ALTAMONT — Trooper Timothy Hard of Altamont killed himself on May 25, two days after he retired from a distinguished quarter-century career with the New York State Police.

Hard was remembered this week as an outstanding officer, dive-team leader, and instructor, and as a man who, at age 52, seemed to have a bright future.

He was engaged to be married and had developed diving skills that meant a wide range of post-career opportunities were open to him, said Captain Robert Patnaude, acting commander of Troop G of the NYSP, where Hard worked.

As the troop’s senior diver and leader of its dive team, Hard helped bring closure to many families, Patnaude said, adding that people appreciated his “professionalism, work ethic, and willingness to do whatever it took within those dark waters to find their loved ones.”

Hard was one of only nine dive-team leaders in all of New York State, Patnaude said.

Diving is a “thankless” task, often involving searching for bodies in very low visibility and dangerous currents, Patnaude said, and a successful search brings its own sadness. But also brings families answers, he said.

Responsibilities of the dive team also include searching for weapons and evidence of various kinds of crimes, Patnaude said.

High-profile searches in which Hard took part include being a 9/11 first responder at the World Trade Center and also helping recover bodies at the site of the TWA Flight 800 crash in 1996 off the coast of Long Island, in which all 230 people on board died.

The TWA search was very demanding, Patnaude said, because it involved searching inside the wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. There are only a couple of dive teams “able to go that deep, and we’re one of them,” he said. Patnaude referred to diving at those depths as a form of “trauma,” and added, “You can only work for a certain amount of time every day, because your body needs to decompress.”

Hard was also a field-training officer, responsible for training new recruits — a position for which the state police take care to pick exemplary troopers, Patnaude said.

An injury in December put Hard on medical leave; he had developed a hernia while moving some dive equipment. He recently had surgery for it, and then decided to retire.

Hard had officially retired on May 23 and visited the office on the 24th, Patnaude said, talking with several people there about his plans for his future. “Nobody saw any outward signs of his being depressed,” he said.

He was still relatively young, Patnaude said, since troopers can work until age 60.

The Guilderland Police Department was first to respond to Hard’s home on Main Street in Altamont when his family called 911 on Thursday morning, Patnaude said.

The case was quickly handed over to the state police, and a large number of troopers and police vehicles could be seen outside the home.

The suicide rate among police officers rises exponentially within the first five years after retirement, said Dr. Robert Douglas, founder and executive director of the National Police Suicide Foundation.

The suicide rate among the general population — people who are not in law enforcement — is about 12 per 100,000, Douglas said. For law-enforcement officers within the first five years of retirement, that number rises to about 200 in 100,000.

A 2014 report called “Breaking the Silence on Law Enforcement Suicides” by the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that law-enforcement officers are twice as likely to die by their own hand as they are to be killed in traffic accidents or felonious assaults.

Douglas, who was himself a police officer for 25 years, said that, generally, the life of an officer can be addictive. “The job is engaging every single day. There are no down days. Every day, all of our senses are used to capacity, and beyond what we could possibly give, and we never have sufficient manpower, so we are always trying to stretch ourselves still further.”

Retirement can sometimes mean taking away an officer’s sense of purpose and identity, Douglas said.

Read the obituary here.