Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  Owen coined a term for the unattached young women he would meet: lady birds. Visiting Marc Quilling at Lafayette College, they made the rounds, stopping at parties in various student houses off campus. Owen wanted to stop at any house where he heard noises indicating celebration. If Marc demurred, saying he didn’t know the inhabitants, Owen ignored him, striding confidently up to the door and knocking.

  “Who are you?” questioned the party’s host as he opened the door to find Owen, an imposing figure with his red hair, and Marc, still standing down on the sidewalk.

  “We’re here to party,” Owen would announce, inviting himself in. It often worked.

  On another visit, when the guys were hitting the bars in the College Hill neighborhood surrounding Lafayette, Owen took Marc aside after dancing with a girl. “He said, ‘I think this lady bird over here is digging me,’” Marc said, grinning at the memory.

  In no time, Owen became the chief party animal at Baltimore Avenue. Another raucous New Year’s Eve bash ushered in 2010. “In January, he was almost on top of the world, going out all the time, seeing girls,” recalled Dave Macknet. Although always one for a good time, Owen’s partying had reached a new level, one that sometimes bordered on recklessness. In hindsight, the tendency of depressed individuals to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs seems likely. But at the time, he appeared to be a typical college student having too good of a time.

  Penn State, which Owen’s close friend Kristen Dota attended, was a favorite stop in the 2009–2010 year. One trip was to the annual celebration dubbed State Patty’s Day. Started in 2007 as an alternative way for Penn State students to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day when the holiday fell during spring break, the event had become an annual day of drunken revelry in the streets of State College, Pennsylvania. In 2010, it was observed on Saturday, February 27, and would result in 160 arrests.

  Owen and his roommates set out early from Philadelphia to join the fun in the place dubbed Happy Valley. It was a snowy day and Justin Cosgrove—not the best driver—was behind the wheel with Owen, Luke DeLuca, and Adam Triglia on board. En route, the car did a 360-degree turn on an icy road and ended up in a ditch. The inhabitants of the car were terrified. Owen was the first to speak: “All right, let’s get out of here.” With some careful maneuvering in the four-wheel drive vehicle, they were soon on their way.

  Once in State College, the four-man contingent from Penn would join several of Owen’s high school friends who were in town for the party. Marc Quilling had come from Lafayette. Even Jamie Pagliaro made the trip from William & Mary, more than three hundred miles away in Virginia. Drinking started on arrival and continued throughout the day. With the help of cell phones, it was easy to track down a buddy amid the hordes that had descended on the town.

  Jamie answered his phone to hear Owen’s voice: “Where are you?”

  Jamie gave him the name of the street where he had paused to take the call and Owen responded, “No you’re not, because that’s where I am.”

  “And I turned around and there was Owen standing there talking to me,” Jamie said.

  The most unforgettable event happened late in the day. Recorded in a video on Marc Quilling’s cell phone, Owen is in the emergency room, his gaze slightly unfocused. A nurse, barely visible on camera, is urging him to say the alphabet backward. Marc’s voice, off camera, urges him on. “Come on, Owen.” The nurse reaches out to bat Marc’s hand away when she realizes that he’s taking a video of his friend. Unfazed, he continues recording.

  A very drunk Owen had landed in the emergency room—one of 103 State Patty’s Day revelers who would end up there that day—after falling and hitting his head on the edge of a table. Upon Owen’s arrival at Mount Nittany Medical Center, the nurse who admitted him asked if he’d been drinking. Owen, polite even when inebriated, responded, “Yes, ma’am. All day.” The response became a favorite among his friends, repeated over and over again.

  Still photos took up where the video ended, a chronicle of Owen’s treatment also saved on Marc’s phone. One shows Owen with gauze wrapped around his head. A second is a close-up of the gash on the crown of his head, mended with surgical staples, seen between the spikes of his short red hair. The third is a shot of Owen posing with a guy who has blood visible around his right ear, holding up a bag filled with ice. The guy had lost part of his ear in a bar fight—a feat worthy of a photo, Owen insisted.

  At some point, the photos ended up on Facebook, reflecting the kind of drunken behavior typical of twenty-something guys. But some of Owen’s female friends asked Marc to take it down—among them Emily Toth DeLuca and the Benner twins. “That’s not Owen,” they would say.

  In the weeks that followed that late February weekend, more than one woman who knew Owen well would take up the refrain. “That’s not Owen.” Women who knew him sensed that something was not quite right with their friend in the first months of 2010. One was Jamie Berkowitz, Owen’s first high school girlfriend, who had dated him before his relationship with Abbie. Jamie had gone to college at West Chester University, not far from Philadelphia. It was another stop on the party trail for Owen that spring, and Jamie remembered the visit, the details becoming more significant to her in hindsight.

  Watching Owen at the party, something seemed amiss. Concerned, she pulled aside Marc Quilling, who had accompanied him.

  “There’s something wrong with Owen,” Jamie said.

  “Nah, he’s just Owen being Owen,” Marc said, shrugging off her concern to rejoin the fun.

  His answer did nothing to alleviate her concern.

  “I thought that I was crazy for thinking what I was thinking,” Jamie recalled. “But when I looked in his eyes, I saw a complete blankness when he was waiting to speak. It was almost like you could see his brain trying to process everything around him.”

  Jamie also noted that he was more aggressively hitting on women in social settings. “And it wasn’t in his cute, sincere Owen way. It was almost a prerogative. Like he was obligated. It got to the point where he’d overstep and get annoying.” Before the weekend was over, Owen came pounding on her door, demanding a place to sleep, and displaying an aggression that seemed unlike the boy she’d known. She couldn’t get the phrase out of her head: Owen’s not Owen. Something’s wrong with Owen. The women were seeing a pattern similar to what the wives of former NFL players who were later found to have CTE would report over the years: impulsive, out-of-character actions on the part of someone they thought they knew.

  As winter ended and spring made its slow, green entrance, the weeks creeping toward April, Owen’s teammates started to note the anxiety in their friend. The Penn Face was slipping. Wharton students were lining up prestigious internships for the summer between their junior and senior years. Owen was having no luck. He paid a visit to Adam Grant, the popular professor who’d noted Owen’s exceptional ability just six months before. Grant asked Owen questions about the kinds of organizations he was interested in interning with, told him he’d be happy to make some introductions, and asked him to send him the latest copy of his resume. “You know, he never followed up, and so I just kind of assumed that he had found something,” Grant said.

  It was on the heels of the 2008 recession, and millennials like Owen were keenly aware that the job opportunities and financial security that were a given to previous generations could well elude them.

  Owen’s mother commiserated with her son. She was between ministerial jobs, so she knew what it was like to be coming up short when looking for a position. And she offered him advice. “I talked to him on the phone once, I think it was in February,” Kathy said. “And he said he was really struggling, and I said, ‘Owen, you have to realize, you have such high standards, you give 150 percent. You don’t have to give 150 percent. There are people who get by, who give 80 percent. Can you try and get that into perspective?’”

  With the start of spring football, Jake Peterson found Owen had changed. “I remember looking back at our conversations. They star
ted to get tough. He was kind of frustrated. And feeling overwhelmed with things. He wasn’t playing like he usually did. He started making a lot of mistakes,” Peterson said. “One of the hard things for me was seeing it was happening.”

  Owen’s conversations had a consistent theme: he was falling short. One day Daniel Lipschutz found himself having lunch alone with Owen. It was rare, Daniel said, because the upperclassmen on the football team usually traveled in packs.

  “I remembered him being very stressed out about school. In Wharton, it was a very intense on-campus recruitment period. The students would all wear suits and would be networking. For a lot of guys on the football team that was especially stressful; they already had a packed schedule,” Daniel said. “Our whole conversation was a combination of how that was going and how he was doing in his classes. For someone who was usually vibrant, he seemed worn down by school. He was not feeling very good about himself. I was surprised he lacked confidence.”

  In early April, some of Owen’s high school friends stopped to visit him on their way home to the Lehigh Valley for the Easter holiday weekend. The next day, on their way out of Philadelphia, they noted that something seemed wrong. Owen was not himself. Thinking back on the visit left them feeling uneasy. One of them brushed it off, thinking the change might be due to the imminent start of finals. Another noted that they had arrived late the night before. Maybe Owen was tired.

  What those friends had been sensing was becoming clear to his roommates. “He was in a dark place. He really withdrew from everybody. He wouldn’t do activities he normally would do with us. He was talking more about his concern about grades and how he was failing classes. . . . He wasn’t sleeping as much,” said Dave Macknet. He and some of the others went to the football coaching staff and expressed their concerns.

  As the end of the semester neared, his roommates also noticed something that they, too, would be haunted by later. Owen entered the room with some very pronounced marks on his neck that looked like rug burns. When they questioned him, Dave recalled, “He told us he cut himself shaving.”

  April 26, a gray and rainy day, matched the mood of students at the University of Pennsylvania. Temperatures hovered in the fifties, chilly with no hint of spring to lighten their mood as they prepared for exams the following week. The next day would be the last day of classes for the spring 2010 term. The young men living on Baltimore Avenue spent most of their free time in the library, avoiding the distractions of partying or playing video games together.

  Looking back, Owen’s friends wondered if he had chosen a time when the house would be empty. No one remembered seeing him at lunch. But when they found him, it looked as if he had been impulsive. His computer was on. His wallet was on the desk. There was no note. His phone was still in his pocket when he attached a football belt to the top molding of his closet door, put it around his neck and hung himself.

  The medical examiner’s report states that the call for an ambulance went out at 1:59 p.m.,4 shortly after Justin Cosgrove had returned to the house. On the second floor at the end of the hall, just a few steps away from his room, he noticed Owen’s door was open a crack and went to say hello. Inside he saw Owen hanging. A surge of adrenaline kicked him into action. He used a pair of scissors on the desk to cut Owen down, placed a frenzied call to 911 and began performing CPR. Owen wasn’t responding.

  When the ambulance arrived at the trauma bay at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania at 2:28 p.m., Owen’s pupils were fixed and dilated and he was without a pulse. Adrenaline administered en route had no effect. Hospital staff continued to attempt to resuscitate him for ten more minutes, administering more drugs and continuing chest compressions. He was pronounced dead at 2:38 p.m.5

  By that point, many were waiting for news. Friends would always remember where they were when they learned he had taken his life.

  Luke DeLuca was at Van Pelt Library, where he had retreated from his roommates so he could get work done. He saw the call from Adam Triglia pop up on his phone and briefly considered ignoring it; he had a test the next day.

  “You’ve got to come home,” Adam said.

  “No way, man, I’ve got a lot of stuff to do,” Luke answered, puzzled by the urgency in his roommate’s voice.

  “Owen tried to kill himself,” Adam said. Luke scrambled to pack up his books and notes and sprinted nearly a mile to their house. He expected to find his other roommates talking to Owen, calming him after averting a tragedy. But by the time he arrived, so had the police and the ambulance. Quickly, Coach Jim Schaefer, Owen’s line coach, and others from the Penn coaching staff, somehow alerted, had run from the stadium to the house. After the ambulance sped away, Owen’s friends went to the police station to make statements, and await word.

  Abbie Benner and her twin, Jess, who shared an off-campus apartment, also were heading into finals at Millersville University, more than an hour from Penn. Abbie felt nauseous. “I went to class and I called Jess and I said, ‘I feel like my throat is really tight. I feel like I have to throw up, but I can’t,’” Abbie said. She went back to her apartment.

  Jess got a call from Mike Fay. He shared the news; Owen had attempted suicide. That was how all of the friends he had loved, now living in so many places, would first hear. That he had tried to kill himself. Fate, it appeared, was giving them a few hours to get used to the idea before they would have to process the unthinkable.

  “We didn’t even know he was dead,” Jess said.

  In the age of cell phones, so many friends were connected in so many places. The news spread quickly. A Parkland High graduate who was dating a Penn football player called friends in their close-knit circle.

  Marc Quilling was among those she contacted. “I was hysterical,” Marc said, using a word not many young men in their twenties would easily use to describe their emotions. “One of my roommates knocked on my door to see if I was OK.” He called his mother to come and take him home. But first he got in touch with some of the former Trojans.

  Jamie Pagliaro at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, also received a call. A deeply shaken Jamie immediately prepared to drive home to Pennsylvania.

  “I was about to get in my car. My buddy took my keys and said, ‘You’re not going,’” Pags said. He called the Tribe’s offensive line coach, Bob Solderitch, a fellow Pennsylvanian who’d attended Parkland’s rival, Whitehall High. “He rushed over to my house. His friend had done the same thing—killed himself. So he sat me down and talked to me. That was actually what helped me the most: my ‘O’ coach talking to me.”

  Solderitch insisted, “You can’t drive. It’s a six-hour drive.” Jamie’s roommates stepped in. Despite the fact that finals were beginning, they drove him to Washington, DC, where his father and grandfather met them to take Jamie the rest of the way back to Schnecksville.

  Members of the Penn football team were summoned to a special team meeting. Gathered in a dim room in the Towne Building across from Franklin Field, the players learned that the man they had unanimously elected team captain just a week before was dead. After the announcement, they sat together, the sound of young men weeping filling the room.

  The principal called Ryan Hulmes to the office at Parkland High School. He had some bad news about Owen Thomas. Hulmes would be the one to tell head coach Jim Morgans. Before the day was over, Marc Quilling showed up in the high school weight room, Hulmes said. “Quilling knew. You could see it in his eyes,” Hulmes recalled. “He just wanted to be up here with us.” The relationships in the weight room had been built on the love of a game and a brotherhood that surpassed the win-loss record. Now it was being reinforced by a shared loss that no one could fathom.

  The next day, they told the Parkland football team. Most of the upperclassmen had been freshmen when Owen was a senior. He was their larger-than-life hero, a big brother and the player they had admired and tried to emulate.

  “I broke it to the team,” Hulmes said. “It wasn’t the days of texting and Twitter and a
ll that jazz yet. Some knew, most didn’t. I’d say 90 percent didn’t. Michael Zaccaro, God bless the kid, he was the spiritual leader. He asked if he could lead us in prayer. And he did. We stayed down there for two periods, kind of leaning on each other. The kids were more there for us than we were there for them. I had a lot of kids after that, checking on me, emailing me, saying, ‘I know you’re going through a rough time.’”

  That day, more of Owen’s former Parkland teammates—his oldest friends—would join Marc Quilling in visiting their former coaches. “I think one of the most heartbreaking things was when I saw Coach Hulmes’s face,” said Jamie. “I remember when we all got together that day, before we went over to the Thomases’ house to see Mrs. Thomas and Mr. Thomas and Morgan. We all went over to the weight room to see Coach Morgans and all them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Coach Hulmes show any emotion except angry or happy. And he just broke down when he came and saw us.”

  Tom Thomas was in his office at Union United Church of Christ. His window looked out on part of the cemetery where generations of congregants are buried. Mondays were normally slow days, coming after a Sunday when he led two services. Tom doesn’t remember how he first heard Owen was in the hospital, but he received the news before he got an official call from Penn.

  “Mike Fay must have talked to somebody. Or somebody saw Mike Fay’s Facebook or something. I learned Owen was in the hospital. I don’t remember exactly how I got it.” Tom speaks quietly, in measured tones. His training in pastoral counseling, his experience walking so many others through such moments, helps him to keep his emotions in check. “My first reaction was to call his position coach, Coach Schaefer. I had the coach’s cell phone, so I called, and I didn’t hear anything.”

  Tom first thought that Owen—as much of a daredevil on his bicycle as he was on the football field—might have had an accident riding on the Philadelphia streets. Then the university chaplain called with news that his youngest son had hung himself.