Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Over the course of several months, parts of Derek’s brain were occasionally pulled from the refrigerator. Pieces were delicately shaved thin enough to fit onto glass slides and slipped under the lenses of powerful microscopes. McKee and her team of assistants spent hundreds of hours dissecting Derek’s brain, examining every thin strip, looking for tiny clues.

  Like everyone else, they wanted to figure out what had happened to him.

  THE FUNERAL WAS held in Regina on Saturday, May 21, inside the small chapel at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Depot Division. It was the same chapel where Len and Joanne were married almost 29 years earlier. The chapel was a simple, barn-like building of whitewashed wood, with a thick, two-story steeple and a gabled red roof. Built in 1883, it was originally the Depot’s mess hall, and was converted into a place of worship 12 years later. It faced north onto Sleigh Square, a paved space cordoned off from civilians and used for the daily parade of cadets. Len Boogaard marched there, under the watchful eyes of relentless, unforgiving instructors countless times, 30 years earlier. Ryan Boogaard had done the same, just a couple of years before. Derek knew the place well.

  Len, Krysten, and Joanne Boogaard at Derek’s funeral.

  Through the rounded, wooden doors was a rich, warm chapel with red carpet and a dozen rows of pews, divided by an aisle, enough to hold about 200. Stained-glass depictions of Mounties, in full red-coated regalia, filtered prisms of daylight from either side of the altar. One showed a Mountie with a bugle. The accompanying inscription, from I Corinthians 15:52, read, “For the trumpet shall sound.” The other showed a Mountie, head bowed and hand on the butt of a musket. “Blessed are they that mourn,” it read, quoting Matthew 5:4.

  The chapel could not hold everyone who came for Derek’s funeral. It was Tobin Wright’s assignment to bring close friends and family into the chapel and direct others to a nearby theater-style auditorium, where the service would be shown on closed-circuit television.

  The bulletin handed to mourners showed a full-color portrait of Derek in his Wild jersey. His back was turned partly toward the camera, showing his nameplate and number, and he looked over his shoulder with little expression. On his right hand was a hockey glove.

  The back page, with a photograph of Derek smiling in his Wild uniform, contained the obituary.

  “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our teddy bear and protector Derek Leendert Boogaard,” it began. It cited the relatives and listed all the family moves as a child. It mentioned Todd Ripplinger, the Regina Pats scout. It skimmed over Derek’s years in minor hockey and minor leagues and into the NHL.

  “Minneapolis was a home away from home for Derek where he made many great friends,” it read. “Derek was well loved and a fan favourite for many, making the decision to leave Minnesota a hard one. For the 2010–11 season, he moved to the ‘big apple’ to play with the New York Rangers. Derek was a strong person who battled many adversities to achieve his dreams. He was a hero to some and a role model to many more. Derek was a larger than life gentle giant that cared for everyone around him providing inspiration as a genuine son, brother, friend and teammate.”

  It closed by requesting that donations be made to the Boogaard’s Booguardians Memorial Fund benefiting Defending the Blue Line, “an organization that supports military families and also donates hockey equipment to children.”

  Inside the program was a photograph of Derek as a toddler, holding a stuffed bear larger than him. There were several poems. There was also an insert, added at the last moment, with the words from “Amazing Grace.” At an impromptu gathering at the Xcel Energy Arena after Derek’s death, the atrium filled with fans who had come to pay respect to a former player and the family left behind, those in attendance broke into song: “Amazing Grace.”

  The Boogaard family entered last and sat in the front two rows on the right side, Len on one end of the first pew and Joanne on the other. Immediately in front of them were large floral arrangements and, on easels, photographs of Derek. Derek’s Wild and Rangers jerseys lay folded on a small table, each covering a small box.

  Doug Risebrough, the Wild general manager who had drafted Derek, was at the funeral. So was Jacques Lemaire, the longtime Wild coach, and representatives from some of the Western Hockey League teams. Several NHL teammates were there, mostly in dark suits and sunglasses. Marian Gaborik and Brent Burns, who had been in Slovakia with Tobin Wright when they heard the news, were among them.

  Janella came. A week earlier, she had been behind the bar at the Rock Rest Lodge in Golden, Colorado, where she worked while attending classes to secure a biology degree from Metropolitan State College in Denver. She did a double take when she saw Derek’s picture on the televisions around her. The screen also showed years—1982–2011—as they do to delicately indicate someone’s death. To Janella, the meaning did not register for a moment. She gasped. Customers asked if she was all right.

  She had not spoken to Derek for several years, since filing for a divorce from their common-law marriage and receiving a $35,000 settlement in 2008 that infuriated Derek’s family. Janella had wanted to ensure that she was free of any complications from their time and tax filings together, but the Boogaards thought it was a ploy for money. Joanne Boogaard sent an e-mail to Janella during the divorce, questioning her motives. Derek, too, sent an angry letter. Janella did not respond to either, on the advice of her attorney. But she sent Derek two text messages after the settlement. One was a promise to pay him back the $35,000. The second told Derek that she loved him, and always would. He never replied.

  Every few months, including the weeks before his death, she resisted the temptation to contact him. Someday, she thought. But now her heart was filled with anguish and regret, and the recesses of her subconscious were filled with dreams about Derek that startled her awake in the middle of the night.

  She arrived in Regina unsure of how she would be received. Aaron, Ryan, and Krysten gave her hugs. But when she tried to step into the chapel, Wright stopped her. They had known each other since the beginning, having arrived in Derek’s life almost simultaneously nearly a decade before. When Derek had first written down Janella’s phone number, he’d done it on the same piece of scrap paper on which he’d also written Wright’s number.

  Only family and close friends, Wright told Janella. Len and Jody Boogaard stood nearby. They stepped over and gave Janella hugs and directed her inside.

  Erin came to Regina, too. Aaron had called her.

  “You’re not going to hear it from Mom or Dad,” he said he told her. “You’re not going to hear it from anybody. This is about Derek, and I think it would be best if you were there. It’s for Derek. Derek would like you to be there.”

  Derek had texted Erin the day before he died. He had told her it had been good to see her, and she told him to have a good time in California. I always do, he replied.

  Then, two mornings later, her phone filled with messages and missed calls. A text message from a friend told her that Derek was dead. It was a shock, if not a complete surprise.

  “The addiction got the best of him, and the loneliness—not feeling like he had that companionship to make it better or make it right or push through it,” she said months after Derek died. “The pills were his outlet. That’s what made him feel better. He never really showed me a struggle, because he never admitted he had an issue. I never saw a desire in him to make it go away. And by the time things got really bad, I wasn’t involved anymore. From hearsay, hearing that the night he died he was saying, ‘I don’t want to be alone, I’m going to be alone the rest of my life,’ that hurts to hear something like that. I knew that about him. It seemed like it would be so simple to make that right for him.”

  Erin did not receive the same reception that Janella did from the Boogaard family. She knew many people there, including Derek’s NHL teammates, but was directed to watch the funeral on the television in the auditorium.

  THERE WERE FOUR eulogists, and they struck common
themes: Derek was a teddy bear of a man who drew people close and then hung tight. He was selfless, quick to donate time and money to friends and charity. He was tireless in his pursuit of his dreams. He was funny and sincere and never wanted to be left alone.

  Jeremy Clark tearfully explained that he never intended to become friends with Derek when he arrived as a client at the gym.

  “It wasn’t long until the size of his love for life and fun overtook the size of his fists,” Clark told the congregation. “I never met someone who got more excitement and pleasure from the simple things in life than Derek. That may explain the array of remote-control helicopters, compound bows, gun-cleaning kits, candles, Buddhas, folding knives, camouflage outfits, camping gear, and so on that line my garage. I would shake my head when the array of text messages, pictures, and phone calls would come in, pronouncing the next passion that crossed his path. I would often tell him, ‘Boogey, stop spending so much money on this stuff.’ His reply was always, ‘Clarkie, don’t worry about it. I have money now. If I go broke, I’ll just live in your basement.’ ”

  He recounted a story of how excited Derek got when he saw Clark and his wife making sandwiches for lunch. It reminded him of childhood.

  “Two weeks later, the day before I was leaving to visit Derek for a week in New York, he sent me a picture-text of a grocery cart full of bread, sandwich meats, cheese,” Clark said from the dais, “and a note telling me that we were going to make sandwiches all week for meals, just like what we had grown up on.

  “The one thing I respected most about Derek,” Clark continued, “was that off the ice, you never saw Derek parading his size, or his strength, or his status. He was about the simple things, and the people close to him, and he protected them at any cost.”

  Risebrough, the longtime Wild general manager who had since become an advisor to the Rangers, recalled Derek’s rise through the minor leagues and into the NHL. He told stories of Derek’s imposing size, including one in which Derek had a bead on Colorado defenseman John-Michael Liles. Liles ducked at the last minute, avoiding the collision.

  “He says, ‘Well, I had my head down, and I knew I was in trouble when the building got silent and it got very, very dark,’ ” Risebrough said.

  He said that Derek’s career was about getting a chance, and taking advantage of it. Over the course of 10 minutes, Risebrough never used the words “fight” or “enforcer.”

  “Derek had a way of attracting people,” he said. “He had a way of comforting people. A big man with a soft heart. On the ice, players were trying to get away from him. Off the ice, the people were trying to be around him.”

  Burns spoke next. He and Derek were teammates in the minor leagues and longtime roommates in the NHL. He joked about late-night orders of chicken wings, and the off-season in which the two of them watched the Tour de France and Derek set out to add cycling to his workout regime, surviving a severe road rash when he tumbled over the handlebars.

  “We will greatly miss his smirks, his laughs, his little jabs on and off the ice,” Burns said. “But most importantly we will miss knowing that when we need something or somebody, he was going to be there for us.”

  Tobin Wright spoke haltingly about Derek’s curiosity.

  “I just want everybody to remember the gentle giant that Derek was,” he said. “Once you got into his close circle, he was the kindest guy you could ever meet.”

  The chaplain introduced a country song called “Small Town, Big Dreams,” by Paul Brandt. After the chaplain’s eulogy, members of Derek’s family—Len and Joanne, sister Krysten, brothers Ryan and Aaron, and half-brother Curtis—shuffled to the microphone. The group circled around Aaron as he spoke quietly, reading from sheets of white paper. He was the first to discuss Derek’s role as a hockey fighter.

  “With the combination of his size, toughness, and downright meanness at times, who took offense to anyone who dared challenge him or agreed to fight him, was what made him as great as he was at his craft in hockey,” Aaron said. “When I think of a definition of a man, I continue to think of my brother. He feared no one and loved everybody.”

  He thanked the Wild and the Rangers.

  Krysten stepped forward to the microphone. She acknowledged all the sympathetic words sent to the family from fans they never met, and said that descriptions of Derek as a teddy bear were correct.

  “A teddy bear is, first and foremost, a source of comfort,” she said. “And having heard from his teammates, we know how much of a comfort Derek provided on the ice.

  “Secondly, a teddy bear is dependable. Derek was dependable to a fault. You could depend on him for anything you needed, any time. Your priority became his priority.

  “Thirdly, teddy bears are usually big, and while he would hate to admit it, cuddly. You wouldn’t think of Derek as cuddly, but there wasn’t a person alive in our lives who had more love to give, or more love to receive.

  “Lastly, teddy bears are loyal. They are a constant reminder of what is good in our lives: love, trust, friendship, and selflessness. Teddy bears give but don’t ask in return. And this is unconditional. There are no demands in return. Derek was a teddy bear and always will be our teddy bear.

  “We aren’t here to talk about Derek’s hockey career, because his hockey was just a seasonal thing for us. Just an aspect of who he was, what he did. We are here because we have lost a son, a brother, a role model and a friend.”

  The chaplain directed the family to “receive Derek.” In the silence of the chapel, the Boogaards shuffled across the altar. Len grabbed the Wild jersey and the small box it covered. Joanne picked up the Rangers jersey and another box it concealed.

  Each box contained half of Derek’s ashes. Len and Joanne turned and walked, side by side, slowly up the aisle, the same aisle they once walked as a bride and groom, full of promise and lives never imagined, and carried the remains of their dead son into the bright light.

  THE HENNEPIN COUNTY medical examiner in Minneapolis determined that Derek died of an accidental overdose, a lethal mix of alcohol and prescription painkillers.

  Derek’s blood-alcohol content was 0.18 grams per deciliter, or roughly double most legal limits for drunk driving. Tests found an oxycodone concentration of 0.14 milligrams per liter—enough to surmise that Derek took more than one pill, but probably not enough to be lethal. A Hennepin County study of postmortem cases between 2000 and 2005 involving oxycodone found that seven deaths were caused by oxycodone alone; the mean concentration was 1.06 milligrams per liter, and the lowest in the group was 0.27 milligrams per liter.

  There was no way to tell how many pills Derek took that night, but it was certainly more than one Percocet. Over the previous 20 months or so, Derek had allowed very few people to see him gobble painkillers, but he sometimes did so by the handful. Even after his shoulder surgery in April 2009, Derek required twice as many painkillers as Aaron, who had the same surgery, to ease the pain. His appetite for them was initially justified by his size. His increased consumption was explained by his growing tolerance. He needed more to feel the same effect.

  But after several weeks in rehabilitation, going through detoxification and being drug tested routinely, Derek’s tolerance for the drugs likely shrank. On the night he died, Derek might have consumed what he thought was, for him, a normal amount, not taking into account his reduced tolerance for the pills.

  The autopsy report was otherwise unremarkable, with two exceptions. It reported that Derek’s brain and brain stem were removed. And it noted heavy scars on his hands.

  Inside the apartment in the blurred, scattered minutes after Aaron’s 911 call and before the first ambulance arrived, Aaron remembered the pills. He had put them into old prescription bottles and hidden them from his brother, hoping to dispense them in small doses to dull Derek’s pain. But he knew they were illegal. And he wanted to protect Derek’s reputation.

  So Aaron grabbed two bottles—one he kept in his bathroom, one in a bag in his closet—and emptied thei
r contents into the toilet, flushing away any evidence. He later told police that it had been “10 to 15 oxys and 10 or so 30-milligram Percocet and 10 or so more 10-milligram Percocets.”

  When police investigators arrived at the apartment, Aaron and Ryan Boogaard were there, and so was Jeremy Clark, who received one of the first calls from Aaron.

  “I observed V-1 [victim] lying on his back in bed,” Minneapolis police officer Timothy Baskin wrote in his report, filled with the misspelled names of prescription medications. “V-1 had a white foam looking cone coming from his lips about ¾″ high. I observed a bottle of Prochlorperazine (10 mg tabs, quantity 12, prescribed 1-15-11 by Dr. Weissman, with 9 remaining) along with a bottle of Ambian (12.5 mg tabs, quantity 30, prescribed on 03-24-11 by Dr. Weissman). The bottle contained 7 pills found to be 50 mg of Tramadall and 11 pills found to be Vicadin 5-500 and no Ambian. This information was determined by calling the poison control center and describing the pills. There was a dollar bill rolled up in V-1’s bathroom. There was a small amount of vomit on the floor at the foot of the bed about 6″ round. It appeared the vomit had been partially wiped up.”

  The subsequent investigation focused on Aaron, and the police, working with the Drug Enforcement Agency, sniffed a broader plot involving renegade doctors. On June 20, 2011, more than five weeks after Derek’s death, Aaron was interviewed at length by Minneapolis police investigator Matthew St. George. The report said that Leah Billington of the Drug Enforcement Agency was also present.

  Aaron, the son of a cop, wanted to be honest. He told the investigators that he sometimes accompanied Derek to check-cashing places in “shit little areas” of town, sending money in exchange for drugs from New York.

  “He would bitch and complain about how doctors wouldn’t prescribe him the stuff anymore,” Aaron said early in the interview.

  “He was on so much shit,” he said later.

  Aaron explained that he lived with Derek for four summers and always knew when Derek was on the pills or not.