Option 0: people tend to be blindsided when someone in their life suffering from depression kills themselves. This is because if you see it coming, usually you go all out to intervene. It is ridiculously common for people to report that someone who seemed like they enduring mental hardship "was doing better" in the days before their suicide.

I'm finding the immediate "it was an an assassination" rhetoric gross and unproductive here, because what it's dismissing is a very real problem: becoming a whistleblower tends to ruin people's lives between the media scrutiny, the legal scrutiny, the career jeopardy and being in and out of court rooms. Marriages breakdown, and people get depressed or develop substance problems.

"He was assassinated" is just casually ignoring the fact that Boeing can kill this man dead completely legally through the normal shitshow which is the legal wringer whistleblowers get put through.