Lawsuit sheds light on CTE and Ray Easterling's life

The largest lawsuit in the history of professional sports came closer to finalizing a settlement Wednesday, marking the culmination of a case originally filed by University of Richmond alumni Ray and Mary Ann Easterling.

Ray, Richmond College '72, who played football at Richmond and on the Atlanta Falcons, suffered brain damage from his football career that led to dementia and depression. In April 2012, Ray committed suicide.

On Wednesday, a fairness hearing was held after the family of Dave Duerson, another former NFL player that committed suicide and had had brain damage, objected to the settlement.

Ray and Mary Ann sued the NFL with six other former NFL players in 2011 on the grounds that the league had knowledge that football caused brain damage but had not disclosed the information.

That original lawsuit has blossomed into a behemoth that includes more than 5,800 plaintiffs, covers more than 18,000 former players and will likely reach into billions of dollars.

The Easterlings filed their lawsuit after dementia was diagnosed in Ray. His symptoms were caused by Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a buildup of plaque in the brain that comes from repeated blows to the head. The aggressive nature of football makes players highly susceptible to CTE, which leads to debilitating symptoms such as dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, aggression, memory loss, paranoia, confusion and impaired judgment.

Andre Waters, former Philadelphia Eagles safety, was diagnosed with CTE after committing suicide in 2006. Waters’ brain had deteriorated from CTE so thoroughly that it was equal to that of an 85-year-old Alzheimer’s patient, according to the neuropathologist who conducted the examination. Waters was only 44 years old.

Despite CTE first being connected to football in 2002, the NFL ignored and even undermined the research about CTE in NFL players in the subsequent years, according to reports by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. One NFL-funded study published in 2005 found that “professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.”

The NFL finally acknowledged the link between football and brain damage in September 2014, 12 years after it was discovered.

CTE, which can only be diagnosed post-mortem, has been found in the brains of 76 of 79 deceased former NFL players. It has even been found in six high school football players.

“The higher the level you play football and the longer you play football, the higher your risk,” Ann McKee, one of the leading researchers on CTE, told Frontline in May 2013.

Ray’s Descent

After the Easterlings got married, they had a daughter and settled down in Richmond. About a decade after Ray’s retirement from football in 1987, he started acting out of character. A man who had always been on time began running late for meetings. Ray had always been very meticulous, but started losing his wallet. He repeated himself often. He would say odd things at work at inappropriate times. This was the beginning of Ray’s dementia.

His condition worsened. Ray, who earned a business degree at Richmond and had two successful businesses after his football career, began gambling with the family’s finances. The Easterlings had been comfortable, but Ray’s poor financial decisions led to the loss of the family’s savings. In 1995, they were forced to sell their house.

He grew paranoid. One night, Ray left for his daily run, but when he hadn’t returned four hours later, Mary Ann grew worried and went to look for him. She found Ray two hours later. He said he had thought somebody had been following him, so he hid in a driveway.

“He couldn’t control what he said, what he did half the time, and the rages were terrible,” Mary Ann said.

With money low in 2008, Ray attempted to heat the house by burning wood. Finding and chopping wood became an obsession of Ray’s. He would chop wood for hours and stack excessive amounts in the driveway.

During one of his many wood splitting outings, Ray lost focus and chopped off part of his own thumb.

On another wood-splitting occasion, Ray asked Mary Ann to help him move the wood splitter. As they were moving the machine, Ray lost concentration, as he often did, and let the wood splitter collapse on Mary Ann’s right hand.

Her ring finger was sliced off.

Unlike the quick, intense physical pain of losing a finger, the unraveling of the Easterlings' marriage stretched as Ray’s brain deteriorated.

Ray Easterling committed suicide in 2012. He said that he was ready to meet his savior. He was 62 years old.

He played eight years in the NFL and had 13 interceptions as a safety for the “Gritz Blitz” Falcons of the 1970s. One of the best games of his career was in 1977 against the Chicago Bears when he shut down the Bears' offense, catching two interceptions and making about 20 tackles. (Tackles were not an official NFL stat until 2001.) Walter Payton was so frustrated with Easterling’s play that he wanted to bench himself, Mary Ann said.

At halftime of that game, Bears tight end coach John Hilton implored the team to stop Easterling from wreaking havoc.

Hilton was a Richmond alumnus himself, who had graduated eight years before Ray. He was also beginning to suffer the crippling consequences of brain damage wrought by football and would soon exhibit all of the symptoms that would drive Ray Easterling to suicide.

The other sideline

Penny Hilton, John’s wife, thinks he showed signs of brain damage years ago, although she only connected it to football recently. She visits John at the nursing home often, and John is unable to finish sentences, articulate thoughts or remember conversations anymore.

After he was drafted in 1965, John played for many teams during eight seasons, and his longest stint was with the Steelers. He played under Chuck Noll, the legendary Steelers coach, blocked “Mean” Joe Greene during practice and caught Bart Starr’s last touchdown pass. In the 1970s, NFL players did not have the exorbitant salaries they do today, and the Hiltons lived paycheck to paycheck.

John went into coaching after he retired from playing, but he couldn’t hold down a job. He was fired from the Chicago Bears after trying to punch the team dentist on the sideline and lost an assistant coaching position with the Packers after flipping his middle finger at the press box.

John lost his job with the Packers just before Christmas. After opening presents on Christmas Eve, the Hiltons packed up their Green Bay home and drove to Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to move in with Penny’s parents. It was one of the 13 times the Hiltons moved in a 12-year span.

John, like Ray, would experience flashes of rage as a result of his illness. When his daughter accidentally spilled milk on the floor, she was met with an angry, profane rant. On two separate occasions, John was nearly removed from his daughter’s basketball games by the principal for his conduct in the stands. Years later, when the Hiltons had moved back to the Richmond area, Penny stopped attending Richmond football games with John because of his loud, embarrassing behavior. He would often prompt fellow fans to move their seats away from him, Penny said.

Once, while at a red light during rush hour, John began beating the steering wheel so hard that he almost ripped it from the dashboard, an act that terrified his children in the backseat. Penny compared John’s rages to the Incredible Hulk.

Penny would not understand John’s issues until years later. After doctors suggested John visit a neurologist, it was discovered that he had early onset dementia. Soon after, another doctor suggested that John should stop driving.

John initially balked at this idea, but was forced to surrender his license a year later. Twice in eight months he chose to make a U-turn on the highway rather than turning around at the next exit. A police officer caught John after the second incident, and John never drove again.

“It’s like watching a black-and-white photo in the sun, and he’s fading and fading and fading, and then he’s gone,” Penny said. “He was my best friend, and I’m watching him change over the years into somebody I didn’t even know.”

By 2011, John had seriously deteriorated. A nurse cared for him during the day and Penny cared for him at night. Daily activities such as showering and brushing his teeth required detailed instructions.

His children insisted he be put in a nursing home, but Penny resisted. She eventually conceded and put John in a home in 2012 after he mistook insect poison for mosquito spray and covered his legs in it.

“He’s not in physical pain, but he’s in mental agony,” Penny said, summarizing her daughter’s feeling about her father. “If he could step out of himself and see where he is in life ... He would have done the same thing Ray did.”

Once in the nursing home, John had a few episodes. He choked an orderly to the ground and had to be restrained by multiple nurses. Another time, John ran through the hallways screaming that Penny was going to leave him and that he was going to kill himself, a stunt that led to a two-week stay in a psych ward.

It was then that Penny realized his care was beyond what she could provide, and she came to peace with her decision to put him in a nursing home.

“I spent most of my life thinking I was the only person who lived this type of life,” Penny said. Not until she met Mary Ann did she realize that she was not alone and that other players suffered the transformation that John had.

In August and September, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Forbes and Dallas News ran pieces related to American dependence on football. The question of whether children should be playing such a violent sport has become an open forum. Many celebrities have said they don’t want their children to play football, including Barack Obama, Lebron James and Brett Favre.

Parents across the country seem to agree. Pop Warner Football participants declined by 10 percent between 2010 and 2012, or 25,000 players, the largest two-year drop since Pop Warner began keeping track of its membership. It is estimated that up to 70 percent of NFL players started their football careers at the Pop Warner level. If that trend continues and parents grow less likely to let their children play football, the sport will have a smaller pool of players at every level.

John Hilton’s son won’t let his children play football because he’s seen his father go through too much. Penny agrees that her grandchildren shouldn’t play football unless there is somehow a guarantee they wouldn’t suffer brain damage.

Mary Ann and Ray didn’t have a son, but if they had, they wouldn’t have let him play. Ray wouldn’t have allowed it, Mary Ann said. In fact, Ray wished that he had never played in the NFL, but rather had taken full advantage of his business degree, Mary Ann said.

Countless people dream that they could play in the NFL, but Ray Easterling dreamed that he had never had made it to the NFL at all.

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The information gap

In 2010, the NFL recognized that helmet-to-helmet collisions were causing concussions, and subsequently outlawed violent hits on “defenseless receivers” who have their heads turned toward the ball and cannot see defenders approaching.

But many leading researchers on CTE, including McKee, believe that concussions are not the lone cause of the disease. Subconcussive blows, hits to the head that do not cause or show symptoms of a concussion, may also play a large role in the development of CTE.

“Just playing the game can be dangerous for some people,” McKee told Frontline in May 2013.

Despite this, neither Mary Ann nor Penny want to abolish football, but Mary Ann does believe that colleges should not offer football as a sport.

“We live in a free society where people choose their poison. But if you’re in the business of educating, then [football] should not be on a college campus,” Mary Ann said. “You don’t have to fall into the idea that football is just another sport. It’s not.”

But the national discussion on CTE and the safety of football has not convinced everyone.

“You can get hurt walking down the street,” Aaron Roane, senior Richmond linebacker and captain of the football team, said upon hearing Mary Ann’s thoughts on universities eliminating football. “College should have football. You can get hurt doing anything. You can get hurt playing basketball, you can get hurt playing soccer.”

Mary Ann said her problem was not with football but with education.

“If they choose to play knowing full well what’s ahead of them, then it’s their choice,” Mary Ann said.

The problem is that many football players don’t know what’s ahead of them. Roane said that he had been vaguely aware that concussions were an issue and he had no knowledge of CTE. Roane did not know that football was linked to brain damage and said he tried not to think about those things.

“It’s not something you bring up,” Roane said about the team’s awareness of potential brain damage.

The understanding of CTE hasn’t changed on the Richmond Spiders football team in the 40 years separating Aaron Roane from Ray Easterling and John Hilton.

“[Football] is a life changer for them, but they don’t know how much their life is going to change,” Mary Ann said.

The Forgotten

Because of the legal settlement agreed upon between the NFL and the former players and their families, including Mary Ann and Penny, there is a deadline that the NFL will stop paying damages for CTE. The way the settlement is structured, the NFL will only pay CTE benefits to players who were discovered to have had CTE between Jan. 1, 2006 and July 7, 2014. Because CTE can only be diagnosed post-mortem, this means no living players, such as John Hilton, who has likely been suffering from CTE for years, will be eligible for CTE benefits under the current settlement agreement.

The rationale the NFL has given for setting such a small timeframe on the CTE window is to prevent a rash of suicides among former NFL players trying to collect the settlements for their families. The NFL argued that many players would rather commit suicide than wait and die slowly before their families could collect payments.

With the current terms of the settlement, the NFL has defined the limited amount of CTE cases they will have to pay for. With the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, players have waived their right to sue the NFL over head injuries by signing their contract.

While the settlement will reach around $1 billion, the NFL’s annual revenue is $9 billion and the league is tax exempt. Roger Goodell and company, through the CBA and this settlement, have swept 60 years of past brain trauma under the rug for about one tenth of their annual revenue and simultaneously guaranteed they’ll never worry about it again in the future.

Roger Goodell earned an average of over $20 million a year in salary the last five years according to CNN, four times more than the $5 million maximum payout the lawsuit offers individual players over the rest of their lives.

Judge Anita Brody’s ruling in the Nov. 19 fairness hearing was the last major step before the settlement becomes official. Brody, who oversaw the objection to the settlement filed by the family of Dave Duerson, has a lot of discretion in deciding if the settlement is fair. After hearing cases from both the players and the league, she is expected to decide her ruling in the coming months. However, any decision Brody reaches will change neither the violent nature of football nor the hardships the Easterlings and Hiltons suffered.

“If there’s any part that makes me upset, it’s that I didn’t know,” Mary Ann said. Both Penny and Mary Ann lamented that they were oblivious to the connection between head injuries and football, but they were in the dark about CTE by the NFL’s design.

The NFL was aware of the correlation between football and brain trauma as early as the 1990s, but made no effort to inform players or their families, according to reports by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. Mary Ann and Penny did not make the connection until decades after their husbands retired. When there was a hearing on Capitol Hill in 2009 on concussions, neither Penny nor Mary Ann were informed.

When the Easterlings and Hiltons needed help understanding why Ray and John were spiraling into dementia, the NFL hid the answers they needed rather than showing them research. If the NFL had encouraged CTE research rather than undermined it, Ray Easterling may be alive today.

Mary Ann compared how the NFL handled CTE with how it handled the Ray Rice saga. “It all smells the same,” Mary Ann said. “I think the wives are the forgotten part of the whole deal. The wives have been disposable, and that’s the part that’s broken my heart.”

When Ray committed suicide in 2012, the Atlanta Falcons sent flowers to the Easterling’s home. They were addressed to Ray Easterling. There was no mention of Mary Ann, his wife of 36 years.

“As if I didn’t exist,” Mary Ann said.

Contact reporter Danny Heifetz at danny.heifetz@richmond.edu