EPILOGUE

DEREK’S BRAIN WAS CARVED out of his skull by a coroner in Minneapolis. It was put in a plastic bucket and inside a series of plastic bags, then placed in an insulated box filled with a slurry of icy water. The box, marked BIOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE, was driven to the airport and placed in the cargo hold of a plane to Boston. Upon arrival, a courier service drove the box 30 miles to the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts.

Building 78 sat among a woodsy, 276-acre campus setting of red-brick buildings, mostly built in the 1920s. At the end of a short driveway was a former ambulance entrance, rarely used anymore for emergencies. Through the door was the basement morgue.

The box was opened and the brain removed. It was vibrantly pink and weighed 1,580 grams, or about three and a half pounds. On a stainless-steel table, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half of the brain was cut into slices, about the width of sandwich bread.

The pieces of Derek’s brain were identified as SLI-76. They were placed in plastic containers and into large refrigerators with glass doors, next to all the rest. There were so many brains, close to a hundred of them, that similar refrigerators lined the walls of another room and an upstairs hallway.

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 their 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.

“He’d give the stuff to me and, according to how his back felt or his shoulders or his hands, you know, that’s how I’d give him what he kind of needed,” Aaron told the investigators. “So last summer around—it was probably the start of August—he, I mean we, worked our asses off up until that point, you know. He had to come in, big year for him, he just showed up at the house with 100 Oxys.”

The pills were gone in a couple of weeks, Aaron said, and then there were 100 more. Aaron explained Derek’s panicked episode at the airport on the way to New York, and Aaron’s refusal to later ship the pills to Derek there, and said that the pills had come from Dillon Hafiz at Sneaky Pete’s.

(Hafiz, subsequently questioned by investigators, denied being a drug source, but acknowledged that Derek sometimes came to him in search of them. “No, no, he knows, he hasn’t asked me in, in months,” Hafiz said, according to the police transcript of the interview. Later, asked why Derek came to him at all in search of prescription painkillers, Hafiz replied, “I mean, I know, I know a lot of people,” and “I pointed him in a direction a year or so ago,” but he denied being the supplier. “I know and Derek knows that I never—I never gave it to him,” he said.)

Four days later, on June 24, the NHL Entry Draft was held at the Xcel Energy Center. The Rangers asked Aaron to announce the team’s first choice. When he stepped to the podium, he received a standing ovation from the hometown crowd.

Four weeks later, on July 22, Aaron was in jail, the lone arrest in the case surrounding his brother’s death. There were two charges: a felony count for the “sale” of a controlled substance—in this case, officially, one pill of oxycodone that he’d given to Derek the night he died. Aaron “unlawfully sold, gave away, bartered, delivered, exchanged, distributed, disposed of to another, offered to sell, agreed to sell, manufactured or possessed with intent to sell one or more mixtures containing a narcotic drug, to-wit: Oxycodone,” the complaint read.

The other charge was for interfering with a scene of death, a gross misdemeanor. Aaron was jailed. Bail was set at $10,000.

“We’re being victimized a second time,” Len said, distraught. “What is this supposed to prove? Aaron’s sitting in the Hennepin whatever the hell it is, being detained, for doing what? Looking out for his brother?”

Aaron’s Canadian passport was revoked, leaving him in limbo—unable to cross the border, unable to renew his work visa in the United States. Under de facto house arrest, he stayed in the apartment that he and Derek intended to share all summer, where Derek died, using the complex’s gym to stay in shape. He was subject to random drug and alcohol tests. His hockey career was on hold.

The felony distribution charge was ultimately dropped, and Aaron pleaded guilty in October to the misdemeanor charge of interfering with a crime scene. He received probation and 80 hours of community service.

The lease on the apartment ended, and Aaron moved to Regina and lived with his mother. The Wild offered him a one-year contract and found him a spot with the Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees of the Central Hockey League, a second-level minor league with teams strewn from the Mexican border to South Dakota, from Arizona to Ohio.

Arriving after the season started, Aaron had 6 goals, 6 assists, and 13 fights in 56 games for Rio Grande Valley. He moved on to the Wichita Thunder in 2012, coached by Kevin McClelland, a pugnacious fighter for the Edmonton Oilers through much of the 1980s. Aaron led the team in penalty minutes. He had one goal and 13 fights.

Aaron had seen, more than anyone, the toll that fighting took on his older brother. But he showed none of the symptoms that Derek displayed—no worrisome signs of addiction, erratic behavior, or depression. Still, Joanne Boogaard fretted, wondering what it would take to keep Aaron from fighting in hockey. The game had killed one son, she thought, and her worst fear was that it would take another.

“What else can I do?” Aaron said.

THE SECOND-TOUGHEST call that Joanne Boogaard ever received came a day after Derek died. It was a stranger, a man from Boston, asking for her son’s brain.

Chris Nowinski was a former college football player from Harvard who became a professional wrestler. For two years, he performed in the ring as a villain for World Wrestling Entertainment, a muscular blond with a throwback mullet. Much of the wrestling was merely a show. But the folding chairs to the back of the head were real. So were many of the flying elbows and rehearsed pratfalls.

Post-concussion syndrome, the lingering fogginess that Derek encountered and that had prematurely ended the careers or haunted the retirements of many hockey players—Pat LaFontaine, Eric Lindros, Scott Stevens, Keith Primeau, and Chris Pronger among them—forced Nowinski to retire from wrestling in 2004. Looking for answers for his condition, he met Robert Cantu, a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University’s School of Medicine. Realizing the lack of awareness and understanding toward concussions in sports, they started the Sports Legacy Institute, dedicated to what they called the “sports concussion crisis.”

The two men later partnered with two other doctors at Boston University, Ann McKee, a professor of neurology and pathology, and Robert Stern, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery, to form the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

Few had heard of the disease they highlighted—chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE—but it was not new. Long called “dementia pugilistica,” and colloquially referred to as being “punch drunk,” it had been identified in boxers dating to the 1920s. They had become a caricatured stereotype: the aging ex-boxer who had lost his mind, having been struck in the head too many times. The symptoms were obvious, even if the cause was not: a loss of memory, emotional instability, problems with impulse control, irritability.

Other sports that include persistent blows to the head were beginning to see victims with similar symptoms as they aged, including the early onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Research showed that CTE was caused by repeated hits to the head. The blows did not have to be severe enough to cause a concussion. Some who were diagnosed with CTE, in fact, had never been officially diagnosed with a concussion. But the repeated blows added up. They seemed to be the root cause.

The team at Boston University had diagnosed CTE in more than 20 former NFL players, even an 18-year-old high school football player. It had been found in dozens of former boxers. And in the previous couple of years, it had been found in two former hockey players: Bob Probert and Reggie Fleming. Months after Derek’s death, Rick Martin would represent another.

There was one catch to its discovery: CTE could only be diagnosed by examining the brain after death.

Nowinski had made the delicate pitch dozens of times before. He explained to Joanne Boogaard who he was. He explained the research into CTE, and how it could improve or save the lives of others. And he asked if the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy could have Derek’s brain.

“This is my child we’re talking about,” Joanne said.

Nowinski made the same pitch to Len Boogaard in Ottawa. Len did not know much about CTE until he read the stories about Probert a couple of months earlier. But the symptoms, the addictions, the mood swings in the final years of Probert’s life, making him someone different than loved ones recognized, hit close to home for Len. He had expected Nowinski’s call.

Len and Joanne discussed the matter. There was little debate. Yes, the Boogaards told Nowinski. You may have Derek’s brain. Please help explain what happened to our boy.

AS THE BOOGAARDS awaited the results, two other NHL enforcers had died under mysterious circumstances. If their brains were exhumed and examined, the results were not made public.

Rick Rypien grew up in the small town of Coleman, Alberta, in the foothills of the mountains a couple of hours south of Calgary. His father was a boxer, and his older brother, Wes, was a hockey enforcer who, in 2001–02, was second in the Western Hockey League with 32 fights—including two against Derek. Wes Rypien and Aaron Boogaard both played for the Calgary Hitmen the next season.

Rick Rypien was smaller and more skilled, but he still fought often. He scored 47 goals and racked up 493 penalty minutes over three seasons with the Regina Pats. While there, his girlfriend was killed in a car crash.

Rypien reached the NHL with the Vancouver Canucks during the 2005–06 season, Derek’s rookie year. He scored on the first shift of his first game, but injuries took their toll over the years as he settled into a role as a hardscrabble fourth-line center. A leave of absence from the team for most of the 2008–09 season was not fully explained. It was only later that it was acknowledged that Rypien had been diagnosed with depression.

The Canucks re-signed him, and Rypien fought a career-high 16 times. In a game at the Xcel Energy Center in October 2010, after Derek had left the Wild for New York, Rypien was restrained before getting into his second fight and he pushed an official. On the way to the locker room, he reached into the crowd and grabbed a Minnesota fan who had taunted him. Rypien was suspended for six games. In late November, he was granted another personal leave of absence, fueling speculation about his mental state.

Rypien returned in the spring and was assigned to the Manitoba Moose, a minor-league affiliate. On July 1, 2011, he signed a $700,000 contract with the NHL’s Winnipeg Jets.

On August 15, he was found dead in his home in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta. He had committed suicide. The family insisted it had nothing to do with fighting or brain trauma.

Wade Belak died on August 31. He was 35 and recently retired when he was found in a Toronto apartment, having hung himself.

Belak was born in Saskatoon, like Derek, and grew into a six-foot, five-inch, 225-pound defenseman and a first-round NHL draft choice. Belak was that rare combination—a sturdy, minute-gobbling top-line defenseman who fought more than 100 times in the NHL.

His opponents included Derek. It was Belak who, in October 2008 while playing for the Florida Panthers, knocked a tooth out of Derek’s mouth with a punch, leading to the first in a stream of prescriptions for narcotic painkillers.

Few knew that Belak increasingly battled depression. He kept it disguised with an effervescent smile and a reputation as a happy-go-lucky prankster. He was married and had two daughters. From the outside, everything seemed fine with Belak.

Waived by the Predators, he retired from hockey in March 2011. He had started a career in broadcasting and, at the time of his death, was preparing for the Canadian reality-television series Battle of the Blades, in which hockey players took part in a figure skating competition. While his mother said that Belak was relieved not to have to fight anymore, the family did not publicly link his role in hockey to his depression.

Like that of Rick Rypien, Wade Belak’s brain was not examined after his death.

The self-inflicted deaths of three hockey enforcers in less than four months prompted a heated debate over the role of fighting. Tradition collided with tragedy. Columnists and commentators who had long questioned the rationale for hockey fights and wondered aloud about the damage to those who took part suddenly sounded less extreme than those adamantly in favor of the status quo.

“While the circumstances of each case are unique, these tragic events cannot be ignored,” the NHL’s commissioner, Gary Bettman, and the NHL Players Association’s executive director, Don Fehr, wrote in a joint statement following Belak’s death. “We are committed to examining, in detail, the factors that may have contributed to these events, and to determining whether concrete steps can be taken to enhance player welfare and minimize the likelihood of such events taking place.”

It was more than two years later, in December 2013, that NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly gave an update on the findings. No changes to the program were noted. “We commissioned jointly with the Players’ Association and cooperated with them on an independent review of our program and I reported on the results of that review today,” Daly said following a meeting with the league’s board of governors. “The bottom line is the report was good, that the program is doing what it is intended to do, it is helping players and former players in times of need.”

Three years after Derek’s death, David Lewis and Brian Shaw still oversee the substance abuse program. And the team doctors who treated Derek during his years with the Wild and season with the Rangers, and who prescribed him medicine leading to his two trips to rehabilitation, remain employed by the teams.

In late November 2011, in an interview with the New York Times, Bettman was asked whether he thought that enforcers were more prone to addiction or off-ice problems.

“I’ve never seen any evidence to that effect,” he said.

He said that fighting served as a “thermostat” to prevent worse forms of violence on the ice, and noted that statistics showed that fighting was declining in the NHL. But the league, he said, had little interest in driving the enforcer out of hockey.

“We don’t allow fighting,” he said. “Fighting’s punished, penalized. The issue is whether or not you increase the penalties further, but the game’s at a point where people who aren’t inclined to fight, don’t fight, and don’t have to.

“The issue is do we increase the penalty because it is penalized now. And there doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming appetite or desire to go in that direction at this point in time.”

Much as the National Football League did for years before the data became too overwhelming to ignore, Bettman dismissed the brain research into CTE.

“I think it’s been very preliminary,” he said. “There isn’t a lot of data and the experts who we talked to who consult with us think that it’s way premature to be drawing any conclusions at this point because we’re not sure that any, based on the data we have available, is valid.”

Early the next season, the Wild honored Derek with a pregame tribute. The team sold No. 24 Boogaard jerseys and autographed memorabilia that it had stored from two seasons earlier. Len and Joanne and all of Derek’s siblings—Ryan, Aaron, Krysten, and Curtis—were escorted onto the ice at the Xcel Energy Center. They were presented with flowers, a painting of Derek, and a framed game-worn Wild jersey of his. Fans serenaded Derek’s family with a standing ovation.

In 277 regular-season NHL games, all but 22 with the Wild, Derek had scored three goals and 13 assists. He accrued 589 penalty minutes and fought at least 61 times. Before reaching the NHL, starting at age 16, he fought well more than 100 times. He never scored more than twice in a season.

The arena was darkened. A 4-minute, 45-second tribute to Derek was shown on the arena’s giant video boards. Fans watched in silence as the tribute showed Derek barging into opponents, smiling with fans, and talking to children. It showed each of the three NHL goals he scored.

It did not show a single punch.

DR. ANN MCKEE sat at her computer at the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Massachusetts, clicking through digital photographs of Derek’s brain.

A professor of neurology and pathology at Boston University, she worked independently of the other doctors studying Derek, like Dr. Robert Stern, who was building a file of Derek’s history through interviews with his parents and medical reports from doctors. Independence was crucial. The findings of one doctor would not somehow influence the findings of another.

McKee knew nothing of the person she was examining, other than that he was a 28-year-old hockey player.

In the photographs, the thin slices of brain tissue looked a bit like two-dimensional cross sections of cauliflower, off-white and ragged around the edges. Unlike some of the brains she had examined, Derek’s tissue was not shriveled or darkened. Reddish-brown dots and splotches, telltale signs of brain damage, were few, not sprinkled thickly around the edges the way they were on many brains she had seen. The evidence was not obvious to anyone but McKee. But to her, the signs were clear and shocking: Derek had CTE, classified as Stage 2 of the four stages of the progressive disease, more severe than McKee had seen before in a person that young. A “wow” moment, she called it.

The biggest spots were in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls organization, planning skills, and inhibition. When she saw the damage, she wondered if this particular hockey player was prone to impulsiveness and nonchalance.

The medial temporal lobe, the part of the brain behind the ears, also showed extensive damage. There was damage to the hippocampus, where memory is formed and stored. McKee presumed that memory had become a growing issue for this particular specimen.

“This is all going bad,” McKee said as she pointed out the damage, difficult for the untrained eye to ascertain. “You just don’t expect that much in a 28-year-old. It is already showing substantial destruction.”

It was impossible to know how much the damage would spread, if at all, but that was how CTE was thought to work. Damage to the brain could be hidden for years, maybe decades, until it manifested itself in the form of symptoms: memory loss, impulsiveness, mood swings, disorientation, even addiction.

“The association between Boogaard’s brain pathology and his clinical symptoms, specifically the behavioral changes and memory problems he experienced in his last two years, is unclear,” the researchers wrote in a news release. “For example, his clinical symptoms occurred during the same time period he was exhibiting narcotic abuse. CTE has been found in other deceased athletes who have died from overdoses or who had problems with substance abuse. It is unknown if that substance abuse is caused by the impulse control problems associated with CTE or if they are unrelated.”

As Stern later put it: “What’s the chicken, and what’s the egg?”

The release quoted the co-directors of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy.

“It is important not to over-interpret the finding of CTE in Derek Boogaard,” Cantu wrote. “However, based on the small sample size of enforcers we have studied, it does appear that frequently engaging in fistfights as a hockey player may put one at risk for this degenerative brain disease.”

The group was careful not to leap to conclusions.

“Boogaard’s clinical history was complex, so it is unclear as to if or how much CTE contributed to his behavior, addiction, or death,” Stern wrote. “However, CTE is believed to be a progressive disease, so even if it was not directly affecting Boogaard’s quality of life and overall functioning before he died, it likely would have in the future.”

That news had already been broken to the Boogaard family on a private conference call that linked Boston with Ottawa and Regina. Len and Joanne listened carefully, but were numbed by the news and overwhelmed by the medical jargon. All they really heard was that Derek had CTE. And that there was a possibility, if not a likelihood, that Derek would have been fighting off the effects of dementia, maybe as early as in his 30s.

That is when Derek’s father stopped listening. For months, Len had been tormented by regret and haunted by what-ifs. Suddenly, his mind was numbed by the thought of something he had not considered—the kind of life his son might have been left to live.