Suicide, Quarterbacks and the Hilinski Family

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IRVINE, Calif. — Ryan Hilinski got the talk in March, two months after his older brother died.

“You can walk away,” his parents, Mark and Kym, and eldest brother, Kelly, told him. Deep down, part of them would be relieved if he did. If he were younger, they would have forbidden him to play football altogether.

But Ryan was almost 18 years old and one of the best high school quarterbacks in the country. ESPN would name him the top pro-style quarterback in the class of 2019. More than 30 colleges would offer him full scholarships, including blue bloods like Georgia, Ohio State and Louisiana State, and his childhood dream school, Stanford. He had worked too long and accomplished too much for them to take this away from him now.

Only he could decide whether to keep pursuing the sport that may have led to his brother Tyler’s suicide, a death that stunned nearly everyone who knew him. One day Tyler was the likely starting quarterback for a team on the rise. The next, he was dead.

Tyler Hilinski shot himself in a closet inside his Pullman, Wash., apartment on Jan. 16. He was 21. Four months earlier he had been carried off the field after leading the Washington State Cougars to an electric triple-overtime victory over Boise State. His parents last saw him alive a few weeks before his death, on a family vacation in Mexico. He seemed happy and healthy, which only haunts them further. Where were the warning signs that their middle son wanted to take his own life?

“We have no clue what happened,” Mark said. “We will sit here for the next 20 years and not know what the heck happened to Tyler.”

The biggest window into Tyler’s mind arrived posthumously, via a brain autopsy conducted by the Mayo Clinic. It revealed that he had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurodegenerative disease brought on by repeated head trauma.

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