Shoved into a tattered accordion folder, the lawsuit sits on an endless bookshelf in a Chicago courthouse, 2,000 pages long and growing by the month. The file is split at the edges; the pages — all those “whereases” and “wherefores” — spill out the sides. Inside is more than a year’s worth of legal quarreling in which lawyers across the country have tried to figure out what happened at a football practice on a late summer day in Evanston.
On Aug. 3, 2001, Rashidi Wheeler, a 22-year-old safety on the Northwestern football team, collapsed while running sprints and died shortly after. By the end of the month, his mother had filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the university.
Since then, the suit has become a tangle of accusations. Wheeler’s mother, Linda Will, is blaming NU and eight individuals for her son’s death. The university is blaming five dietary-supplement companies. And at least one of those companies is blaming Wheeler himself.
For now, the case may turn on one question: Who has the more persuasive medical expert? On that front, NU’s strategy of questioning the official cause of Wheeler’s death — bronchial asthma, the medical examiner said; banned supplements, NU alleges — may run into a few roadblocks.
The first round of depositions starts later this month, with Will’s Los Angeles lawyer Johnnie Cochran flying in to join the proceedings. The suit could go to trial late next year, said Randal Schwartz, another of Will’s attorneys.
If the case ever gets that far, it will buck an overwhelming statistic that says that more than 95 percent of civil suits settle before they reach a courtroom.
The mere fact that the suit is still alive today surprises some.
“In more traditional (cases of) large institutions vs. little families — David-and-Goliath-type stories — these things usually just go away a lot faster,” said Clarke Caywood, an associate professor at NU who teaches crisis communication. “So that makes me somewhat confident that there’s more of a story to be told here.”
Meanwhile, Will is preparing to fly to Chicago from her home in Ontario, Calif., for a Nov. 26 deposition.
The grieving mother has found her only comfort in waging a very public war against what she sees as the abusiveness of college football. She still launches broadsides against NU head coach Randy Walker, whom she calls a “little Hitler,” and assistant Jerry Brown. Neither was present the day Wheeler died, but Will is blunt about the lawsuit’s intentions.
“I will not make any settlement whatsoever,” she said. “I will fight to the bitter end, until Walker and Brown are fired.”
An August afternoon
If the suit does go to trial, a jury will have to wrestle with one question long before the expert witnesses take the stand with their blood-sample analyses and academic articles.
“How are you going to deal with the question that you have a 22-year-old kid who shouldn’t be dead?” said Monica McFadden, a Chicago lawyer who specializes in personal injury and civil rights cases. “There’s this instant feeling that something was wrong; 22-year-olds just don’t die.”
Before he collapsed, Wheeler was participating in a conditioning drill that consisted of running 28 progressively shorter sprints. There is some dispute about the nature of the lakefront workout.
In its response to the lawsuit, NU denies that the practice was mandatory and that the team kept records of who passed and failed the drill — both violations of NCAA off-season workout rules.
But at the same time — and in an apparent contradiction — University President Henry Bienen announced on Oct. 9 of last year that results from the drill were kept and “subsequently reported to the football coaching staff.” He said the team would forfeit six practices during the 2001 season.
The university, along with the individuals named in the lawsuit and their lawyers, cannot comment on the suit, said Alan Cubbage, vice president for university relations.
Wheeler, who had a history of asthma, was about halfway through the drill when he dropped to his hands and knees, according to the Evanston Police Department’s report. A teammate helped him off the field, and Wheeler said he was in pain and “wanted to stop breathing,” the report said.
Tory Aggeler, NU’s strength and conditioning coach, handed Wheeler a bag to breath into, believing he was hyperventilating. His breathing appeared to slow down, but he shortly became unresponsive, the report said. Wheeler’s eyes glazed over.
Aggeler tried to call 911 from an emergency phone on the field, but it was broken. He used a cell phone instead, then performed CPR on Wheeler. Paramedics arrived after four minutes; 12 minutes later, an ambulance sped to Evanston Hospital, where Wheeler was pronounced dead.
A medical question
The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that Wheeler died of exercise-induced bronchial asthma. An autopsy also uncovered in Wheeler’s system traces of ephedrine, the substance found in over-the-counter supplements like Xenadrine and Ultimate Orange, both banned by the NCAA.
In the police report, Aggeler said he had been told — it’s unclear when — that Wheeler and several other players were taking Ultimate Orange and Xenadrine.
The medical examiner didn’t label ephedrine a contributing factor to Wheeler’s death. But NU has disputed this from its first filings in the suit, instead suggesting that supplements played a greater role.
In April, NU pulled into the lawsuit five companies associated with the production and distribution of Xenadrine and Ultimate Orange, including GNC and New Jersey-based Cytodyne Technologies. Should it be held financially liable for Wheeler’s death, the university is asking that these companies pay up as well.
If successful, NU’s legal strategy would lift some of the liability. But in the meantime, it threatens to yank the case in an uncomfortable direction. By shifting the focus to supplement use, NU is inviting public scrutiny into a hot-button issue that otherwise would not have figured into the suit.
“Because they have (raised the issue of supplements), those have to be questions that we ask,” said Schwartz, Will’s attorney. “Questions like, ‘What did Northwestern’s coaching staff know about athletes taking substances?'”
The university also has placed itself in the middle of two different parties, both trying to prove the same thing: that supplements did not kill Wheeler.
Wheeler’s mother and Cytodyne have little in common in the suit. In fact, Cytodyne is accusing Wheeler of being irresponsible with its product. But the influx of more lawyers and medical experts — all battling NU — could work to Will’s advantage.
“You have sort of added in more people to beat upon you,” McFadden, the Chicago lawyer, said of NU. “On the other hand, you’ve given the jury an alternative.”
That alternative may not carry much weight in a courtroom dispute between medical experts. The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, one of the most respected in the country, is a tough target, McFadden said.
“They don’t have any bone to pick here,” she said. “They’re not the Will family, they’re not Northwestern — they’re calling it as they see it. They’re sitting in the medical examiner’s office going, ‘Why would we have incentive not to give you the truth?'”
The power of publicity
The tenor of the suit may have been determined before it was filed, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson turned to the cameras after Wheeler’s memorial service at Alice Millar Chapel.
“He’s still a safety,” Jackson said, referring to Wheeler’s position on the field. “He’s going to save thousands of young athletes.”
Days later, Jackson gave an impassioned, impromptu press conference in the courtyard of the Rebecca Crowne Center. And he invited the Chicago media down to his South Side Rainbow/PUSH Coalition headq
uarters to formally announce the pending lawsuit.
“Rev. Jackson’s involvement early on turned the public’s eye and the case in a direction that was, frankly, not productive for the public’s understanding of it,” said Caywood, the NU associate professor. “He took it in another direction and made it a cause rather than an issue that this family faces as a tragedy.”
Jackson quickly receded from the scene to champion other causes. But the arrival of Cochran for all of the major depositions could thrust the case back into the national spotlight.
Will is happy to have the attention, even if it means her son gets lost in the greater cry of every student-athlete.
But that may not be in the best interests of NU or any of the individuals named in the suit: Walker, Brown, Aggeler, Director of Athletics Rick Taylor, director of strength and conditioning Larry Lilja, assistant strength and conditioning coach Tom Christian, coordinator of football operations Justin Chabot and intern-trainer Michael Rose. Aggeler, Christian and Rose are no longer at NU.
Any resolution, whether it’s dealt by a jury two years from now or sealed in a settlement next month, would fall short of a victory for either side.
“There is no highly desirable outcome, because the first outcome was tragic,” Caywood said. “I don’t know who wins and loses. ‘Winning’ and ‘losing’ suggests something about the process that isn’t exactly true.”
The case could take yet another turn if NU fails to link Wheeler’s death to supplements. The university would have to refocus its strategy and defend against Will’s original contention: that NU had a duty to ensure Wheeler’s safety, and that it acted negligently in carrying out that duty.
The worst-case scenario for NU — and a very unlikely one, Caywood said — is that the process reveals an attempt to cover up the truth by the university. Short of that, NU has already been through the worst, he said, and handled the situation as best it could.
“Except in very extreme circumstances — the assassination of the President — mostly these things recede into memory, and people move on with their lives,” Caywood said. “It’s unlikely to be a permanent black eye against the university.”
Channeling grief
In the past year, Will has found a new group of friends in the last place she thought she’d look — the cemetery. She and other parents talk about their sleepless nights and their eternal grief.
“We know we’re never going to be happy, and the only thing we can look forward to is learning a new coping mechanism,” said Will, who last month received Wheeler’s honorary NU degree in the mail. “To know that in your lifetime you’re never going to be able to obtain happiness, that type of reality is what’s so bad.”
The lawsuit helps Will channel her grief. Every day she tries to do one thing that honors her son’s memory or furthers his cause — even if that means flying cross-country to give a deposition.
Mostly, she thinks about how things were supposed to be.
“You think they might party too much, you worry about grades, you even worry about are the teachers good, are they really interested in teaching?” she said with a sad laugh. “I was worried about everything other than what I should have been worried about.”
If she could, Will said, she would throw in jail each of the men she views as responsible for her son’s death. But that isn’t an option.
So she pursues the only ones available to her — fighting her grief with some friends from the cemetery and a bulky lawsuit on a shelf in Chicago.
“Not that anything that happens in this lawsuit is going to change her life in a meaningful way, because she can never have her son back,” Schwartz said. “But the quicker that you can get to the point where it’s over, no matter what the outcome, the next day everybody involved can start the healing process.”
