“The intensity, that was his personality,” the Rev. Katherine Brearley said from her Allentown home. “But his intensity spiral went downward. His friends and his football coaches all tried to help him put it in perspective and we thought they were succeeding. They told him to take it one day at a time.
“But there was something with his schoolwork where he said, ‘I can’t do this and it’s not worth it.’ All the energy that we had seen him put into life spiraled out of control and made him do this.”
Brearley, a minister in the United Church of Christ, said her 21-year-old son was found Monday afternoon inside the off-campus apartment he shared with four roommates, all members of the football team. He had apparently hanged himself.
Full story: Penn mourns football player who took his own life | Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/28/2010