When news broke last week that former Colorado running back Rashaan Salaam had committed suicide at age 42, some wondered if brain injuries were to blame. Salaam was not given an autopsy, so we won’t know if he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), but his brother said that the 1994 Heisman Trophy winner displayed “all” the symptoms of the disease.
Jabali Alaji told USA Today, in a story published Sunday, that he looked up the effects of CTE in the wake of Salaam’s death. Referring to signs such anxiety, depression, apathy and memory loss, Alaji said, “He had all those symptoms.”
“When I opened the house [of Salaam], I expected to go into a house of somebody who was on drugs or find alcohol in the trash can,” Alaji said. “But when I walked into the house and saw how clean the house was, it shocked me. I went through his trash can. I went through hiding spaces expecting to find pill bottles, or bottles of liquor. None of that was there. He didn’t even take Motrin, you know what I mean?”
Salaam was found dead in a Boulder, Colorado, park Monday. Authorities said that “foul play” was not suspected and that a note and a gun were found near his body.
Alaji said that he spoke with Salaam about an hour before his death and was given no indication that anything was amiss. “It was a very positive conversation,” Alaji, an Atlanta-area resident, told USA Today. “We made plans for the future.”
However, Alaji said that he “would guarantee they’d find” CTE in his brother’s brain if it were studied. Their family’s Muslim faith mandated that Salaam be buried quickly after his death, with no desecration of the body.
In recent years, former NFL stars such as Junior Seau and Dave Duerson have committed suicide at around the same age as Salaam (43 and 50, respectively). In both cases, they shot themselves in the chest to preserve their brains for study, and both were found to have had CTE.
A friend of Salaam’s, Riley Hawkins, told the Denver Post that the former first-round pick “had become more of a recluse” recently. He added, “That’s when the demons took over.”
According to the Hawkins, Salaam maintained a sense of guilt about not fulfilling his athletic potential. He won the Heisman after rushing for over 2,000 yards in his final season at Colorado, but he lasted just four seasons in the NFL and pointed to partying and marijuana use as partly to blame.
But Salaam also suffered his share of injuries while in the NFL, and Alaji said that the back had hidden a fractured elbow during his rookie season with the Bears. “He was banged up,” Alaji said, noting that Salaam had undergone over a dozen surgeries. “He was a running back. Who gets hit more on the field than a running back?”
Whatever was happening with Salaam, it led to him becoming more distant from some who were close to him. “Over the last five or six years, it was a bit of a journey trying to figure out where he was and what was going on and what direction his life was taking him,” Chad Brown, a teammate of Salaam’s at Colorado, told the Denver Post.
“He was trying to save a few lives,” said Hawkins, who worked with Salaam at a mentoring program for at-risk youth. “But he had trouble saving his own.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Des Bieler
