Family members of George Foreman’s daughter Freeda Foreman are having a difficult time coming to terms with her death by apparent suicide.
Foreman, 42, was pronounced dead at her home near Houston, Texas on Friday, March 8.
Family members discovered the former women’s boxer hanged by her neck in a closet in her home.
George Foreman, the two-time heavyweight boxer, remembered his daughter in a tweet on Sunday morning.
“Heaven send so many wonders; too many to have questions about any one thing or event in my life. Lippizana colt just born on the ranch,” he wrote, alongside a photo of a newborn horse standing beside a fully grown horse.
In an exclusive interview with KHOU, her family members wanted Freeda to be remember the way she lived, not how she died.
“She asked me a couple of weeks ago, ‘Mom, what was the biggest joy of your life?’ And I told her, ‘The day that you were put in my arms,'” her mother Andre Skeete said she told her only daughter.
Freeda was mom to 2 daughters, 24-year-old Justice Green and 12-year-old Marlena Foreman.
She was also grandmother-of-3.
“She loved to be close to me,” Skeete said. “She loved to be up under me. She loved to cuddle with me. Just like that. (It’s OK). Wherever we were. (It’s OK),” Skeete said.
Freeda’s oldest daughter, Justice, was listening nearby. “She defended me,” Justice told KHOU. “She always defended me.”
Skeete remembered Freeda following her dad’s footsteps to blaze her own trail in women’s boxing. Freeda had a 5-1 boxing record. She retired in 2001.
Skeete said, “She called me one day and she said, ‘Mom, I’m going to be a boxer.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ I just left everything I was doing, hoped on a flight to Denver and I stayed there with her. How old were you baby? Five?”
But Justice broke down and cried before she could answer her grandmother’s question.
“It doesn’t hit now. I just, I don’t, I just, I just don’t believe she’s gone because it doesn’t happen, it’s not supposed to happen,” Justice said through tears.
The family asked for privacy and respect while they try to get through this tough time.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, someone is waiting to speak with you 24 hours a day.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1.800.273.8255(TALK).
Photos by Dan Callister Online USA Inc/Hulton Archive/Getty Images and Al Bello /Allsport /Getty Images Sport
