Minimally 2 Player Deaths Overlooked, Likely More of 2011

2010 Fatality Apparently Misidentified as 2011 Football Case

National 'Research' Continues in Error for Grid Casualties 

By Matt Chaney

ChaneysBlog.com

Posted Wednesday, February 22, 2012; updated February 22, 2012

The official sounding, widely quoted Annual Survey of Football Injury Research only officially gets worse.

The 2011 report on fatalities in American football, freshly posted on the University of North Carolina website, is erroneous like its 2010 predecessor but in startling fashion.

The new report, co-authored by Frederick Mueller and Bob Colgate for the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research Center (NCCSIR), at UNC-Chapel Hill, is missing a minimum of two football fatalities during 2011, teen players Alec Mounkes and Jerson Tizol.

The 2010 NCCSIR report, posted a year ago this month, also missed at least two football fatalities.

But the 2011 report appears to mistakenly include one of those cases missed for 2010!

Quadaar White, 15, suffered a catastrophic neck injury on Aug. 24, 2010, during football practice for a neighborhood youth team in Upper Darby, Pa.

Witnesses said that White, on defense, led with his head for tackling an opponent and was struck by a knee. White lay on the ground when paramedics arrived, paralyzed and not breathing, and he died a week later, reportedly in the early morning of Aug. 31, 2010.

Yet for the new “study” at the UNC site, supposedly 2011 football, White appears to be included among four “direct” fatality cases on page 15, briefs that do not include names and places. One brief states White’s case in almost exact detail:

A 15 year-old youth football player was injured while participating in a practice scrimmage on 8/24/2011. He died on 8/30/2011. He was playing defense making a tackle with his head in a down position. The top of his head hit the ball carrier’s knee causing a fractured cervical vertebra.

Last summer, this blogger reported the omission of White for the 2010 data, then I reported the miss of Ben Bundy, 20, a football player at Southwest Minnesota State University who died of brain aneurysm suffered in a team workout that February.

Mueller, a UNC professor of sports medicine with a PhD in education, and Colgate, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, were not contacted for comment prior to this post.

Mueller, director of the NCCSIR and lead author on football reports, has declined my interview requests and ignored my posts regarding his faulty data, for months.

Renowned NFL researcher Dr. Robert Cantu, of Boston, compiled medical data for the 2011 fatality report at North Carolina. The NCAA provides major funding for the NCCSIR.

Besides the apparent mix-up regarding White, the 2011 report commits two glaring omissions: Mounkes, 13, a middle-school player in Kansas dead of blood clots following a football injury; and Tizol, 15, a high-school player in Texas who died of brain bleeding from football, reportedly.

Further 2011 deaths of players are overlooked by the new UNC document, candidate cases for qualification as game-related, including:

*Marcellis Williamson, 23, former Ohio University noseguard training for the NFL draft, who died April 27 of a blood clot in his lung.

*Andy Collins, 27, free-agent pro quarterback of indoor football, who died on Aug. 1 in Florida, working out on a hotel treadmill. Preliminary autopsy indicated heart attack as the cause.

*Kishon Cooper, 8, a youth-league player in Florida who collapsed while training for football at home on Sept. 5; he died later at a hospital, possibly of heat complications.

*Aaron Harris, 18, prep offensive tackle in Alabama, was stricken with kidney problems during a week he practiced football and played a game for his school. He died of reported kidney failure on Nov. 1.

For more information, see my Feb. 8 post on ChaneysBlog, “26 Football Fatality Cases of America 2011.” Link to the new UNC report is http://www.unc.edu/depts/nccsi/2011FBAnnual.pdf.

The 2011 UNC report is correct for 15 deaths listed on pages 15-18, annotated cases that do not include names noted here: Ridge Barden, 16, who died of subdural hematoma; Kainen Boring, 17, brain injury; college player Derek Sheely, 22, severe head trauma; Tyquan Brantley, 14, complications of sickle cell; Latrell Dunbar, 16, acute cardiac arrest; Samuel Gitt, 17, cardiac arrest amid heat factor; Forest Jones, 16, heatstroke; Luke Killian, 16, heart ailment; Isaiah Laurencin, 17, heatstroke; Brian Rushing, 17, undetected heart condition; Don'terio Searcy, 16, heat complications; Ryan Smith, 16, blood clot in lung; Al Smith, Jr., 15, heatstroke; Montel Williams, 15, cardiac arrest with possible sickle cell complication; and Garrett Uekman, 19, college player who died of cardiomyopathy

Meanwhile, Mueller and Cantu have yet to address their fault-ridden reports of 2010 and 2009 on survivors of catastrophic injuries in American football.

My extensive Boolean searches of Google banks have located about 165 survivor cases during 2010 and 2009, casualties of catastrophic injury to brain, skull, spinal cord, vertebral column and/or heart.

My finds exceed by about 100 the survivor cases published by Mueller and Cantu for tackle football during those years. The researchers have declined comment and refused my offer to forward the casualty names they have missed.

The annual reports by Mueller, Cantu and Colgate are accepted without question by medical journals and the CDC, with data disseminated worldwide as valid epidemiology on catastrophic injury in American football.

Matt Chaney is a writer, editor, teacher and restaurant worker living in Missouri, USA. His 2001 graduate thesis study for an MA degree at the University of Central Missouri was qualitative media analysis of 466 football reports, historical print coverage of anabolic steroids and HGH in American football, largely based on electronic search among thousands of news texts from the 1970s through 1999. For more information, including contact numbers and his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit the homepage at www.fourwallspublishing.com.