not how things worked out, however.
Wallis said Reeves denied the affair before learning that he'd be placed on leave during an investigation and that, should investigators conclude the affair did take place, Reeves would be fired.
Wallis said he also gave Reeves the option to resign, which he did. "Mr. Reeves turned to his computer and typed his resignation letter," Wallis wrote in a statement obtained by Dallas News.
Reeves then left the building. But after he returned with tools from the school's welding shop and then went back to his truck, the statement says the vehicle remained there for around an hour.
Wallis alerted authorities to the situation and, about an hour after his resignation, police say they found Reeves inside his pickup still holding his .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol with a fatal gunshot wound to the side of the head.
The details of Reeves' resignation and suicide were detailed in a press release from the Kirbyville Police Department Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, one of Reeves' assistant principals resigned from his own post in what he characterized in an email to employees as an act of loyalty to his former boss.
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Charles Simmons said he was resigning not "because I’m distraught, not because I’ve been asked to or because I have another place to go."
"One thing that I promised Dennis Reeves before he hired me was that he could count on me to be loyal and trustworthy, and I also told him that I would not compromise my integrity," the email obtained by KFDM stated. "It was a matter of simply right vs. wrong and by consistently doing the right thing, I would maintain my integrity. I kept that promise to him, and now that he’s gone, I must still keep it."
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