Keana Strzelczyk spoke about her former husband this way:
“If I had still been married to him I could have 302’d him, put him in a mental hospital involuntarily. But I wasn’t married to him anymore so I couldn’t.
“I was like, ‘What do you want?’ And he’s like, ‘Nothing. Never mind.’ And I was like, ‘Justin, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?’
“I met him in 1993. We got married shortly after. He was so much fun to be around. He didn’t judge people. He could fit in anywhere. Black tie or seedy biker bar. I mean, he was just very chill.
“As far as his career goes, he never had concussions that I knew about. He was never diagnosed with concussions on the field. Or off the field, for that matter. I never felt anything one way or the other when he played. I mean, it was great. We were in Pittsburgh the whole time and the Steelers organization was, you know—the women I was with, they were just like family, which was, it was great. I felt as wives we did a lot of good. I loved doing the charity work. But, you know, now, looking back…Now how I feel about it is that I don’t even—I can’t. There’s just too many lies.
“Murderers, liars, thieves. I just—I just don’t.
“He wouldn’t come home. He wouldn’t call. He went to take the trash out one night and he didn’t come back until five o’clock in the morning. I had no idea where he was. One time he said ‘I’m going to Vegas for the weekend, I’ll be back Monday.’ I was like, okay. He didn’t come back for six weeks.
“That was one of the reasons that we split was because of him doing stuff like that. I just couldn’t deal with it anymore.
“I thought maybe he had bipolar, because he started to get angry. He was scaring me. My daughter wouldn’t go anywhere with him. She was afraid of him. I bought my son who was in fourth grade one of those disposable mobile phones and hid it in his bag because I was afraid. Then I just stopped sending the kids.
“I really thought he had bipolar.
“Had I known this was from football, I think I would have behaved differently. You feel some sense of guilt for kicking them out, for kicking them to the curb, because, you know, you’re blaming other things. That’s what always gets to me. That this game, this thing that he loved so much, that gave us so much comfort, you know? Financially, it let us have a great life, and yet it was the downfall of him and that’s kinda like…I still don’t even know what to think about that, like that still kind of just blows my mind. Something that was such a big part of our lives, and that gave us so much—it took him away.
“I’m like, ‘Justin, what’s going on? What’s wrong?’ And he started crying and he’s like, ‘God came to me just now here at the garage and he spoke to me.’ And I was like, what? And he was like—and then he paused, and then he got real angry and he was like, ‘Never mind, never mind.’ And I go, ‘Justin, do you want me to get the kids on the bus and come over there to the garage?’ And he’s like no, no. And I said, ‘I can come over.’ And he was like no. And then he said ‘I love you’ and hung up.
“How these owners sleep at night, I have no idea. I just feel like the NFL is run by murderers, liars, and thieves. They can sugarcoat it, and do all the charity they want. And that kills me because I think: Why aren’t you doing something for these men? Forget breast cancer awareness. Forget colon cancer awareness. Forget, I don’t know, whatever you’re doing. Concentrate on these people that you’ve wronged. You could build a whole entire hospital and facility dedicated to these men. You have enough money! You could have a whole staff! You could have a retirement home for these men. You could build five retirement communities. And have them each with their own personal doctor.
“I don’t think Justin committed suicide like they said. I just—I don’t know. In my mind, he knew. He knew he wasn’t going to be here anymore. He knew he wasn’t coming home, wherever he went. I don’t know what he had in his mind, but he wasn’t coming back.”
Justin Strzelczyk was thirty-six when he drove away on that cool autumn morning in 2004, the sky streaked with clouds. He didn’t tell Keana where he was going; he just hopped in his truck and drove. He stopped at a gas station on a highway outside Buffalo, New York. He tried to give some guy three thousand bucks and told him, Head for the hills! The evil ones are coming! Then he got back in his truck and sped away, ninety miles an hour, eventually with the cops chasing him on Interstate 90. The cops chased him for forty miles, threw metal spikes, blew out his tires, but he kept going and kept going, a hundred miles an hour, until finally he steered over the median strip, into opposing traffic, and smashed into a tanker carrying corrosive acid and everything exploded.
Strzelczyk had been dead nearly three years when Julian Bailes started thinking about him in light of CTE, Webster, Long, and Waters. Bailes had been on the Steelers sidelines during Strzelczyk’s playing days, and he had been deeply troubled by his tragic death; he told Bennet and the others the story of that death, and they agreed it was worth asking whether perhaps the local coroner had saved a piece of Strzelczyk’s brain tissue, which in fact he had. Bennet looked in the microscope and again found CTE.
“It’s making me sick,” Bailes said. “All of this, it’s making me sick.”
“I’m sorry, Julian,” Bennet said. They were in the conference room adjacent to Bailes’s office at West Virginia University Hospital in Morgantown, about an hour south of Pittsburgh, where the mountains were blue and round on top.
“They called him Jughead,” Bailes said. “Did I tell you that? That was Justin’s nickname.”
“I don’t understand Jughead,” Bennet said. He was wearing his wide-pinstripe suit and his cologne filled the room like sassafras.
“After the guy in Archie. Because he was just so goofy and so lovable. That was Justin to a tee.”
“Archie?”
“Wow,” Bailes said. “It’s a comic book, Bennet.” He rolled his chair back, put his feet up on the long, wide table. He was in his scrubs, just out of the OR, and he was drinking a Diet Coke.
“Comic book,” Bennet said, trying to be present for his new friend.
Bennet had come down to Morgantown to go over a PowerPoint presentation that Bailes was taking to a meeting in Chicago. Bennet wanted to make sure Bailes got everything right, was there to help prep him. But the news of Strzelczyk’s diagnosis was hitting Bailes hard, and Bennet was trying to give him the room a grieving man needs to reminisce.
“Jugs,” Bailes said. “Everybody loved Jugs. I would go to his apartment. I rode his motorcycle. Did I tell you about his Harley?”
Bennet nodded. “The hat with the spike coming up,” he said, motioning with his hands. “He had the hat?”
“The helmet!” Bailes said. “Like a Prussian helmet. He had this box on the back of the Harley. He filled it with candy. Seriously, this was a guy who would drive around and give kids candy. Friggin’ Santa Claus.”
“You knew these guys,” Bennet said. “It is very different for me looking at a slide.”
“He had a banjo and that big beard, like a mountain man, a big lumberjack on a Harley strumming a banjo. Seriously.”
“A character,” Bennet said. He had so little to offer. He had no reference point. Also, he was better talking about dead people as either just dead people or as spirits moving on. The land of the living was not his forte.
“And it’s like, why?” Bailes said. “With all these guys. And where does it stop? I’m really wondering if every single football player doesn’t have this. Some more, some less. And if they have it, who else does? What about the soldiers coming home, killing themselves? I don’t know who all. It’s staggering, and it’s just…it’s football. A game. All this for a game? I played football. I love football. But mankind does not need football.”
He stood up, fumbled with the cord on the laptop. Fidgety. More and more, Bailes’s southern veneer was falling away. Cool preppy kid, his dad a Louisiana Supreme Court judge. Privileged kid. Brilliant kid. Brain surgeon. Steelers team doctor. It was as though the more the light came on about CTE, the more someone else was crashing through and inhabiting Bailes, compassion was crashing through, or maybe he always had it, yeah, he has to always have had it, Bennet thought. Compassion bottled up.
“And you know, with Webster,” Bailes said, his mind churning. He sat back in his chair. “I was always like, Why, Mike? Why is this happening to you? I mean, if you knew Mike Webster in his prime. I used to sit with him at my mother-in-law’s house…he would come over. He was fine. Then one time he was holed up in the Hilton and I had to come get him out, he was slipping, he was slipping and I was like, What happened? He was a warrior. I was like, Why is Mike doing this? Why? I would think, that’s not Alzheimer’s disease. I’m trained. I know Alzheimer’s disease. I was heartbroken watching him. And then Justin just goes off. Bam. Why? I can’t believe it. I think about all this and I can’t believe it.”
“They couldn’t help themselves,” Bennet offered.
“I’m the doctor, Bennet,” Bailes said. “The doctor is supposed to help.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Bennet leaned forward, picked a speck of lint off his sleeve. He took the opportunity to switch the subject to Jesus and forgiveness. He talked about God working in mysterious ways and he talked about angels. He said just being friends with these guys, knowing them the way Bailes did, loving them the way he did, that was God’s work right there.
“Do you want something to eat or something?” Bailes said.
Bailes was converting to Catholicism but it wasn’t something he talked about easily. His wife was Catholic. They had five kids. That was how he found Catholicism. Because of that he was converting, not because of this, not because of Bennet and the truth on the slides.
But maybe, yeah, maybe part of the reason was because of this.
“We could order sandwiches,” Bailes said. The Jesus talk had forced him to collect himself. He wasn’t one to get all emotional with remorse or touchy-feely talking about himself or talking about God. If he admired Bennet for one thing it was for his ability to show unabashed vulnerability. All that emotion he wore—Bennet was a man transparent, a man without filters, a man who exploded with love, God, rage, joy, envy. And then he had all that intellect on top.
What an oddball, Bailes thought. That was their friendship. Bennet thought Bailes was an angel with compassion bottled up, and Bailes thought Bennet was an oddball. Someone who needed protection. Because oddball was not, after all, the kind of personality that won fans in academia, or in the medical community. And oddball was exactly the kind of personality that a multi-billion-dollar entertainment behemoth like the NFL could ridicule, discredit, and dismiss.
“Julian, why did they not invite me to Chicago?” Bennet said to Bailes that day.
“I already told you everything I know,” Bailes said.
Everyone who was anyone in concussion research was invited to Chicago. Goodell had convened the meeting in June 2007, the first leaguewide concussion summit. All thirty-two NFL teams were ordered to send doctors and trainers to the meeting. It would be a chance, finally, for the NFL to talk openly about this unfolding crisis and to hear from independent scientists, many of whom they also invited to the meeting—three hundred participants in all.
They asked Bailes to come. They asked Cantu to come. They did not ask Bennet Omalu.
“They hate me?” Bennet said.
“They don’t hate you,” Bailes said. It was more like they had successfully orchestrated a way to marginalize him. Should he tell him that?
“Okay, should we go over the PowerPoint one more time?” Bennet asked.
“I think I’m good,” Bailes said. “I’m ready for this. In fact, I can’t wait.”
If Bennet wasn’t invited to the meeting, then Bailes would bring Bennet’s science. He would present Bennet’s work to the NFL and the nation’s top neurosurgeons, slide by slide. He would say “Dr. Bennet Omalu.” He would say “Here’s who you need to listen to.”
“You know, it’s now even more ironic that I am not going to Chicago,” Bennet pointed out. “Because for the first time in many years, I have time on my hands.”
Bailes put back the last of his Diet Coke. “Did you tell Prema yet, Bennet? Did you tell her that you no longer have a job?”
“No.”
“You have to tell her.”
“I’m not going to tell her, Julian.”
It wasn’t just that Bennet didn’t get chosen to be Wecht’s replacement as Allegheny County’s new chief medical examiner, it was who the county bigwigs chose when their plan was enacted: Dr. Karl E. Williams, a longtime Pittsburgher, a seemingly innocuous fellow with a bow tie and round wire-rimmed glasses. To Bennet he was hardly an innocuous fellow. The bow tie. The wire-rimmed glasses. Bennet knew him.
Williams’s career trajectory had intersected with Bennet’s in one especially unpleasant way. Williams had served as a forensic pathologist at a small hospital up north, Ellwood City Hospital, which most people even in Pittsburgh had never heard of, but Bennet had heard of it. Back when Bennet got the guy off death row. The Thomas Kimbell case. Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is!
What are the chances? Williams was the prosecutor’s expert forensic pathologist on the Kimbell case, duking it out with Bennet. Williams was on the team that, in the pretrial hearing, had said this guy trying to get Thomas Kimbell off death row was not credible, they said there was no scientific way that some forensic pathologist could determine, all these years later, who killed that woman and her kids.
“Yeah, there is,” Bennet had said, in so many words. “I’m the way.”
The judge sided with Bennet.
Bennet was hardly the picture of humility back then. Bennet was all showmanship, newly schooled by his mentor, Dr. Whizbang himself, Cyril Wecht. And there Bennet was with his applause line, Show me whose hands those are, and I will show you who the killer is! There were all the media glorifying him, Bennet beaming like a triumphant prizefighter.
Williams sat there, on the losing team.
This was the guy who became Bennet’s new boss at the Allegheny County coroner’s office. Here was the dawn of a new day at the morgue, a place that had been raided by the FBI, scrutinized by investigators, and put in the spotlight by media beginning to suspect literal skeletons in the closets. Williams was the man appointed to clean up the mess. If he had followed any of Bennet’s career after that trial, what he heard had done nothing to improve his opinion of the guy from Nigeria.
For three months in the office I don’t think Dr. Williams ever said one word to me.
Then he sent the slides of Webster and Long to somebody I did not know.
Then he began to send my work to be reviewed by other pathologists. I think he was looking for some type of mistake so that he would have a reason to fire me. He did not find any mistakes.
I moved swiftly and obtained signed consents from Webster’s family and Long’s wife for the brains which were fixing in formalin in my office. Still Dr. Williams refused to release the brains to me.
It was only after Long’s wife got involved that Dr. Williams released the brains to me, without the slides. He said the slides were not available so I told him to keep them, as long as I had the brains, I did not want to be bothered with him.
To this day, I do not know what he did with those slides.
I moved the brains to the coat closet in my condominium, so at some point I had Webster’s brain, Long’s brain, Waters’s brain, and then a wrestler, Chris Benoit’s, brain in my coat closet at home. The work environment at the medical examiner’s office was becoming threatening, antagonistic, and hostile. I was treated with ignominy and I was beginning to be painted and branded as a troublemaker. I was referred to with all types of adjectives and nouns, and suspected that many called me the N word behind closed doors.
One Sunday morning in March of 2007 I received a call from my former professor and teacher at Pitt, Dr. Wiley, asking that I should come see him first thing on Monday morning. I asked why. He wanted to help me. He said he did not want me, his former student, to be professionally incapacitated at such a young phase of my career. First thing on Monday morning I went to his office. I met with him and Dr. Hamilton. Dr. Wiley suggested I should leave the medical examiner’s office, and possibly leave Pittsburgh.
I wept in his office and asked him what I had done to deserve this. He looked at me and said he did not know. I got home that day, still with tears in my eyes, knelt down and wept to my God. I resigned my job at the office that week. I was now also in trouble with my immigration status, since at that time my immigration status was based on my employment. I went back into a state of acute depression, and I started seeing a psychiatrist, an older guy who was in his seventies and semiretired. I saw him every Wednesday morning at eleven o’clock. I saw him for about six months and built such a wonderful friendship with him. While all these things were happening, my wife did not know anything. She was pregnant with our first child, Ashly, and I did not want her to worry. I was out of a job for six months, and she did not even know. I had savings, so our standard of living was not affected. I began a nationwide search for a new job. Every morning I would pretend that I was going to work, and I would go to the library or to church and work on my private consultation cases and CTE.
To feel that you’re running away. To feel marginalized. To feel you don’t belong. Once again, here he was. And the builder was calling about the house in Moon Township. The drywall was up and where did he want the flatscreen in the bedroom? Could he come out and look at the size of the pantry in the kitchen? Because it could be bigger if they took off a foot or two from the powder room; there was still time. He answered the builder’s queries and drove with Prema out to the house. She held up paint chips for the baby’s room and swatches for living room drapes. She began to regard that house as her own loving creation, her work of art, and Bennet could not allow that to be taken away from her. He prayed for a miracle, stood in the backyard and imagined a swing set and prayed for a miracle.
So Bailes going to Chicago with his research, with his PowerPoint presentation, to stand up for him, to be his voice, that was a significant moment in Bennet’s life. That was a kind of rescue.
But, honestly, at that point Bennet needed so much more rescue. Wecht wouldn’t talk to him. The FBI was after him to testify. His precious slides had vanished. He’d lost his job. His American dream was collapsing. It felt like monsters were growing out of the earth, pushing up from under his feet, pushing up and toppling him over and getting ready to swallow him.
The meeting was in an amphitheater in Chicago’s Westin O’Hare. Maybe two hundred guys in suits holding awesome folders with the NFL’s awesome logo on them. Inside the folder, like a prize in a box of Cracker Jack, was a CD holding all the journal articles about concussions that the MTBI committee had produced. Goodell got up and thanked the MTBI committee for such important work.
Pellman was there.
Casson was there.
Maroon was there.
Apuzzo, the editor of the journal Neurosurgery, was there, too. He had not accepted Bennet’s paper about Andre Waters’s brain, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player: Part III” for publication in the journal. He had accepted the first two, but this one he had turned down without explanation. He was on the NFL payroll. He had served as a consultant for the Giants since at least 1997.
It was awesome to be affiliated with the NFL.
It was standing room only in the amphitheater, mostly white guys in suits, and the morning session started off politely enough. Members of the MTBI committee were praised for their hard work as guys showed slides and other guys clapped, and there was much doodling on notepads. Then a former New York Jets neuropsychologist, Bill Barr, cut through the crap and all but accused the MTBI committee of fraud. He told everyone in the room that the committee had excluded available data—his own data—from its studies, thereby skewing results and promoting a false narrative. He went after the committee, and committee members fired back, and by the time they broke for lunch the tone of the summit had turned dark.
Bailes spoke after lunch. “Does Concussion Lead to Pugilistic Dementia and Alzheimer’s?” was what he titled the talk, going straight for the heart of Bennet’s work. He figured the science would elevate the discussion, move it forward, enable the group to think about building on Bennet’s work. Not that Bennet’s work was news to them. By now they all knew about it, as reported in The New York Times. Bailes figured just saying it out loud, showing the slides, would wake everyone up. At a minimum, it would make the statement that, hey, guys, there’s work to be done here, there’s a whole lot more research we need to do. Because look at this: it’s scientific proof that the kind of concussions sustained in football can lead to debilitating brain damage.
Bailes clicked through the slides, told the stories. This was personal. Webster, Long, Waters. And Bennet, too. He thought about how Bennet was as pure a scientist as anyone could bring into this equation—no government and no institution funding him, doing no one’s bidding but his own.
Bailes stood up there and he showed pictures of the tau tangles, the sludge that did Webster in. He showed it in Long’s brain and in Waters’s brain, too. He was solemn, his heart heavy. The game he loved so much, had played in high school and college, had felt privileged to be part of as a sideline doctor with the Steelers, he was telling all those like-minded men that their beloved game was causing brain damage.
He saw a guy near the front, smiling. Except, no: it was more of a smirk. He saw Casson, the infamous Dr. No. The guy with the smirk was looking at Casson. The guy was looking at Casson because Casson was rolling his eyes. Like, Here we go again. Like, Can you believe this bullshit? Like, What a fucking idiot.
They were mocking him.
Bailes had never before been mocked. Certainly not in his professional life.
“And I’m thinking, ‘This is a new disease in America’s most popular sport, and how are its leaders responding? By laughing at the guy presenting it. Alienating the scientist who found it. Refusing to accept the science coming from him.’ ”
Bailes felt a burning inside him, a volcano.
At a press briefing afterward, Bennet’s name kept coming up—this was Bennet Omalu’s research—and so Casson made a statement about that stupid Nigerian’s work: “The only scientifically valid evidence of chronic encephalopathy in athletes is in boxers and in some steeplechase jockeys. It’s never been scientifically, validly documented in any other athletes.”
A total dismissal of Bennet’s work.
“I’m a man of science,” Casson said, implying that Bennet Omalu was not.
As for the commissioner, Roger Goodell, he said: “I’m not a doctor.”
One final thing happened in 2007 that turned Bennet’s world sour. Maybe he suspected it would happen, the way you can feel a storm coming even before the wind blows. There’s a stillness in the air. There’s that feeling on your skin. Something was not right.
Nowinski was on the phone. It was a conference call. Nowinski, Bennet, Bailes, and Fitzsimmons. The four would gather for regular weekly calls about SLI, planning research, discussing how to move forward to promote concussion awareness and how to pierce the wall of NFL denials.
Nowinski was talking and he was saying he needed money. He said he deserved to be paid for his efforts to bring CTE to the public’s awareness.
“What do you mean, money?” Fitzsimmons said.
A salary, Nowinski said. He said he wanted to make at least $110,000, and he wanted it paid retroactively, starting from the day SLI was formed.
Fitzsimmons made the point that the group had no money, that it was a nonprofit, that he himself had already put $10,000 of his own into it, to say nothing of all Bennet’s personal assets that had gone into the research, the foundation upon which SLI was built. They would of course need to seek funding to continue the research, but that was a long way off.
“There’s no money,” Bailes chimed in.
“Nobody’s getting any money,” Bennet said.
Nowinski did not back down. Maybe he didn’t even need them; that’s the way he was talking. He could go solo. He didn’t need the scientist who discovered the disease. He didn’t need the brain surgeon who had been studying the subject for decades and knew his way around the NFL. He didn’t need the one attorney in the world who had ever successfully sued the NFL for disability claims.
In fact, maybe he had all he needed: The New York Times. And he’d been talking to other people. Better people. He didn’t say anything about that then. He just said he needed to be paid, and the others said they couldn’t pay him, and the conversation got heated and Fitzsimmons couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The wrestler wants money? For what?
Fitzsimmons had never felt good about Nowinski joining the group. He found him bossy and impertinent and he believed he was trying to turn Bennet’s science into the Chris Nowinski Show. Using Bennet to make himself famous. “Why should we put up with this?” Fitzsimmons would say to Bennet and Bailes. What did Nowinski even bring to the table? And now he was asking for money. And now on the conference call, Bailes and Nowinski were fighting. A power struggle. A battle for turf. Nowinski wanted SLI headquartered in Boston, where he and Cantu were based. Bailes thought it belonged in West Virginia, where he and Fitzsimmons were based. The argument got heated, and then the money issue came up again, and Fitzsimmons just couldn’t take it anymore.
“I’m resigning,” he said. “Good luck to you guys.” He hung up.
Bailes couldn’t take it anymore, either. He hung up.
It was just Nowinski and Bennet left. “Who do you think you are?” Bennet said, his voice high and angry. Who?
They both hung up without resolution. Bennet would remember Nowinski calling him a few days later, calling to tell him that his brain analysis services were no longer needed for SLI.
Nowinski wouldn’t remember it that way; he would say he wanted out all along. He would say his request for money was just a ruse, an exit strategy, and it worked. Whatever it was, and whoever was right and whoever was wrong, the fact was that the alliance was over. Nowinski took off. He had an idea for a different neuropathologist to be the face of CTE. A better face. And a better whole team of people who would maybe behave. And he had The New York Times.
Bailes and Fitzsimmons and Bennet still gathered each week for their conference calls. They gathered in collective wonderment.
What just happened?