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Print Ray Seals |
This was the Super Bowl that Mr. Seals and his cousin-business partner-best friend had talked up in the weeks before Jonny Gammage died in a traffic stop, which escalated into a still-mysterious fracas on a dark roadside. Mr. Gammage was driving Mr. Seals' 1988 Jaguar through Brentwood when he was pulled over on suspicion of impaired driving.
Twenty minutes later, Mr. Gammage lay dead beside his cousin's car. Blood tests found no evidence of drugs and just a trace amount of alcohol in his system, and three policemen were prosecuted, none successfully, for his death.
In the ensuing decade, Mr. Gammage floated like a ghost over the subject of race relations in Western Pennsylvania, and bled like a wound into Mr. Seals' career.
"I swear to you, before the games, I used to see him strapped to that stretcher," Mr. Seals said.
There is less anger burning inside Mr. Seals than loss and puzzlement.
"You can be riding high and something can happen and your life changes. This was a life-changer," Mr. Seals said. "People used to say Jonny was like a wife to me. He took care of schedules. He handled my business. I tried replacing him, but it was just impossible."
In Syracuse, where Mr. Seals, the son of a city police officer, was famous for football, and Mr. Gammage was known for community work, the death in Pittsburgh on Oct. 12, 1995, can still summon resounding anger.
"Why did he have to die?" asks the Rev. Larry Ellis, who presided at Mr. Gammage's funeral and later sought a law to establish independent boards to investigate deaths in police custody. The Rev. Ellis waved his hands broadly and built up a head of rage.
"That was not a mistake. You don't mistakenly choke the life out of someone," he said. "Five officers? That's an officer for each limb and more."
A coroner's ruling decided that, however it happened, the life was, indeed, choked out of Mr. Gammage, who died as he was held face-down, hands cuffed behind his back, on Saw Mill Run Boulevard, Route 51. It was declared a case of "positional asphyxiation," meaning essentially that his position on the ground impaired his breathing.
Mr. Gammage's death received widespread publicity in Syracuse, a town of 114,000, a quarter of them black. The city council passed a resolution endorsing the Rev. Ellis's call to federalize investigations of police brutality. Community groups organized meetings and protests. Mr. Gammage's name was added to the list invoked every time the subject of a death in police custody came up.
For Mr. Seals, though, the death of Mr. Gammage was less an emblem of the national race divide than the seed of a still-gnawing ache. In the summer before the 1995 football season, Mr. Seals said, he and Mr. Gammage were working out on side-by-side treadmills at a gym and talking about the Super Bowl. The Steelers had missed their chance at the world championship in 1994 by 3 yards.
"We talked about 'when we get to the Super Bowl this year,' " Mr. Seals recalled. "Then, just to go to the Super Bowl that year and him not be around ..." Mr. Seals' voice trailed off.
"One day, I just hope we really will find out what happened."
Some, such as Mr. Gammage's mother, who gathered with his sisters, Demetria and Pam, to plant flowers at his grave, are certain they know the blanks in the narrative.
Standing beside their son and brother's grave at Oakwood Cemetery here, they blame police brutality they think was born of racism and vindicated by a justice system that does not guard the guardians.
"Mean cops, racist cops, because he was black driving a Jaguar. He wasn't a criminal. I'll say that and I'll say it over," Narves Gammage said.
After Mr. Gammage was buried at Oakwood, Mr. Seals flew home for a Thursday night football game, the first of many times he glanced at the stretcher on the sidelines and saw his best friend.
There were the artifacts of a life interrupted. When he went to Mr. Gammage's apartment in Coraopolis to clear it out, Mr. Seals found a blanket on the floor, Mr. Gammage's medications beside it, all suggesting that, sometime before he died, Mr. Gammage had again thrown his back out of joint.
"Me and Jonny couldn't even play basketball together because his back would go out," Mr. Seals said.
When police returned Mr. Seals' Jaguar from the impound lot, the trunk was filled with groceries.
"There was a box of chocolate chip cookies. Someone had poked a hole in them, looking around for something," Mr. Seals said. He shipped the car to his home in Tampa, Fla., hung on to it for a while, then had it sold.
In 1997, after missing the preceding season with a shoulder injury, Mr. Seals became a free agent and signed on with the Carolina Panthers. He retired from professional football a year later and returned home to Syracuse, where he hopes to coach in the city's high schools.
To do so, though, Mr. Seals must be a city schools employee. Because he is that rarity in professional football, a player who did not attend a college, Mr. Seals cannot teach. Instead, he works as a hall monitor at Delaware Elementary School, where the 6-foot-3 Mr. Seals, who admits to 300 pounds, delights in watching bug-eyed children stare up at him in wonder as they pass through the halls.
"Sometimes they come up to me and say, 'Were you really a pro football player?' " he said.
That status, professional athlete, helped Mr. Seals on one occasion, just after the Super Bowl his cousin did not live to see. Mr. Seals and some friends visited a casino near Tampa, then his legal residence, when he backed out of a parking space in the lot and noticed police lights flashing behind him. It was the casino's security patrol, he said.
Figuring he was blocking some sort of emergency call, Mr. Seals said, he pulled his Mercedes-Benz into an empty space. A uniformed officer ran over to the car, he said, and began screaming.
"He says, 'Don't you ever move that car when I have my lights on!' " Mr. Seals said. "I'm looking at that guy and he's blowing his cool, totally."
The officer radioed people inside the casino and learned that he had gotten in the face of Ray Seals, Pittsburgh Steeler.
"He comes back later and says he's sorry," Mr. Seals said.
"Well, sometimes, sorry's too damn late."
