Jury deliberations started Monday in the $53 million wrongful death suit against the NCAA brought by the widow of a former USC linebacker posthumously diagnosed with CTE after hearing from both sides on whether football-related injuries indirectly killed him.
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Closing statements concluded in the wrongful death trial of Matthew Gee, who’s counsel alleged his chronic traumatic encephalopathy was a result of of the thousands of head injuries Gee suffered while playing football for the University of Southern California from 1988 to 1992.
The jury is first panel in the country to decide whether the NCAA is responsible for a player’s football-related injury and subsequent death.
Alana Gee and her children testified about Matthew’s mental decline near the end of his life, before passing away on New Year’s Eve 2018 at the age of 49 of an alcohol and cocaine overdose.
A model husband and father, Gee over time became more aggressive, experiencing memory issues, anger, delusions, impulsivity, sleeplessness and a substance abuse disorder that plaintiff’s counsel, William G. Horton, said was caused by CTE.
“Before Matt died, he knew he had CTE,” Horton claimed. “And he didn’t know it clinically, but he knew it. He talked about it, and he knew he was powerless to beat it, that he couldn’t stop his brain: he couldn’t shut it off.”
Horton requested that jurors award a sum of $53 million in both economic and noneconomic damages, as well as loss of love, comfort and moral support from today forward.
“You cannot bring Matt back, but you can say what the NCAA did to him was not right,” Horton said. “You have the chance to be on the other side of that, so there’s not another Matt Gee, so that this is finally on the NCAA’s radar that you cannot continue to treat kids like this. You have to tell them what’s going on and if you don’t, there’ll be consequences because this is the only way they’ll ever listen.”
NCAA’s counsel, William F. Stute, argued that Gee died from sudden cardiac death brought on by his yearslong uncontrolled hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, excessive drinking that predated college, and his eventual overdose and cardiac event, contending that the NCAA is not liable.
“I think you can conclude very easily why there were no experts: first, no expert is willing to testify that CTE causes any of these things because it doesn’t,” Stute stated. “Nobody was willing to put their professional MD on the line to say this stuff, or they couldn’t find anybody who was willing.”
Horton closed his statement requesting that the jury return a verdict in their favor on Tuesday, Matthew’s birthday.
“There is only one cause of CTE, and it is a cumulative number of head impacts,” Horton said, noting that Gee suffered an estimated 6,000 hits to the head during his football career. “Tomorrow would be Matt Gee’s birthday, which is just a very weird coincidence. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask you to deliver a verdict on his birthday, so he didn’t die for nothing.”
Read more articles from Haute Lawyer, visit https://hauteliving.com/hautelawyer
Source: https://www.law360.com/articles/1551551
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