by Glenn Stout
Evan slings the ball all over the field during the game’s first 20 minutes of clock time, some passes reaching his receivers, others falling incomplete. On a few plays, he is hit after he releases the ball. On one third down, he drops back and runs to his right; just as he unleashes a pass, a defender crashes into him, slamming Evan’s head and body to the turf.
Evan wobbles to the sideline, clutching his sternum beneath his pads. The athletic trainer, Kevin Call, immediately checks him, worried he is concussed. After a cursory exam, Call tells the coaching staff Evan is good to return to the game.
So he does. With about a minute remaining in the first half and the ball at midfield, Evan receives a snap and rolls to his left. He wants to attack the cornerback he and his coach had discussed earlier. Evan rears back and rifles a ball deep, sending it high into the September sky.
A defensive end wallops Evan after the ball leaves his fingertips, and he slams Evan into the turf. The cornerback intercepts the pass. Wanting to make the tackle, Evan pops up and, as he’s angling toward the cornerback, another defensive player rams into him. The quarterback crumbles to the ground. Both hits are legal.
Evan rises and gingerly walks to the sideline. The trainer, Call, moves immediately to Evan and escorts him to the bench.
One minute passes in real time, two—Evan appears fine, responding to coaches and the trainer. Then, as Call is still inspecting him, Evan suddenly slumps on the bench and his limp body slides sideways, like a seated mannequin tipping to its left. Evan loses consciousness as he’s caught by a teammate. Tom Murray, atop the press box, is busily recording statistics when a family friend yells for him: “Tom, something is wrong with Evan!”
Tom sprints down the grandstand. He leaps over the four-and-a-half-foot chain-link fence behind the bench and is quickly at his son’s side on the bench, grasping his hand, looking into his sweat-beaded face.
Evan blinks his eyes open. The coaching and training staff, huddling over him, believe he has a concussion. They call for the ambulance, which is parked close to the locker room about 75 yards away.
About two minutes later, the first half ends with Warren Hills trailing 0–6. On his way to the locker room, Dubiel stops to talk to Evan, who is now sitting up on the sideline and waiting for the ambulance to move onto the field. “How are you doing?” Dubiel asks.
“I’ll be fine,” Evan says. “Go get this. We’ll talk after the game.”
The ambulance pulls near Evan, who is now on a gurney. Tom Murray hands his cell phone to his son as the teen is loaded into the back of the emergency vehicle.
Kelly is on the other end of the line. A concerned friend in the stands had texted her and told her to call Tom immediately.
“What happened?” Kelly asks.
“I don’t know,” Evan says. “I think I blacked out or something. I’m okay.”
“I love you,” Kelly says.
“I love you too,” Evan replies.
Evan gives the phone back to his father. Lying on his back on the stretcher, he flashes a thumbs-up sign to the crowd, prompting a relieved round of applause. Evan, with eye-black smudged on his face, smiles.
He is lifted into the ambulance. Tom climbs into the front seat. The vehicle rumbles off the field and disappears down the dark two-lane road, red and white lights flashing as it passes the Victorian-style houses in the Jersey night.
Kelly trembles at the table. She tells her friends Evan has been injured. “Something’s not right,” she says. “Something’s not right.”
She orders her food. She calls her sister in Syracuse, New York, telling her in a panicked voice that her boy is hurt, that something is terribly wrong. She cannot eat.
Her friends drive her back to their house in Michigan. In the car Kelly is so scared she has trouble breathing.
From the front seat of the ambulance, Tom peers into the back at his son through a window. The driver is heading to a small hospital four miles from the football field.
The white ambulance cruises along a highway, the driver obeying the speed limits, believing his patient is in no grave danger.
But then, horror: Tom sees, through the window, the emergency medical technician performing chest compressions on Evan. His son has stopped breathing.
The driver changes course: Evan needs to go to Morristown Memorial Hospital, some 40 minutes away, because it houses a trauma unit. The driver flips on the siren and mashes the accelerator.
Tom stares at his boy.
The medic works feverishly, pumping hard on Evan’s chest. Up and down, up and down, he pushes.
Tom stares at his boy.
Minutes and miles pass. The ambulance finally stops in front of the emergency room at Morristown Memorial. Tom rushes out of the passenger seat, eyes wide with terror.
Tom looks around but sees no medical personnel running out of the hospital to help his boy. “Where is everyone?” Tom yells. “Why aren’t they waiting for us?”
The answer—the oh-my-God answer, the please-no-no-no answer—hits Tom at just past 9:15 p.m. ET, 135 minutes after kickoff.
Kelly steps out of the car at her friend’s house and into the growing Michigan darkness. She’s standing in the front lawn when her cell phone rings, the smell of freshly cut grass hanging in the cool air.
“He didn’t make it,” Tom says.
“What do you mean?!” Kelly yells. “What do you mean?!”
“He didn’t make it,” Tom says. “He’s gone.”
“What are you saying to me, Tom?!” Kelly yells. “Don’t say that to me! Don’t say that to me!”
One friend takes the phone from Kelly, who falls to the ground, wailing. She rips up the grass and continues to yell, the screams audible for blocks. Another friend picks her up and carries her into the house.
Kelly sits on a chair, unable to talk for 30 minutes, sobbing so hard that her friends quickly decide she is in no condition to fly home. She needs to be driven to her son immediately.
In a private room at Morristown Memorial, Tom wraps his arms around his son. Evan is on a gurney with a tube in his mouth and a brace around his neck. The time of death was around 9:30 p.m., two and a half hours after kickoff. The medical staff believes he suffered some sort of fatal brain injury.
For over an hour, Tom won’t let go of his boy. A family friend arrives, hugs Tom tightly, and tells him a dozen students and parents are in the waiting room and deeply concerned. Tom briefly leaves Evan’s side and quietly tells everyone, “We lost Evan.” Then he returns and continues to hold and caress his boy.
Into the night and through the small hours of the morning, Tom doesn’t let go—can’t let go.
Kelly sits in the backseat of the car, her head resting on the shoulder of her brother-in-law. Her eyes are blank.
The countrysides of different states pass by—Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. At one point she sees the first blush of the day’s light ripple across the horizon and shoot across the farming fields of the Midwest. Gazing out the window at the sunrise, Kelly is reminded that the world will carry on, even if her son won’t—and even if she can’t.
Kelly is quiet in the backseat, with so many questions about Evan rolling through her mind: Did he suffer? Did he take one fatal hit? Was it a blow to the head? What caused him to die? Then she’d catch herself and think: What’s it all matter? My boy is gone. That’s all. My boy is gone.
The car pulls into her driveway 20 hours after kickoff. But now she can’t bring herself to walk inside, not when her son isn’t there. Tom eventually approaches; husband and wife collapse into each other’s arms, moaning together in pain.
The entire football staff soon comes to the house. They form a line to hug and comfort Evan’s parents. Tom can’t stop blaming himself for his son’s death, believing he could have done something to prevent it. “It’s my fault,” he says over and over. “My fault.”
More than 300 students, teachers, coaches, and community members gather at the football field the day after, unsure
of where else to go. They hug, cry, and share stories of Evan—stories of his love of drawing comic book heroes, stories of his silly high-pitched laughter, stories of how he was going to become a sportswriter, stories of his ability to drink more gallons of chocolate milk in a week than any other kid on the planet.
Friends also congregate in the school parking lot in space No. 287 and build a makeshift memorial. Within hours, this rectangle of asphalt is filled with flowers, balloons, candles, banners, written notes, cards, and photos. One handwritten missive reads: “We love you, Evan. You are so beautiful. Never, never will we forget you.”
Two police officers arrive to deliver seven boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts and enough coffee for everyone. Coach Dubiel, who had sped to the hospital to be by Tom’s side, shuffles onto the field, his eyes red. He embraces each of the players, whispering in their ears that he loves them. He says the same thing to non-football players.
According to the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, named after the former Vikings offensive tackle who died from heat stroke complications during a practice in 2001, Evan was one of 13 U.S. high school students whose death was linked to playing football in 2015.
“But this isn’t supposed to happen here,” Coach Dubiel says. “Not in Hometown, USA.”
The line stretches the length of several football fields out of Faith Discovery Church. Young and old, wealthy and poor, black and white, even little kids from across the region who never knew Evan yet dressed in their football uniforms—they all come to say good-bye at the visitation five days after Evan has died.
The family is the first to enter. Kelly still hasn’t seen her son. Holding the hands of her husband and sister, she approaches the open casket. She loses all strength in her legs when she’s two feet away.
She strokes his face, rubs his bearded chin. She wants to crawl in the casket with him and never let go. For the next nine hours, she clutches every last person in the line as they stream past Evan. One peewee football team kneels in front of the casket and says a quiet prayer. Even the 70 police officers and firefighters from Warren County assigned to work the visitation embrace Evan’s mom. That night Kelly is so sore she can barely lift her arms.
The funeral is the next day. Evan is wearing a blue-and-green checkered shirt. Two days earlier, Tom had entered Evan’s room to pick out the shirt—the last time Tom will walk into his boy’s bedroom.
In the nursing home in Michigan, a family friend streams the funeral on her iPhone and plays it for Evan’s grandmother, who is unconscious. She dies three days later.
The letter Evan wrote to her is sitting on her nightstand.
The medical examiner calls with the news: Evan’s spleen was abnormally large, so big that it was literally hanging out of his rib cage. The spleen was lacerated; Evan bled to death within about 30 minutes of his final play on the football field. The examiner explains that he had mononucleosis, a condition that often causes the spleen to swell.
Most young people with mono don’t have the energy to climb out of bed—this was the case for Kelly when she was struck with mono as a 16-year-old—but Evan was virtually asymptomatic and ignored the symptoms he did experience. He didn’t allow the fatigue or dehydration (signaled by the strange-colored urine after school) to keep him from the football field. “An atypical case,” the medical examiner calls it.
Tom is shocked by the information; he assumed a head injury had taken his son.
But the knowledge that there was nothing Tom could have done to prevent the sequence of events brings no relief to the father. His boy is still gone.
“It was Evan’s tremendous work ethic that sadly led to his downfall,” Dubiel says. “He never complained about anything. He was so tough, so determined. He never wanted anyone to worry about him.”
In the days, weeks, and months following the funeral, thousands more cards and notes arrive in the Murrays’ mailbox. Peyton Manning sends a signed jersey. Eli Manning pens a long letter. (“The pain of losing a child is unimaginable,” Eli says now. “It’s something you never get over, but when I think of Evan’s family, I pray they have peace.”) Coach Jim Harbaugh explains that he read Evan’s college application essay to his players. Atlanta Falcons coach Dan Quinn writes, “Our team is thinking of you.” And a mother in Illinois details how she lost her son to football too—he suffered a fatal head injury—and that she prays peace will come.
Kelly reads every last word.
She finds no peace.
It’s a blue-gray summer afternoon in Washington, New Jersey, and Kelly is driving through the quaint downtown with her niece, Danielle Hobson.
It’s been almost two years since her son lost his life, but blue-and-white ribbons are still attached to street signs and utility poles in Evan’s memory. Kelly always counts the ribbons on her slow rides through downtown, desperately hoping none have blown away.
The family wants Evan’s story told, to help their own healing and so that other football families, perhaps, can learn from their devastation. Kelly hasn’t returned to her job as an in-home caregiver. Tom sometimes doesn’t remember driving to work in the mornings, still searching for his magnetic north.
They haven’t canceled the mobile plan for Evan’s phone, because it comforts Kelly to know his voice is still alive, forever frozen at 17. Kelly still visits his room—which is just as Evan left it, down to the exact order of how he arranged his books on his bookcase—and lies in his bed at night, letting thoughts of her son wash over her.
Yet on this June afternoon, as Kelly cruises along Belvidere Avenue in her white Mazda CX-7, there is joy in the backseat—exactly 11.7 pounds of it. Strapped into a car seat is Adrian Evan Hobson, a baby boy Danielle gave birth to eight weeks ago. When Danielle told Kelly and Tom that she was going to pass along Evan’s name to her firstborn, the still-grieving parents cried. But after a few moments they both smiled, as if sunlight had finally penetrated the fog.
“I don’t want my son playing football,” Danielle says. “It’s dangerous. But will my wishes stop him? I don’t know.”
“Football didn’t kill Evan,” says Kathy Killgore, Kelly’s sister. “He died because he was sick, and he was playing when he was sick, and nobody knew it.”
Kelly, her niece, and little Adrian Evan pull into Meadow Breeze Park, the place where Evan grew up playing football, baseball, basketball, and soccer. A few parents bought a bench, engraved Evan’s name into the wood, and placed it near the basketball court. Evan’s best friend, A. J. Lea, often sits on the bench when he’s home from college. Here, surrounded by blooming marigolds, the wind dusting his cheeks, he reads books and relives those crowded hours of happiness he shared with Evan.
“The bench is where I spend time with Evan,” says Lea, now a sophomore at Cornell. “Evan and I pushed each other academically. We did a reading competition against each other in the third grade, and in high school we were in the National Honor Society together. We even edited each other’s college essays. My life will never be the same without him.”
Kelly steers the car toward the Warren Hills High football field, back to those haunting floodlights. Dubiel retired after the 2016 season, but he still returns to the stadium on Jackson Valley Road—and can still picture that last game with Evan, that final conversation on the field.
“You want to move on in life, but it hasn’t been easy,” he says. “I don’t blame football. I blame this on life not always being fair.”
Kelly parks outside of the stadium. She walks to the plaque that hangs on the outside wall of the locker room. The words from Evan’s college essay are inscribed in bronze. Kelly examines every syllable, saying each word aloud, searching for . . . searching for . . . her son.
“I ask myself all the time, ‘How should I feel about football?’” Kelly says, her fingers rubbing the plaque. “Some people think I should hate it, but I don’t. Football put Evan in a compromising position, but it could have been on a basketball court where he took a hit or even in th
e school hallway messing around with his friends. But sometimes I think I should have made him stop. He’d be here now if I did. But how could I? He loved it so much. Just loved it.”
For one minute, Kelly keeps her right hand on the plaque, two.
Rain begins to fall.
Three minutes, four.
Her hand doesn’t budge.
Five, six.
In stillness, she closes her eyes.
She is with her boy.
Kent Babb
There’s Nowhere to Run
from The Washington Post
He inches forward, with jets overhead and the ground 50 stories below. Larry Johnson can feel it happening: the arrival, he calls it, of the demons.
They push him toward the barrier of a rooftop deck of an apartment building where he sometimes comes to visit a friend, and, in moments like these, there’s a strengthening urge—an almost overwhelming curiosity, he describes it—to jump.
“One is telling you to do it; one is telling you don’t,” says Johnson, a former NFL running back. “One is telling you it’d be fun.”
It is early November, less than two weeks before his 38th birthday. He played his last game in 2011, and he now believes he suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disorder linked to more than 100 former football players. For now, CTE can be confirmed only after death, but Johnson says his symptoms—anxiety, paranoia, the occasional self-destructive impulse—are consistent with those of past victims.
On this afternoon, he shuffles closer to the ledge, past the drainage fixture a foot or so from the glass barrier. His body is tingling, he says; his thoughts are filled with static.