“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
Installments to date in THE TED AGU PAPERS:
https://concussioninc.net/?p=10992
https://concussioninc.net/?p=10996
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11014
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11087
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11096
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11099
https://concussioninc.net/?p=11120
by Irvin Muchnick
Last week I received evident confirmation from the Alameda County sheriff’s office that it never received from the University of California-Berkeley campus police a statement by football player Joey Mahalic in March 2014.
As a result of this suppression or convenient oversight — take your pick — the authorities never incorporated the Mahalic information, concerning the peculiar-in-the-extreme strength and conditioning program of head coach Sonny Dykes’ assistant, Damon Harrington, into investigation of either Ted Agu’s death during a conditioning drill, in February 2014, or the concussion and hospitalization of Fabiano Hale, from a Harrington-inspired beating by teammate J.D. Hinnant in November 2013.
In Concussion Inc.’s exclusive coverage, we already have reported on the civil lawsuit deposition in which Harrington described what he told police. We also have presented deposition testimony from both an Alameda County sheriff’s lieutenant and the county coroner, establishing that Mahalic’s statement (along with another player’s) was among the more than 100 pages of supplementary reports by Cal police, in the wake of Agu’s death, that were never forwarded to county authorities.
In response to a public information request, the county sheriff now has told me Mahalic’s statement is not in its records. The response document was uploaded to http://muchnick.net/acsheriff.pdf.
Just before the Agu death incident, the Alameda County district attorney decided not to press charges against Hinnant over the earlier incident but left the case open. The district attorney has not asked Cal police for the Mahalic statement and has not explained why.
I also have a request for the Mahalic statement in the California Public Records Act pipeline at Cal. Last week the university estimated eight weeks for a full response. It’s not clear whether that is eight weeks from last week or eight weeks from the earlier submission of my request. The Cal PRA office declined to release a log of records requests — a piece of public information I have routinely acquired in the past from other agencies — in order to track the progress of this request in the queue and details on who else might be filing requests these days.
A separate but related set of public records concerns a testified review of conditioning coach Harrington’s program by UC Davis sports medicine co-director Dr. Jeffrey Tanji. So far all we really know about it is that Harrington testified, in his deposition in the Agu case, that the upshot was that Harrington got suspended … for one day. Berkeley, Davis, and the UC system president’s office all have promised compliance in the near future with assorted connected requests.
Meanwhile, we can count State Senator Loni Hancock among the elected leaders who are indifferent to the scandal of death and cover-up in Cal football. Last week a Hancock staffer called to tell me that the senator would not be responding to Concussion Inc.’s questions because she’s too busy doing the work on behalf of her constituents in California’s 9th district, of whom I am one.
For those of you keeping score, Hancock also is a former mayor of the city of Berkeley and the wife of current mayor Tom Bates, who played football at Cal.
Here are the unanswered questions to Senator Hancock: