A Hard Hitting Decision

The high-definition MRI showed small areas of bleeding on Richy Klepal’s brain, a condition commonly known as a Duret hemorrhage, and usually only discovered during autopsies.

“The outcome is almost universally fatal,” reads a summation of the hemorrhage in Imaging Science Today.

So five days before his 18th birthday, Richy went to Florida Orthopaedic Institute with his mother and girlfriend for a followup appointment. There was much to discuss but a single important recommendation: Richy, a star offensive tackle at Plant High who was headed to Florida State upon graduation, must stop playing football.

“This is a 17-year-old Caucasian male with repeated mild traumatic brain injuries,” Dr. Marc Hilgers wrote in the report after the Sept. 19 visit. “The current findings confirm our decision and the decision of the athlete to step back from playing football and to focus on his academic career.”

“It scared me to death,” said Richy’s mother, Amy. “We could have lost him over this.”

News of Richy’s decision resonated during a time of greater public awareness of football-related concussions and traumatic brain injuries. About 5,500 plaintiffs, including 4,000 former NFL players, have filed concussion-related lawsuits against the league, accusing it of withholding information about the link between head trauma and permanent brain injuries.

But the wages of the game made a particularly tragic example of Richy, one of the youngest football stars ever forced into early retirement.

His career lasted four years. At least one concussion for every season.

Read the rest of the story by Times staff writer Joel Anderson at tb-two.com (click the HomeTeam button).

Cheating at Harvard

It’s no news that students in high school and college have been known to cheat on exams, but Harvard University comes under a new cloud with reports by two newspapers that administrators searched the emails of 16 deans last fall, trying to figure out who leaked information to reporters about a case of cheating at the school. The Associated Press reports that the deans were not told of the search beforehand, and only one was notified afterward.

The cheating scandal involved academic sanctions against about 60 students who were forced to withdraw from Harvard for a period of time after cheating on a final exam for a class on Congress, according to the Associated Press.

In a matter related to cheating at Harvard, former tb-two* staff writer Xi Yu, a current Harvard student who graduated from King High in 2009, gets reporting credit on the cover of a recent book, Conning Harvard by Yu’s Harvard Crimson colleague Julie Zauzmer. The book is the story of former Harvard student Adam Wheeler, who faked transcripts, SAT scores and recommendation letters to gain admission to the school, where he continued his trail of fraud, plagiarizing assignments until his scam was discovered as he tried the same tactics to win the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships. The book was published last fall.

Party for paddy

Even if you don’t have a drop of Irish blood in you, Sunday is a day to wear green and celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. Go to tampabay.com and click on Things to Do for a complete listing of events around Tampa Bay. Just remember, no green beer for you!

Put your phone in the trunk

In case you haven’t heard, texting and driving is stupid. As efforts to ban the practice in Florida await legislative action, here are some somber reminders of why you should swear off texting behind the wheel. The videos are part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign. Watch heart- wrenching testimonies from texting-accident survivors at bit.ly/fyOqnF, and check out the shocking (or maybe not?) stats from a survey of teens at bit.ly/JWN4RZ. (Preview: 43 percent of teens admit to texting while driving, even though 97 percent say they know it is unsafe.)