Don Stone said the first warning sign came two years ago when Joshua O’Brien boarded a plane for school and suddenly, without any word, didn’t report to football camp at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.
O’Brien, a University senior history major, died last weekend from a self-inflicted gun shot, according to Eugene Police Department spokeswoman Jan Power. She said that, according to the police report, O’Brien made a 911 call at 2:34 p.m. on May 12 and left the phone off the hook without saying anything to the operator. When police arrived at his residence, they found the door open, O’Brien dead and a suicide note.
“He was really sensitive — he cared about a lot of people. Sometimes I thought he cared more about others than himself,” said Stone, who coached O’Brien through four years of football at Thurston high school in Springfield and kept in close contact with him through his college years, most recently over last spring break.
“He was an outstanding student and a really emotional kid,” Stone added. “He was one of our more fiery performers.”
O’Brien played football and wrestled for Thurston before attending UNLV on a football scholarship his freshman year of college. Stone said that O’Brien went to UNLV for his sophomore year and after he didn’t report to practice for a few days, coaches called O’Brien’s parents.
“The parents called me to see if I had heard from him,” Stone said.
O’Brien’s brother, Justin, a senior at Oregon State University, said that the decision to leave football and UNLV was sudden.
“One day he just decided no more football [and] decided to enroll in the UO,” he said.
O’Brien’s father chose not to comment on his son’s cause of death.
Stone said O’Brien felt like he let people down by not continuing with football and he thought he was being treated for depression. As a person who also played football in college, he reminded O’Brien to do whatever made him happy.
Stone said he remembered when, in a 1994 first-round playoff game, Thurston missed a field goal and some players criticized the kicker. O’Brien instantly stepped in to defend the kicker.
“He was not your typical football player … that was his struggle … sometimes [football] can be very brutal,” Stone said.
O’Brien had many academic goals beyond his sports life, according to his brother. He said O’Brien was an aspiring writer who had written his first novel and taken it to a publisher, who returned it for revisions. He added that O’Brien was one of the kind of people whom everybody knew and wanted to be around.
“You could spend 15 to 30 minutes with him and just go ‘whoa,’” he said. “Everybody had something in common with him, no matter if they were 6 or 60.”
A memorial service for O’Brien will be held today at 2 p.m. at St. Alice Catholic Church in Springfield, where much of his family lives.
UO senior, aspiring author takes his own life
Daily Emerald
May 17, 2000
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