Lawrence Phillips committed suicide on January 12 inside his cell at Kern Valley Prison a day after a judge ruled that Phillips would stand trial, and possibly face the death penalty, for the April 12 murder of his former cellmate Damion Soward. Phillips decided not to wait on a lethal injection and just take care of the whole thing himself.
He was found the next day, unresponsive and the prison still won’t release the method of how he killed himself for at least 90 days, but considering he was in a locked cell, there weren’t a lot of options to go with other than some kind of asphyxiation-related cause.
Phillips was a murderer, a serial abuser of women and, when on the street, an active danger to anyone who crossed his path as three kids learned in August, 2005 when he tried to run over them with his car after a pick-up football game at a local park. Now he’s dead, a decision he made himself, adding one more victim to the lengthy list he acquired in life. At least this time you could argue that Phillips’ target had it coming.
Lawrence Phillips was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on May 12, 1975, and is just a little over a year younger than I am. He was drafted at No. 6 by the St. Louis Rams in 1996 after a successful career on the field with the University of Nebraska. Phillips wasn’t so successful off the field, unless you somehow count dragging his girlfriend, Kate McEwan (a player on Nebraska’s women’s basketball team) down a flight of stairs and slamming her head against a mailbox a success. In which case Phillips was already an All-Pro.
Coddled by his despicable coach Tom Osborne, who should have a statue right next to Joe Paterno’s outside their torture chambers in Hell, Phillips was not kicked off the team, even though he was “suspended” for a few games. In one memorable moment a reporter asked Osborne “if one of your players had roughed up a member of your family and had dragged her down a flight of steps, would you have reinstated that player to the team?” Osborne, coward that he was and remains, didn’t answer that question and instead left the press conference in a mincing huff.
Phillips played in six games that season including a dynamic performance against No. 2-ranked Florida in the Fiesta Bowl that would give Osborne and the Cornhuskers the national title. Phillips rushed for 165 yards and two touchdowns and caught a 16 yard touchdown pass in the game.
“You know, he made some mistakes and had some negatives, but he also wasn’t quite the evil person that some people might think he was,” Osborne was quoted as saying in USA Today. I like to think while he said that he glanced fondly at his 1994 National Championship ring that has to be periodically scoured by the blood of the innocent as to not burn its way through the bottom of his trophy case.
“Some negatives” is a pretty interesting way to say “murderer, attempted murderer and batterer of women,” but as an educator from the University of Nebraska, nobody ever accused Osborne of being smart.
For most NFL teams the fact that Phillips was obviously a danger to any community that he would join made him undraftable, but not for then St. Louis Rams general manager Steve Ortmayer and head coach Rich Brooks. With future Hall of Fame running back Eddie George sitting in the draft’s green room presumably polishing his freshly-acquired Heisman Trophy, Ortmayer and Brooks knew what was best for the Rams and the team. They wasted no time in turning in the card, drafting Phillips No. 6 overall in what would go down in history as one of the most disastrous and stupid drafts the Rams, as an organization, would ever participate in.
(The Rams had two first round picks and two second round picks. Here’s who they got:1a. Phillips, 1b. WR Eddie Kennison, 2a. QB Tony Banks and 2b. TE Ernie Conwell. Here’s who they could have had without make so much as a trade phone call. 1a. Eddie George, 1b. WR Marvin Harrison or MLB Ray effing Lewis), 2a. WR Muhsin Muhammad, 2b. FS Brian Dawkins. Oh, and in the third round they passed up Terrell Owens for a running back named Jerald Moore and if you’ve never heard of Jerald Moore, you’re not alone. I don’t even remember him and I’m a fan of the team. This is why coaches deserve to get fired and never hired again).
Brooks and Ortmayer, who had not yet successfully ran an NFL team at that point, somehow thought they were the right men to clean up Phillips’ act and turn him into an NFL star. Instead he got them both fired at the end of the season and ended up back in jail. Dick Vermeil was hired as the new general manager and head coach the following season.
If there was a human being on planet Earth that would have the patience and fatherly love to save Lawrence Phillips it was Vermeil, who basically adopted every person that came into his life. Vermeil and Phillips had their first meeting in jail after Phillips had been busted for drunk driving. Vermeil was determined to save Phillips career. Phillips wouldn’t let that happen. Just 10 games into the 1997 season Vermeil cut him from the team.
Vermeil, never one to hide his emotions, was still broken up about it almost two decades later.
“Lawrence was a troubled kid,” Vermiel told CBS Houston. “No question about it. When I got to St. Louis he was in jail. When he was paroled, I went and picked him up. I’m going to rejuvenate this kid. … There were some real good qualities to this guy, but obviously he had some deep-rooted emotional problems that prevented him from taking advantage of all his different talents.”
Vermeil wasn’t surprised by the news that Phillips killed himself. But he was saddened, wondering if he could have somehow helped. It’s the kind of person Vermeil is and was then. The kind that Phillips, with his behavior, forced to cut him loose.
Phillips bounced around various leagues over the next few years and had stints with the Miami Dolphins and San Francisco 49ers, but couldn’t stay out of trouble. It was a missed block from Phillips that would end Steve Young’s playing career. Phillips mocked the coaches, refused to practice and was cut free by the NFL for the final time in 1999. Some men, as the quote goes, you just can’t reach.
After multiple run-ins with the law and multiple new battered women, Phillips was finally put away on a 25-year prison sentence. Six years later he would strangle his cell mate to death before killing himself a few months afterwards.
Phillips’ family has donated his brain to a CTE study, but in this case his behavior, lack of self control and violent impulses can’t be blamed on football. This is the way Phillips showed up and luckily enough for him he played a sport where coaches like Osborne and Brooks are far too willing to overlook a few girlfriends with black eyes for talent on the football field. Football didn’t make Phillips violent. It enabled it and now, at last, his violence is at an end. And it ended the way it always does for men like Phillips, with a casket getting lowered into the ground.
He was 40 years old.
