What happened to the young athlete was a tragedy.
Drushaun Humphrey was a standout football running back, good enough to be offered a scholarship to Ohio State University even before he started his junior year at Rogers High School.
Then, like thousands of kids across the nation, on Toledos most gorgeous spring day of the year, he was playing a pickup basketball game late Monday afternoon. Suddenly, this athletic, apparently supremely fit 18-year-old keeled over.
They rushed him to Medical College of Ohio Hospitals, but it was too late. His heart had stopped forever. What happened to him was every parents nightmare.
And, unfortunately, The Blade was insensitive.
Yesterday, in our story about the young mans shocking death, we included the fact that he was having difficulty in school and that his eligibility to play was in question.
Vicki Laverde, a visiting nurse who lives in West Toledo, was outraged.
“Whatever happened to the idea that we should speak no ill of the dead?” she asked. “I guess as a parent of a student athlete, I empathized, and I know how sensitive adolescents can be. And how sensitive their parents can be.”
“What was the necessity in having the story reflect the challenges this young man was having in his academic career?” Darrel Gibson added. They were among a number of readers who called to complain.
Our readers were right, and we were wrong.
“That should not have appeared in this story,” Ron Royhab, executive editor of The Blade, agreed. “This was not a story about his academics, it was about his untimely death.”
How did such a thing happen? Not out of any maliciousness.
The sports department was preparing a story on Humphrey, who everyone agreed was the hottest football prospect Toledo has produced in many years.
Had he lived, that story would have told how he was fighting to succeed, in school and life as well as on the gridiron, in a balanced and appropriate way.
But when he unexpectedly died, we inappropriately used some of that material in the story of his death. Somehow, we fell down on the editing or “gate-keeping” process, and did not realize how improper it was until we saw it in print.
The fact is that we should have done better. But it is also true that newspapers are, as the Washington Posts Ben Bradlee used to say, “the first rough draft of history,” and sometimes, when writing a rough draft on deadline, things like this happen.
That is not, we recognize, good enough, and we will try to do better.
“I personally would advise The Blade to apologize to the family, the high school, and the community as a whole for the lack of decorum,” Mr. Gibson wrote yesterday to Kurt Franck, our managing editor.
Hes right, and The Blade does.
