On April 7th of this year, former NFL player Phillip Adams shot and killed six innocent people and then took his own life.
It was a horrifying event, one that shook all who heard it.
According to The New York Times, officials haven’t found a rationale or connection between Adams and his victims, identified as physician Robert Lesslie; his wife, Barbara; two of their grandchildren, Adah and Noah Lesslie; and two HVAC technicians, James Lewis and Robert Shook, who were working at the Lesslie home on that fateful day.
Yet something had to incite Adams to murder this group.
Today we learned of at least one contributing factor to this horrific incident.
According to Dr. Ann McKee, who directs the CTE Center at Boston University, Phillip Adams suffered from stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy, better known as CTE.
“Severe frontal lobe pathology might have contributed to Adams’s behavioral abnormalities, in addition to physical, psychiatric and psychosocial factors,” said Dr. McKee, who examined Adams’ brain after his death. “Theoretically, the combination of poor impulse control, paranoia, poor decision-making, emotional volatility, rage and violent tendencies caused by frontal lobe damage could converge to lower an individual’s threshold for homicidal acts — yet such behaviors are usually multifactorial.”
CTE, the degenerative brain disease linked to head trauma and concussions, includes symptoms such as memory loss, depression and violent mood swings. CTE has four stages, the most severe being stage 4, which is associated with dementia.
Phillip Adams had stage two which, according to Dr. McKee, is inclusive of symptoms such as aggression, impulsivity, explosivity, depression, paranoia, anxiety, poor executive function and memory loss.
But Adams’ case was “unusually severe” as it existed in both of his frontal lobes, said Dr. McKee.
This does not excuse Adams’ actions, but it does offer an explanation.
Adams’ family claimed that his behavior had changed rapidly and he became increasingly volatile. His temper flared more often and he neglected his personal hygiene.
They suspected CTE was at the root of his regression, but not to this extent.
And unfortunately, it cannot be diagnosed without an autopsy.
“After going through medical records from his football career, we do know that he was desperately seeking help from the NFL but was denied all claims due to his inability to remember things and to handle seemingly simple tasks, such as traveling hours away to see doctors and going through extensive evaluations,” said his family in a statement.
Adams played in the NFL for six years and finally retired in 2015. But because he didn’t retire by 2014, he was ineligible for testing under the NFL’s massive yet highly scrutinized concussion settlement.
In 2016, after decades of neglect and dismissal of the subject, the NFL agreed to the settlement without accepting responsibility for hiding the horrors associated with concussions.
Yet the settlement ignored more current players, such as Adams, and, more alarmingly, also included race normed tests.
These racially-biased tests made it harder for Black players to qualify for financial awards as they assumed Black players started with a lower cognitive level than white players, so brain loss was harder to prove.
Despite suffering two concussions over three games with the Raiders in 2012, Adams could not get the help he needed, help which could have possibly prevented this mass murder and his suicide.
And even if he did qualify, race norming would have, most likely, prevented him, as it did others, from receiving help as he already suffered from memory loss. That meant his inability to prove loss after already starting from a lower point would have deterred any chance he had at receiving a financial award to seek treatment.
While the NFL finally agreed to end race normed tests this past October, it didn’t end the suffering for Black players it previously excluded. This includes players who committed suicide like Junior Seau, Dave Duerson, and possibly Vincent Jackson. It also includes those who killed others before taking their lives, like Aaron Hernandez and Phillip Adams.
No one is dismissing what Phillip Adams did, nor can the pain, anger and loss felt by all of the families be erased by Adams’ autopsy.
But with the revelation that he suffered from a severe case of CTE, we must remember the NFL’s neglect and flawed concussion settlement that continued to hurt those it was supposed to help and remain vigilant in ensuring that all players, past, present and future, are given the proper treatment they deserve.
