Bridget Cronin, who served on the Inver Grove Heights school board for a decade, was an advocate for children with autism and helped veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, has died after apparently falling at her Summit Avenue apartment. She was 50.
Cronin was found injured Saturday by her kids after she “apparently fell in her bathroom,” her ex-husband, Tony Sutton, said Monday in a telephone interview. “According to the doctor, she had massive head trauma. That’s all we know.” She died the next day at Regions Hospital in St. Paul.
Funeral services are pending.
“I’m stunned, my kids are stunned,” Sutton said. “I’m on my way out to meet with her sister and her mother to plan the funeral. I’m in a state of shock.”
Cronin and Sutton, a former state GOP chairman, divorced in 2014. They had four children, ages 23 to nine.
“Nothing was more important to her then her children,” Sutton wrote in a Facebook post this week.
Cronin was smart, creative and “fierce about the causes she believed in,” Sutton wrote.
One of those was the Ars Bellum Foundation, a nonprofit that Cronin and others formed in 2014 to provide art therapy programs to veterans and military family members dealing with PTSD and related mental health conditions due to service-related trauma, loss and grief.
Cronin served as executive director of the St. Paul nonprofit.
“Her father was a veteran, and she had a real soft spot for veterans,” Sutton said. “And she was more enthusiastic about that than anything I’ve ever seen her do.”
In 2001, Cronin became the advocacy and fundraising leader for a parent group called Families for Effective Autism Treatment (FEAT) and successfully won state recognition and funding for intensive early intervention behavior therapy for young children with autism. Her son was diagnosed with autism in 2000.
FEAT went on to become the Minnesota Autism Center, which is now one of the largest providers of autism therapies in the Midwest.
Cronin served as an elected board member for Inver Grove Heights Schools from January 2004 to August 2014, when she resigned prior to moving to St. Paul.
In the mid-2000s, Cronin and Sutton co-owned several Baja Sol Tortilla Grill locations in the Twin Cities and elsewhere.