Most men here stay to themselves, moving quietly from machine to machine, sporting essential earbuds and serious scowls. I watch this same scene again and again while pedaling on a stationary bike near the entrance. My view is limited to a few overhead TV screens, too many mirrors and a chiseled parade of young gym members who look similar to me.

I don’t recall seeing Andrade when I’ve been there, but the face of Varun Raj Pucha looked familiar when I saw photos of him in news stories late last month. On Oct. 29, the 29-year-old Valparaiso University grad student was stabbed in the right temple while sitting in a massage chair.

The attack stunned gym members, the local community and the VU campus. It took place in a room located just off the main entryway, near where I bike every time I’m there.

Andrade, 24, is the gym member who stabbed Pucha with a knife that Andrade had used regularly to open boxes at work, police said.

At Planet Fitness, a large message on the wall amplifies the company’s motto: no critics.

Another wall sign states, “you belong!” Although I’m typically one of the oldest members there on any given day, I’ve always felt I belonged, not overly intimidated by the younger, more virile members.

On Wednesday, I returned to the gym to write this column while once again pedaling to nowhere. My workout, though, was different. I caught myself looking around the gym with a sharper eye at other members, especially the young men who bounce from equipment to equipment.

I wondered how many times Andrade and Pucha likely walked past me during my previous visits. I may have nodded to them, as guys do. They may have nodded back. Neither of them will ever pass by me again. Pucha died Tuesday and will be remembered at a Nov. 16 service on the VU campus. Andrade is currently at Porter County Jail, charged with murder and awaiting his next court date in January.

We may never know why Andrade decided to plunge a folding knife into Pucha’s head. Why Pucha? Why that day? Why in that way? A motive for the unprovoked attack is still unclear.

“I believe he said he was going to assassinate me,” Andrade reportedly told police after the attack.

If this is true, it illustrates what Andrade’s defense counsel stated in a court document, saying he had previously been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions. Serious, indeed.

Our country seems to have a mental illness problem about the pervasiveness of mental illness. We’re delusional that it’s a reality. But if you look around with a sharper eye, you will see example after example of people struggling with their mental health and mental illness. On the streets. In the workplace. Inside the prisons. And now, allegedly, at my local gym.

Mental illness is so pervasive that it has become invisible to most of us. We know it exists. We look away, telling ourselves that’s it’s someone else’s problem. Or we politicize it by lumping it into the polarizing debate on gun control.

If a gun, not a knife, was used in the Oct. 29 attack at Planet Fitness, the mental illness aspect of this killing would again be overshadowed by politics. Gun rights supporters are pointing to the murder weapon in this case and clamoring, “See, it wasn’t a gun!” And they’re right. But it doesn’t mean that our country’s gun violence crisis is strictly a mental health problem.

The two crises are connected like a finger on a trigger.

As the new murder charge was read to Andrade at his court hearing Wednesday, he took a couple of deep breaths, according to a Times story. Our country needs to take a couple of deep breaths before instinctively pointing fingers of blame and returning to our political foxholes.

Unlike forensic autopsies on bodies, which typically pinpoint a cause of death, an “autopsy of explanation” cannot always pinpoint a logical or understandable connection between what took place and why it happened. It’s usually an incomplete report, and we have to learn to live with it that way. This is what may play out with Pucha’s senseless death.

Andrade told police that he found Pucha to appear “a little weird,” leading to the attack. I can pick out a handful of guys at my gym, or any gym, on any given day who look a little weird. This was the same description told to me by a woman named Angella Meeks about her 34-year-old brother, Eric.

In 2016, he shot and killed both of his parents in the family’s Merrillville home before taking his own life. Something snapped in Eric’s head, his sister told me while sitting just a couple of feet away from where her brother shot and killed their mother.

Angella invited me into her family’s home to share her grief, her guilt and her concerns about the stigma of mental illness in our society. Eric was diagnosed with schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder that tormented his brilliant mind, his sister said.

“But we never talked about Eric’s mental illness. We never once had a family conversation about it,” Angella told me. “My parents were in denial about it. They felt ashamed about it.”

This sounds like how many Americans feel about mental illness in our communities. We’re in denial. We’re ashamed. We’re not prepared to deal with it. Instead, we point our trigger fingers at perceived boogeymen and we blame our political enemies. It’s the definition of insanity. Nothing changes.

Five years after her brother’s attacks and suicide, Angella Meeks died after disappearing in Flint, Michigan. But her public plea about the sensitive topic of mental health still echoes loudly in my head. And I hope it now echoes in yours, too. Whispers aren’t getting us anywhere to properly understand and address this deadly issue.