Jailed US footballer had brain disease

An American footballer who committed suicide while in jail for murder had advanced brain disease possibly due to injury.

The former New England Patriots’ player Aaron Hernandez after his double-murder acquittal.

An American footballer who committed suicide while in jail for murder had the most advanced case of brain disease seen in a young man by researchers at a leading medical institute in Boston.

Aaron Hernandez, who was 27, was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of a man when he hanged himself in his cell in April. A few days earlier he had been acquitted of a double murder in 2012.

A legal case brought on behalf of his four-year-old daughter against the National Football League and the New England Patriots, where Hernandez played for three seasons, said he was found to have “the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy [CTE] medically seen in a person of his young age by the world renowned CTE Center at Boston University”.

It added that Hernandez had a stage of CTE usually seen in players in their sixties.

The findings, confirmed by the CTE Center, makes Hernandez the latest in a series of players who have committed suicide while suffering from the brain disease, which is linked to repeated blows to the head.

In 2011 Dave Duerson, 50, who had played for the Chicago Bears, left a suicide note for his family that read: “Please see that my brain is given to the NFL’s brain bank”, a reference to the research unit in Boston.

A year later two other retired American footballers, Junior Seau and Ray Easterling, took their own lives. All three were found to have been suffering from CTE, a degenerative disease that can impair thought and memory and cause mood swings.

A few months before he died, Seau told his biographer, Jim Trotter, that those who were complaining about rule changes in the NFL did not have to live with the effects of repeated concussions.

He said: “If everybody had to wake with their dad not knowing his name, not knowing his kids’ names, not being able to function at a normal rate after football, they would understand that the game needs to change.”

Jose Baez, the lawyer who represented Hernandez during his double murder trial, said he regretted not having him tested for signs of CTE.

The lawsuit alleges that Hernandez’s daughter was deprived of the “love, affection, society and companionship” of her father while he was alive and that the league and his team were negligent. It claims that their negligence was also “the proximate cause of Hernandez’s suicide”.

The Times