"I saw something flash out of the corner of my right eye," said Stacy Holzer, Christopher O'Leary's girlfriend.
That something was the right fist of Richard Newton, a 17-year-old quarterback and teammate of Woods'. The fist connected with O'Leary's jaw.
"Chris' eyes rolled back in his head," Holzer said. "He dropped like nothing."
The cheerleader knelt over her boyfriend, cradling his head in her tiny hands.
"Then, I saw the boot," she said.
The boot belonged to Marcus Raines, the team's 17-year-old linebacker.
"Marcus kicked Chris' head right out of my hands," Holzer says. "He kicked it like it was a football."
Within hours he was airlifted to a trauma center in Northridge, where surgeons compared the brain hemorrhaging O'Leary suffered to setting a plate of Jell-O on the sidewalk on a summer day.
Three days later, O'Leary was declared brain-dead. Before deciding to donate his organs, the family was allowed a minute alone. O'Leary's mother and girlfriend crawled into the hospital bed, put their arms around his body and sobbed.
If he REALLY wants to turn his life around, why does it have to be done on a football field, with the prospect of making mega-bucks if he makes it to the pros? Why not spend the rest of his life in some kind of public service capacity, no matter how lowly? I am all for giving people second chances (although not Shelby), but in this case a second chance at freedom should be used doing something more socially profitable than playing football.