As More Info Emerges on Cal Football’s Ted Agu Death Cover-Up, University Dithers With ‘Do-Over’ Review of Assistant Coach Damon Harrington’s Conditioning Program

See It Now — Full Transcript of Whistleblower’s Suppressed March 2014 Statements to Campus Police on How Cal Football Killed Ted Agu
September 7, 2016
Did UC Berkeley Deputy AD Get Golden Parachute For Slow-Walking Investigations of Football Coach-Inspired Player Beating and Ted Agu Death?
September 10, 2016

“eBook Bonus: Introduction to ‘Ted Agu Papers,’ Cal Football Death Cover-Up,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=11359

“Table of Contents of the New eBook ‘TED AGU PAPERS’,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=11367

Amazon Kindle link: http://amzn.to/2aA2LDl

 

 

 

by Irvin Muchnick

 

The University of California-Berkeley’s disgraced lame-duck chancellor, Nicholas Dirks, promised over the summer a new-and-improved administrative review of the conditioning program of football coach Sonny Dykes’ assistant Damon Harrington. The coaching staff’s “crusader” culture (their word) essentially killed Ted Agu in 2014, to the tune of a $4.75 million wrongful death civil lawsuit settlement, and dissident faculty members were rightly unimpressed by the bogus report later in the year authored by UC Davis sports medicine guru Dr. Jeffrey Tanji, a crony of Cal football.

Tanji and co-author/co-crony John Murray didn’t even interview player Fabiano Hale, who had been beaten unconscious by teammate J.D. Hinnant, three months before Agu’s death, after Hale missed one of Harrington’s puke-inducing, homophobic-ranting conditioning sessions — triggering collective punishment drills for the athletes present, as well as the coach’s exhortation for them to take out their anger in vigilante action.

Information about all this, of course, is augmented anew with our publication this week of the suppressed campus police testimony of whistleblower player Joey Mahalic.

On August 1, Chancellor Dirks’ spokesperson, Dan Mogulof, told Concussion Inc. that a team of experts was being assembled for Harrington Review 2.0. This week, in response to a follow-up query, Mogulof provided this update: “Work on the recruitment of appropriate experts has progressed significantly, and we hope/expect this phase of the endeavor to be completed in the next two weeks.”

As I said earlier, the Mahalic police statement raises the legitimate question of whether more than an administrative review is needed here: university officials who first gave Mahalic the run-around, and then concealed from Alameda County authorities information and more than 100 pages of documents pertinent to the investigation of Agu’s death, may have obstructed justice. The office of Nancy O’Malley, the district attorney, so far is not responding to our questions about that, but we’ll keep asking. More  tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a couple of housekeeping items:

* The first and last names of a Cal athletics official were mangled in the transcription of Mahalic’s police interview. We reproduced the errors before an alert reader corrected us. The official is Solly Fulp, the former deputy athletic director who now heads the University Partnership Program.

* The transcript identified the campus police officers who interviewed Mahalic as Detective Harry Bennigson and “Lieutenant Deckler.” Yesterday, UCPD chief Margo Bennett confirmed to us that the latter was Lieutenant Marc DeCoulode. Sources on the Hinnant-Hale incident have told us that Bennigson and DeCoulode were instrumental in tamping down real-time media coverage of the event in November 2013 by assuring journalists that it was an internal team misunderstanding and not a criminal matter — all while the district attorney was deciding to “defer” criminal charges against Hinnant. In a telephone interview with me in April of this year, DeCoulode said the whole matter was “over and done with.” (See https://concussioninc.net/?p=11020.)

Well, not quite.

 

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“Explainer: How ‘Insider’ Access Made San Francisco Chronicle and Berkeley J-School Miss Real Story Behind Death of Cal Football’s Ted Agu,” https://concussioninc.net/?p=10931

Complete headline links to our Ted Agu series:

https://concussioninc.net/?p=10877

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Concussion Inc. - Author Irvin Muchnick