The former NFL player murdered five people in South Carolina, including a top doctor and two minors, and then took his own life in yet another act that links football with violence.
BY MIGUEL ENRÍQUEZ
A police source who chose not to reveal his name said the doctor Adams killed had treated him before killing him on April 7, but at midnight Thursday, the 33-year-old former player took his own life with a .45 caliber handgun.
The 33-year-old shined as a collegiate player, where he was able to develop the potential that led him to the NFL to be drafted in 2010 by the San Francisco 49ersthen played for the New England Patriots and finished his short career in 2015 in an Atlanta Falcons uniform.
Like hundreds of athletes who are dedicated to the sport of tackling, Phillip Adams was the victim of more than one concussion, so science could try to find an explanation for the apparently motiveless act of murdering six people and then taking his own life.
The characteristic disease that derives from the blows of this style is called Chronic traumatic encephalopathyThe NFL recognized in 2016 that 99% of their league's players suffer from this condition.
Within the symptoms that are present when an athlete is part of this condition are the memory loss, constant headache, poor light support before your eyes, mood disorders, suicidal thoughts and aggressive behaviors.
The former Forty-Niner's case isn't the first to end with this situation. One of the most named was that of Aaron Hernandez, star of the New England Patriots who murdered his friend Odin Lloyd in 2017. The tight end went to prison and ended his life there; days later, an examination of his brain revealed that he was suffering from CTE at a level never before seen in any other athlete.
Brains that are noted to be damaged by the disease have large cavities and torn tissues at their center, indicators of neuronal death. In 2017, the newspaper New York Times published a study conducted on 202 brains to analyze the conditions in which they ended up with similar patterns; of those, 111 were from former NFL players, 110 turned out to be part of the FTE.
After a lengthy examination of various players who end their lives (or keep them) in similar conditions, it is very likely that Phillip Adams' autopsy will show a new victim of the blows that the head suffers inside the gridiron and that takes its toll a few years later.
