He broke the Clinton-Lynch tarmac story.
That story probably killed his career.
The excerpt pretty much tells the rest:
“Birmingham, Ala. anchor Chris Sign was found dead by first responders Saturday morning. He was 45.
Sign first worked at ABC affiliate WBMA between 2000 and 2005. He came back in 2017 as a weeknight anchor after working as a reporter and then a morning anchor at KNXV in Phoenix for almost 13 years.”
The way career progression works in media for presenters/on-camera reporters/anchors is that you start out in some backwater/podunk little market like, well, Birmingham. If you do well there, they invite you to move to a larger market in a lower level position. In this case, Phoenix. If you keep on at your career, you repeat the cycle over and over until you get to national level or you get told this is as far as the industry will let you go. The only way you go back to a smaller market once you’re an anchor (instead of staying in that or a similar size market, or going to a larger market) is by screwing up in some way or making your boss hate you. The fact that he didn’t stay in that market or get moved to a larger market (there’s perhaps one to perhaps four more ‘steps’ before getting to national level from Phoenix) may indicate that he was told that he was going to have to go back to the junior farm team affiliate because breaking that story meant that he couldn’t stay in Phoenix due to pissing off his bosses. Or their real bosses, the Democratic Party.
Realizing that your career is basically over at the age of 45 has caused no shortage of men to commit suicide.