‘Inadvertently’ Omitted Documents in California Public Records Act Case Show Berkeley Football Team Doctor Casey Batten — Point Person in the Ted Agu Sickle Cell Trait Death Cover-Up — Corresponding With Chief Campus Counsel

PREVIOUSLY:

“University of Oklahoma Athletic Trainer: From the Moment of Ted Agu’s Death, Cal Football Staff Feared Implications of a Finding of Sickling Collapse, Instead of Coronary,” March 25, 2019, https://concussioninc.net/?p=13743

Complete headline links to our series on the Ted Agu death cover-up (beginning November 2013 – before Agu’s death): https://concussioninc.net/?p=10877

by Irvin Muchnick

(I am back from a hiatus caused by a random violent street crime against two family members and myself on March 24. We are all doing better. Thank you to friends who learned about the incident and have sent along good wishes.)

Dr. Casey Batten, Cal football team physician who executed the University of California’s cover-up of the cause of Ted Agu’s 2014 death by misleading the coroner and withholding information about the dead student-athlete’s sickle cell trait, communicated directly with the chief campus counsel in December 2015 in documents that were belatedly released just last week in Concussion Inc.’s state Public Records Act lawsuit.

In forwarding the email exchange to my attorney Roy S. Gordet, UC claimed the two additional documents were “inadvertently” not included in a September 6, 2018, batch of almost entirely redacted records, for which the university is claiming attorney-client privilege and exemption from public release.

Like almost all of the rest of the assertedly privileged earlier production, these new documents are blacked out except for the “To,” “From,” “cc,” “Subject,” and “Attachment” lines. And unlike the earlier production, this one additionally blacks out the title of an apparent attachment document — suggesting that an unnamed attachment was part of the exchange.

On December 15, 2015, Christopher M. Patti, the chief counsel for the Berkeley campus, wrote to Batten, the team doctor, in an email cc’d to “Athletic Departmental.” The Athletic Departmental moniker is believed to correspond to a list of top athletic department officials. (Patti would die tragically in an accident in 2017.)

Later the same day, Batten replied to Patti in an email cc’d to Matt Conant and Jeff Hosking (outside lawyers who were defending the Agu family’s wrongful death lawsuit against the university, which would settle the next year for $4.75 million), Ryan Cobb (an associate athletic director), and Brad Buchman (director of the campus University Health Services). The entire substance of the exchange is redacted.

We have uploaded facsimiles of these documents to http://muchnick.net/batten-patti-exchange.pdf.