Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard Read online

  Two days later, the counselor noted that Derek planned to go to New York in a couple of days to move into a new apartment, and that he continued to deflect probing questions. The session focused on the issue of pain.

  “Client reports that some other athletes are ‘babies’ when it comes to pain,” the counselor wrote. “Client discusses his job with a noticeable delight when he talks about being a professional athlete and appears to take pride in his role on the team.”

  EARLY ON APRIL 29, a Friday, Derek flew from Los Angeles International Airport to New York’s LaGuardia. He landed shortly after 4 P.M. Before heading to Manhattan, to the new apartment on the west side that Derek planned to share with Devin Wilson, Derek headed east, toward the suburbs of Long Island, where he paid a man $4,000.

  Derek visited the new Manhattan apartment that he planned to share with Wilson, his old Prince George teammate, who had moved Derek’s belongings from his other place. And then Derek drove his Audi to Minneapolis. He arrived well after midnight at the apartment that he and Aaron would share at 415 North 1st Street, a two-bedroom place on the second floor of a complex called Heritage Landing. Before he got to the apartment, though, Derek stopped at Sneaky Pete’s.

  Aaron saw that Derek had a large Ziploc bag filled with an assortment of pills, dozens of them, including OxyContin, Percocet, and Xanax. Aaron recognized them by now. He placed them into pill bottles from old prescriptions and stashed them out of sight, out of the easy reach of temptation. If Derek needed pills to combat his pain, Aaron was not going to make it easy for him to find them in large quantities.

  Derek and Aaron drove to Lawrence, Kansas, to visit their sister, Krysten. Along the way, they stopped at a truck stop because Derek wanted to buy a CB radio.

  “Let’s screw around with some truckers,” Derek said.

  He paid $150 for it, thinking he could just plug it into his Audi’s cigarette lighter. It was only after the brothers were on the road that they realized it needed to be installed through the fuse box. Derek still liked the idea. He said he would get that done sometime.

  Krysten was a graduating senior at Kansas, and the school was holding its end-of-season banquet for the basketball team. A six-foot-five center, as well liked by her teammates as Derek was in hockey, Krysten averaged 8 points and 4.4 rebounds over four seasons. She was the 20th player in program history to score more than 1,000 career points, and was named to the All-Big 12 academic second team as a senior.

  The brothers hurried back to Minnesota after the banquet. Aaron was relieved to see how good Derek seemed—clear-headed, not complaining about concussion symptoms. Derek and Aaron had gone most of the fall and winter to February without speaking, the fallout from their arguments the previous summer. Now Derek seemed in high spirits.

  The night before Derek was to fly to Los Angeles and report back to the rehabilitation center, Erin sat with a friend in a Minneapolis bar called Bar La Grassa. Erin told the other woman that Derek had been in touch with her now and again, and since she had moved into an apartment building next door to the one that Derek and Aaron planned to spend the summer, she would probably bump into him on occasion. That would be strange.

  Just then, Derek walked into the bar. Erin practically jumped.

  “I felt like I saw a ghost,” she told him.

  The two met for lunch the next day before Derek’s flight to Los Angeles, and the awkwardness of the breakup and elapsed time faded quickly. Derek told Erin he was going to California to train and see Ron Salcer. Even then—especially then—he tried to keep his drug troubles from her. He was not about to tell her he was back in rehabilitation.

  Derek took an afternoon flight from Minneapolis on May 4 and landed back in Los Angeles a little after 7 o’clock in the evening. But before he left, he begged Aaron to come with him. We can hang out together, go to the beach, and work out, Derek said.

  Aaron demurred, not wanting Derek to spend money on a last-minute flight for him. But Derek booked one for him, anyway, two days later. He got Aaron a hotel room at a Marriott Courtyard not far from the rehabilitation center.

  Derek had rented a Porsche, and he picked up Aaron each morning at the hotel. They spent the days bouncing between the gym and the beach. At the gym, they boxed. At the beach, they worked out and played in the water.

  Derek wanted a deep tan—“Brazilian nut” was the tone that he joked he wanted his skin to be—and asked Aaron to put sunscreen on his back. Aaron nonchalantly swiped a few squiggles on Derek. It left Derek with a white Z on his otherwise sunburned back.

  The two went to movies and to Starbucks. They occasionally saw Salcer and his grown daughters. They ate a few fancy dinners, including at Katsuya in Hollywood, where Derek paid the $579.77 tab. Another night, they went to Supperclub Los Angeles, a restaurant and nightclub in Hollywood where meals were prepared on a stage and diners lay on white beds to eat. Derek spent $2,083.04.

  In early May, a woman named Ashley whom Derek liked from Sneaky Pete’s—a different Ashley than the one who visited New York in January—called Derek with a problem. She was in Miami Beach, unable to pay a bill at the Fontainebleau Hotel because her credit card was declined. He put the $3,807.32 charge on his American Express card. She promised to pay him back.

  At night, Derek dropped Aaron back at the hotel and returned to Authentic Recovery Center. Aaron knew that Derek was being drug tested and undergoing some sort of detoxification. Derek had to check in a time or two every day, but Aaron thought it seemed more like a hotel than a rehabilitation clinic.

  The progress reports in Derek’s file petered out as the weeks went by. Derek’s return on May 4 had been noted, saying that Derek reported that his trip to New York was successful. But the next entry in the notes the center later gave to Derek’s family was eight days later.

  “Program therapist was informed by Residential Supervisor on 4/12,” Derek’s file read, with the wrong month written down, “that client left for MN and was due to be away from facility until 5/24/11. Reported purpose of trip was for training.”

  Shortly after his arrival in April, Derek had received permission from the league’s substance abuse program to be gone from the center from May 13 to 24 to attend Krysten’s college graduation in Kansas, according to the Boogaards. (For graduation, Derek gave her a $5,000 gift certificate to Astor & Black, his New York tailor.) In early May, Derek asked Dan Cronin, the lead counselor, if he could book him a flight to Minneapolis on May 12, not May 13.

  Cronin told Derek that Dr. David Lewis, the program’s co-director, said no.

  “Advised by Dan that leaving 5/12 was against my advice,” Lewis wrote in his notes on May 6. “Must stick to plan.”

  Derek bought his own ticket for May 12.

  On May 11, the night before he left Los Angeles, Derek went to dinner with Aaron and the Salcers. Ron and his wife and their two daughters, both in their mid-20s, were there, along with the young women’s boyfriends.

  They ate at Fonz’s, a steakhouse in Manhattan Beach. Derek told Salcer that he wanted to come back and stay at a beach house for a few weeks over the summer, as he and Aaron had done the year before, and he gave Salcer a signed blank check for a deposit. Derek was engaging again, comfortable and funny. The group laughed and lingered, and everything seemed right with Derek—not perfect, Salcer thought, but better than it had been in many, many months.

  Derek complained about the Rangers, who had recently told him they wanted him to stay in New York over the summer to train—potentially wrecking Derek’s summer plans in Minnesota and California. Salcer spun it into a positive. It means they still want you, Derek, he said. Derek said he wanted to make up for the last season, to prove them wrong with a new start. He would show them that he was worth the money. He would regain his crown as the toughest enforcer in the NHL.

  The group split after hugs. Derek and Aaron had a flight the next morning. Salcer sent Derek a playful but serious text message: “Have a safe flight. Take care of yourself. Stay out of tr
ouble. And don’t go to Sneaky’s.”

  IT WAS THURSDAY, May 12, in the late afternoon of a warm spring day in Minneapolis. Derek showered and prepared to go out. He was in the mood to celebrate. He wore dark jeans, a blue-and-white checked shirt, and black Pumas.

  Derek asked Aaron for pills. Aaron knew where they were. He asked Derek if he really thought that was a good idea, given that he had just left rehabilitation, but Derek insisted. Come on, he said. You know one is not going to make a difference.

  Aaron gave his brother a Percocet—just one, Aaron said later. It was about 6 o’clock.

  Derek left the apartment and went downstairs to let Ashley into the building. She worked at Sneaky Pete’s, one of the revolving servers who wore low-cut tops and an alluring smile, and who on busy nights sold beers from a trough of ice or slid through the crowd to sell sweet-tasting shots to keep the patrons well oiled and energized.

  They talked with Aaron in the apartment for a while. Derek and Ashley left for Seven, a steakhouse and sushi lounge on Hennepin Avenue, in the heart of downtown Minneapolis’s social scene.

  Jeremy and Jennie Clark met them there. Dillon Hafiz, part of the family that owned Sneaky Pete’s, and another friend had been waiting for Derek and Ashley at Seven for an hour. Aaron declined to go and stayed at the apartment.

  At 7:11, Derek called the cell phone of Dan Cronin, the NHL substance-abuse program counselor. The call was not answered. Derek sent a text message. Over the course of 12 minutes, Derek and Cronin exchanged seven text messages.

  Derek also called his mother in Regina. Joanne missed the call, and Derek did not leave a message. He called again a short while later, and she missed it again. She called back and left her son a voice-mail message.

  At Seven, Derek drank Jack Daniels and Coke, at least a few of them. He excused himself from the table and went to the bar’s ATM, where he withdrew $200.

  Derek paid the $251.27 bill with a credit card. Ashley drove Derek, in his car, back to the apartment to get Aaron. Ashley left, to go change clothes at home, and agreed to meet Derek later at Sneaky Pete’s.

  It was about 11 P.M. Derek was visibly drunk.

  “Holy fuck,” Aaron said to him. “How did you get so banged up at dinner?”

  “I didn’t even eat,” Derek said.

  Their travels extended only a few blocks within Minneapolis’s Warehouse District, but Derek wanted to keep moving, more than usual. They began at Sneaky Pete’s. They moved to a strip club named Augie’s, then back to Sneaky Pete’s, where Derek had more drinks and called Ashley. She arrived 15 minutes later. The group left and turned right around the corner to take a quick look inside a live-music joint called Bootleggers, but they did not stay long. It was past 1 A.M., and the bars would close within the hour. The group crossed the street to a dance club called Aqua.

  Derek squeezed drinks in before last call, and the group rushed back to Sneaky Pete’s so that Derek could close his bar tab. When the bars closed at 2 A.M., the group climbed into Clark’s car for the short ride, about a mile or so, back to the Boogaard brothers’ apartment. Along the way, though, Derek asked for the car to be pulled over. When it stopped, he jumped out and ran. Aaron gave chase.

  He caught up to Derek under a bridge. Derek was emotional, complaining that Ashley did not like him the way he liked her. As the brothers walked the mile or so to their apartment, Derek’s mood swung from playful to despondent. He spoke of his crippling loneliness one moment. In the next, he belligerently shouted to other night crawlers on the edge of downtown, challenging them to fight.

  The others were waiting at the apartment building when Derek and Aaron arrived. Derek went straight into the bathroom. Jeremy Clark followed to offer counseling, and the two spent a half-hour or more inside.

  After a time, Derek emerged and went to his bedroom. He lay on the floor for a while, then sat at the foot of the bed, his back to the door, a large window to his left. On the dresser to his right were pictures of his grandparents, whom he called Opa and Oma, who had come to his first hockey games and watched him score his first goal. There were several pictures of the bulldog named Trinity that Derek and Janella had bought in Louisiana but had later given to Len when they realized they could not care for it.

  Aaron made pancakes in the apartment’s small kitchen, where Derek’s Buddha statues lined the counter. Jeremy Clark had a training session with a client early the next morning. He and Jennie left. Ashley left, too, after checking on Derek.

  “I went into his room and he was laying on his bed,” Ashley told police later. “And I said ‘goodnight’ and I left.”

  (The investigator asked her if the two had any disagreement that night. “No,” she said. “He was so happy.”)

  The company gone, Aaron continued to make pancakes. His cooking was interrupted several times by calls from the bedroom.

  To Derek, the bed was spinning. He could not lie down. He sat at the end of the bed, his feet on the floor, his sore back hunched. At one point, he threw up on the carpet between his feet.

  Aaron moved back and forth down the short hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom. He tried to soothe his brother with words. He tried to get him to eat. He tried to encourage him to fall asleep.

  Everything will be okay, he told his brother. Just go to sleep.

  Finally, sometime around four in the morning, the calls from the bedroom stopped.

  Derek was quiet at last.

  HIS BROTHER PRESUMABLY asleep, finally, in bed, Aaron left to spend the rest of the night with a girlfriend. He slept late and was in no hurry to get home, returning to the apartment about 3 P.M. to shower and change clothes. From the hallway, he could see Derek still on the bed, his feet hanging off the end. It was not unusual for Derek to sleep the afternoon away, and he probably had a nasty hangover.

  Aaron shouted that he was going to the airport to get Ryan, but Derek did not budge. Let him keep sleeping, Aaron thought.

  The Boogaard brothers planned to convene in Minneapolis before heading to Kansas for Krysten’s college graduation. Aaron told Ryan that Derek was hungover and still sleeping. In no hurry to return, the two of them stopped at a Potbelly sandwich shop.

  They stepped back into the apartment a bit after 6. Derek was still on the bed.

  “He still hasn’t moved,” Aaron said to Ryan.

  Ryan glanced into the bedroom. An RCMP member, like the boys’ father, he immediately recognized that something was not right. Any nonchalance dissolved immediately, replaced by the slow creep of dread.

  Ryan stared at the large body atop the bed, still in his clothes. Derek’s chest was not rising and falling.

  “He’s not breathing,” Ryan said.

  He stared hard at Derek’s face. It was oddly pale. Aaron circled to the other side of the bed. Ryan touched Derek’s arm. It was cold.

  Ryan was a cop. He knew what a dead body looked and felt like.

  Aaron shrieked and began to jump up and down. “What do we do? What do we do?” he shouted.

  Ryan, instantly numb, told his brother to call 911. Then he slipped out of the bedroom and collapsed in the hallway.

  The call arrived at 6:18 P.M.

  “Can you come to 4, 415 North First Street, please, my brother is not breathing,” Aaron hurriedly told the operator. “He’s pale, his lips are blue, he’s . . .”

  Aaron’s words, shrouded in sobs, became unintelligible.

  The phone rang at Len Boogaard’s house in Ottawa. Len’s wife, Jody, answered and heard nothing but an unintelligible wail. She thought it was a prank call, but something told her to stay on the line. Finally, she realized it was Ryan, and made sense of the words.

  Derek’s dead.

  Len Boogaard was in the backyard. Jody rushed the phone to him.

  “I knew this was going to happen,” Len cried into the phone.

  From the hallway floor, Ryan called his mother in Regina. Joanne was at a friend’s house and answered her cell phone. She heard Ryan and Aaron wailin
g. Derek’s gone, Ryan blurted, and Joanne did not understand. What do you mean “gone”? she asked. What is going on? Her spinning mind slowly processed the message through the chaos.

  Thousands of miles away in Saskatchewan, Derek’s mother was helpless to do anything but offer a reassuring voice. Call 911, Joanne said.

  “It’s too late,” Ryan cried. “It’s too late for him.”

  EPILOGUE

  DEREK’S BRAIN WAS CARVED out of his skull by a coroner in Minneapolis. It was put in a plastic bucket and inside a series of plastic bags, then placed in an insulated box filled with a slurry of icy water. The box, marked BIOLOGICAL SUBSTANCE, was driven to the airport and placed in the cargo hold of a plane to Boston. Upon arrival, a courier service drove the box 30 miles to the Bedford Veterans Administration Medical Center in Bedford, Massachusetts.

  Building 78 sat among a woodsy, 276-acre campus setting of red-brick buildings, mostly built in the 1920s. At the end of a short driveway was a former ambulance entrance, rarely used anymore for emergencies. Through the door was the basement morgue.

  The box was opened and the brain removed. It was vibrantly pink and weighed 1,580 grams, or about three and a half pounds. On a stainless-steel table, Dr. Ann McKee cleaved it in half, front to back, with a large knife. Much of one half of the brain was cut into slices, about the width of sandwich bread.

  The pieces of Derek’s brain were identified as SLI-76. They were placed in plastic containers and into large refrigerators with glass doors, next to all the rest. There were so many brains, close to a hundred of them, that similar refrigerators lined the walls of another room and an upstairs hallway.