Authors: Mark Fainaru-Wada
Seau had had a son with his childhood sweetheart and two boys and a girl with his wife, Gina, a former Chargers marketing associate whom he met as a rookie. Before they divorced in 2001, Gina watched the cult of Junior grow in San Diego—from the afternoon when he was a rookie
and a woman asked for his autograph while they were out buying milk and cookies to “four or five years down the road and we couldn’t go sit and have dinner without ten, fifteen, twenty interruptions.”
During the final years of Seau’s career, there were signs that he was changing. Without warning, one day he exploded at his oldest son, Tyler, to the point where the two had to be separated by Junior’s friends. “It never got completely physical, but it was close,” Tyler said. “I’ve never really seen him that angry before.” Seau played his last down with New England in 2009. By the time he returned to Oceanside, where he had bought a $3.2 million home in 2005, the people closest to him could tell he wasn’t right. He seemed totally unprepared for the transition out of football, which was difficult for all players but especially for one who had played almost continuously since his teens. Seau was 40. He had earned over $50 million. But his world quickly began to collapse, financially and spiritually.
Seau was drinking heavily, according to his friends and family. Hoffman was unable to get him to focus on his restaurants or the foundation, a change she had noticed as far back as 2003, after Seau left the Chargers to play in Miami. Now, when Seau made presentations to potential donors, he rambled and lost his train of thought. He had volcanic eruptions of anger, particularly when he drank. His memory seemed to be fading. One day, his son Jake, a star lacrosse player, had a big game in Torrey Pines. Seau’s daughter, Sydney, called repeatedly to remind him to be there, including on the morning of the game. “I text him 20 minutes beforehand and I’m like, ‘Where are you? They’re warming up,’ ” she recalled. “And he’s like, ‘What are you talking about? I thought that’s tomorrow.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I called you this morning. We talked about this. You need to be here. Get here now.’ ”
As Seau’s problems grew worse, he withdrew from his family and close friends, going months without seeing his kids. Hoffman became alarmed by his growing gambling addiction, which cost him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. “It just became more and more serious,” said Hoffman, who had control of Seau’s finances. Seau would call her from Las Vegas, sometimes frantic, asking her to wire huge amounts of money to keep him going.
On October 17, 2010, Seau was arrested on charges that he had assaulted his live-in girlfriend, Mary Nolan. She told officers that Seau had “grabbed her by the arm and shoved her into the wall/dresser in their bedroom.” Seau was released on $25,000 bail, Nolan never filed a complaint, and the case was dropped. But Seau was inconsolable. The morning after the incident, a few hours after he left jail, Seau was driving up the coast when he ran his Cadillac Escalade off a cliff. The SUV careened down a 100-foot slope and settled in the sand near the water. When Gina learned about the accident, she grabbed the kids and drove to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where Seau had been taken in an ambulance with, remarkably, minor injuries.
Seau was still in the emergency room when his family arrived. “He just looked so broken, and I mean not just physically,” said Gina, who stayed close with her ex-husband. “His eyes: He just looked so sad and so defeated, this big guy that barely fits on the bed.”
Seau insisted that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, that the accident wasn’t a suicide attempt. At the time, Gina believed him. Still, she told him it was an opportunity to turn his life around.
“You’ve got another chance in life,” she said. “You’re very blessed. You lived to see another day. What are you gonna do? You have so much to live for. Our kids are progressing so beautifully. You’d be so proud of them. Get in the game.”
“You’re right, G,” said Seau. “You’re right.”
But soon he disappeared again; Gina and the kids found out from
TMZ
that Seau was back in Vegas just a few weeks after the incident. In January 2011, Bette Hoffman quit as the head of the Junior Seau Foundation. “I was just done; I’d had so much, you know, trying to protect him and cover for him,” she said. “I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ I mean, I couldn’t help him. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, Mom,” Seau said when Hoffman told him she was quitting. He called her repeatedly, begging her to change her mind. Instead, Hoffman changed her phone number.
Seau’s daughter, Sydney, decided to stage a one-girl intervention. Sydney was a high school senior, a promising volleyball player with wavy brown curls and her father’s charisma and megawatt smile. She was every bit a daddy’s girl; she worshiped her father and wanted to
be around him as much as possible: “He was just a light, that’s how I’d describe him,” she said. That year, Seau had missed most of Sydney’s senior season. She had written an English paper about the void her father had left in her life, and it emboldened her to confront him. “I drove over to his house, and I just told him everything,” she said. “How I wasn’t gonna take a backseat anymore because I was sick of waiting. It hurt me to have to pull so much. It was just hard because I wanted him to want me more than anything. And my whole life was to make him proud and to make him want to see me.
“He just looked in a straight line and cried and didn’t hug me, didn’t say a word. He just sat on the couch. And that’s what really bothered me. How can I express all of this emotion and you just cry and not even want to console me? Like, that’s not normal. He just told me that he had never really, truly felt love. And I was like, ‘What does that mean?’ But it didn’t change. He was still really distant.”
Sydney decided to attend USC, her father’s alma mater, “because that’s his second home and I could share that with him.” In March 2012, she, Seau, and Gina drove up to Los Angeles for spring orientation. It was the kind of moment Sydney had yearned for. Her parents had been divorced for 10 years, but they all went to dinner together at the Palm before attending a Lakers game. “He was being such a tease and a flirt, and the waitress came by,” said Gina. “She goes, ‘Oh, you guys are such a cute family.’ I was about to say, ‘We’re not married.’ And he said, ‘Meet my future wife. This is Gina.’ ”
“Dad!” exclaimed Sydney, laughing.
Five weeks later, Seau shot himself in the chest with a .357 Magnum revolver.
Unlike Duerson, Seau hadn’t left instructions for what to do with his brain, and so it was never known if he shot himself in the chest to preserve it. His girlfriend, Megan Noderer, found him on a queen-sized bed in an upstairs guest room after returning from the gym that morning. After calling 911, Noderer pulled Seau to the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to administer CPR.
When police arrived, the bed was strewn with bloodstained pillows and sheets, a gray stocking cap, and the gun, which lay on its left side with five bullets in the chamber and
one spent round near the headboard. Seau’s cell phone also was on the bed, the SIM card removed, a fact that was never explained.
Seau was
placed on a gurney in a body bag and brought down to the garage. Outside, some 400 people had gathered: neighbors, Chargers fans, news crews, Seau’s extended Samoan family. Inside the sweltering house, Seau’s closest relatives and friends milled around in shock amid his trophies, signed helmets, and game photos. In the late morning, the family decided to open the garage for a spontaneous public viewing. Seau lay on his back, the body bag zipped up to his neck, his head exposed. Hoffman bent over and kissed him. “Good-bye, Junior, I love you,” she said. “He just looked like he was asleep on the couch,” said Hoffman, sobbing at the memory. “He didn’t even look like he was dead. I had to wake him up so many times from a nap, and that’s how I said good-bye to him.” For nearly an hour, the tearful crowd filed past.
That afternoon, Tyler, Seau’s 23-year-old son, was still at the house when his phone rang.
It was Omalu and Bailes, asking for his dad’s brain.
If the two doctors were concerned about the unfortunate timing—just a few hours after Seau was carted out of the garage—the feeling was superseded by the urgency they felt. Within a day, Seau’s body would be autopsied; without preparation, his brain might be buried with him or destroyed. More immediately, there was also the competition: Omalu and Bailes knew that Nowinski and the BU Group would soon make a big push, if they hadn’t already, presumably backed by the NFL. They felt they had to move now.
Bailes, Omalu, and Tyler Seau would remember the call differently. Omalu said: “We introduced ourselves, explained what we were doing, about CTE, that we would like him to grant us consent to examine his father’s brain.” He described Tyler as “very polite” and receptive during the brief call.
But Tyler said he immediately felt pressured by Omalu. “He was very pushy, and he really wanted me to make a decision that night. He pretty much said that we have to do it now because if it’s not done the right way, we could lose a lot of the tissue and things like that.” Tyler already was under unthinkable pressure; with his father’s death, he had become responsible for a host of family decisions. Quiet and thoughtful,
four inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter than his dad, Tyler had played linebacker at Palomar Community College in San Diego and Delta State University, a Division II school in Cleveland, Mississippi. Now he was working in Seau’s restaurant.
During the call with Omalu and Bailes, Tyler agreed to donate his father’s brain to their group.
Omalu initiated the paperwork that would allow him to harvest Seau’s brain. He faxed a consent form to Tyler, who initially indicated that he was prepared to sign.
At 8:38 that night, Tyler wrote in an e-mail to Omalu: “my guy is on his way here right now so I can sign it and fax it back to you.” An hour later he wrote again, asking Omalu to contact David Chao, the San Diego
Chargers’ doctor, to “cross our Ts and dot our Is before proceeding.”
Junior Seau and Chao were close. Tyler said Chao had continued as his dad’s personal physician after Seau left the Chargers. Tyler was growing wary about his decision, and he felt Chao was the logical person to help him sort out what to do. But
Chao had his own issues. The day after Seau shot himself, the orthopedic surgeon appeared before the Medical Board of California to respond to allegations that he committed acts of “dishonesty or corruption” by failing to report a 2006 drunk driving conviction on an application to evaluate workers’ compensation cases. Later that year, the board moved to revoke Chao’s medical license over three separate malpractice claims. (DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association, would take the unusual step of calling for Chao to be replaced as the Chargers’ doctor. A panel of independent physicians created under the league’s collective bargaining agreement ultimately exonerated Chao. Soon after, Chao resigned his position with the Chargers, citing health and family reasons.)
Now, at Tyler’s request, Chao became the point person for what would happen to Seau’s brain. The night of Seau’s death, Chao called Omalu and berated him, according to Omalu. “That was one of the most arrogant phone calls I’ve ever been involved with in my life,” said Omalu. “This guy was yelling, was extremely arrogant, pretty much questioning who I was.” After the contentious call, Omalu e-mailed his credentials and samples of his research to Chao. He was convinced he
still had “verbal consent” from Tyler to take Seau’s brain. He booked a flight from San Francisco to San Diego to do just that.
By then,
at least a half dozen prominent researchers were making a play for Seau’s brain. The deputy medical examiner, Craig Nelson, returned from Seau’s home to find a sheaf of messages stacked up at the office. “It felt sometimes to me like buzzards were circling,” Nelson said. “I have a scientific mind and a medical background, but when someone has just died, things are very fresh. Imagine that your parent dies and then hours later somebody is calling you and saying, ‘Hey, would you consider donating this for research?’ It can sit a little odd, and when it’s such an unexpected death, it makes it harder.”
Nelson’s buzzards included a Nobel laureate brain researcher, Stanley Prusiner, director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California, San Francisco. Prusiner, a 70-year-old scientist with a cloud of white hair, won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of prions, a class of infectious proteins behind brain disorders such as mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Prusiner’s specific interest in CTE wasn’t clear, but he launched a tag-team effort with Omalu to bid for Seau’s brain. Within hours of Seau’s death,
Prusiner placed calls to the medical examiner’s office to try to arrange a meeting with Seau’s family. He had his assistant call and e-mail Tyler Seau.
Omalu and Prusiner egged each other on. “Please it is vital you get to the Seau family,” Omalu wrote Prusiner in an e-mail the day after Seau’s suicide. “I think they will give you/us the brain if you directly speak to them and play the nobel price [
sic
] card :)”
Prusiner responded by e-mail 12 minutes later that he was planning to fly to San Diego to meet with the Seau family.
But BU was launching its own offensive. At 5:55
A.M.
(2:55 California time), the morning after Seau killed himself, popular
Sports Illustrated
football writer Peter King issued a supportive tweet for the BU Group to his more than 1 million followers: “Dedicated researchers in Boston studying deceased players’ brains for evidence of trauma attempting to obtain Junior Seau’s. Hope they do.” King thought the tweet was harmless, but it quickly morphed into a national news story that was picked up by NFL.com, ESPN.com, and other websites. Seau’s
family was outraged by what they perceived as more tactless pressure. Nowinski and others scrambled to contain the damage. They urged King to “retract” the tweet and apologize to Seau’s family. Nowinski later claimed that King had based the tweet on his own assumption that BU would chase after Seau’s brain. But King said, in fact, he had confirmed BU’s interest. King refused to apologize or make a retraction. “
I empathize with them and know how badly they wanted to see Seau’s brain,” he said. “I was sorry it put them in an awkward situation, because I believe in what they do.”