Private Resce Stayed Down for the Count : Report on Marine Recruit’s Boxing Death Suggests It Could Have Been Averted

As he came out for the final round of his interplatoon boxing match, Pvt. Paul Resce had victory in his grasp. Less experienced than his opponent on this hot, dusty August afternoon, the 18-year-old Marine recruit had nevertheless won the first round on sheer aggressiveness, and had battled to a draw in the second.

But within the first minute of Round 3, Pvt. Sean Schoonmaker pummeled Resce to a corner of the ring. Resce wobbled, then toppled backward between the ropes. With Resce momentarily helpless, Schoonmaker landed at least one more blow flush on Resce’s brow.

Staff Sgt. Gary Gibson caught Resce before he could topple onto the hard ground of the downtown Marine Corps Recruit Depot.

“Thank you, sir,” said the young recruit, adhering to Marine discipline even in the face of the pummeling.

“Are you going to take that from him?” Gibson asked.

“Sir, no, sir,” Resce responded.

“Well, get back in there!” Gibson barked.

Unexpectedly, Resce asked: “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Gibson replied. “Get back in there and fight!”

Something was wrong, but only Resce knew it. He raised himself to a crouch as the blood pouring from a ruptured vein in his brain began to fill his skull. A moment later, Resce pitched forward on his face, unconscious. He died at Navy Hospital in Balboa Park after five days in a coma.

After an exhaustive investigation by the Marine Corps, Paul Resce’s death last Aug. 7 was ruled accidental. The Marines reviewed their boxing program and halted it, saying the matches were not an effective training method for recruits.

But the 1,250-page report on the investigation, obtained by The Times under the federal Freedom of Information Act, suggests that Resce’s death might have been prevented, either by the Marines or by Resce himself, a fearless young man driven to fight by his own competitiveness and the aggressive fire instilled by the Corps.

It raises the haunting question of whether Resce could have saved his own life by volunteering information about headaches that plagued him throughout boot camp and concussions he suffered as a high school football player. Those conditions, while not necessarily linked to his death, certainly would have kept him out of the boxing ring.

The investigation also suggests that if the Marines had followed their own regulations designed to prevent such injuries, Resce would not have been permitted in the ring Aug. 2, 1987. He probably would have been prevented from joining the Marines without a waiting period because of the concussions.

“I don’t think anybody was culpable (in Resce’s death),” said Maj. Gen. Donald Fulham, commander of the base and the man in charge of Marine recruitment throughout the Western United States. “If anybody were culpable, I guess you’d have to say it was Private Resce, and I really have a hard time saying he was culpable.”

But Resce’s parents, many of their friends in the small Illinois town of Romeoville and a Chicago attorney blame the Marines for negligence in his death. Prevented by federal law from filing a lawsuit against the Marines, Resce’s parents are demanding that the military men they reluctantly entrusted with the care of their only son be punished for his death.

“Somebody has to stand for it,” Bertha Resce said, weeping at her kitchen table on a gray, drizzly day two weeks ago. “ . . . Pauli did not just die there because God wants him. I mean, I know God wants him. But there was somebody there that should have stopped that thing from happening, and they didn’t.”

“They took her baby,” Rosie Britton said of her mother. “She gave (the Marines) her pride and joy and trusted them with him. And he never came home.”

Romeoville, Ill., population 16,000, is one of those small Midwestern towns where everyone knows nearly everyone else, and word of an 18-year-old’s untimely death in a faraway place is major news. Forty miles southwest of Chicago, Romeoville lies between the larger Chicago suburbs to its east and the beginnings of the Illinois heartland to its west.

Mexican immigrants Paul and Bertha Resce (pronounced Ree-see) moved to Romeoville in 1974, leaving behind the Chicago neighborhood of Marquette Park, which they believed was taking a turn for the worse.

Romeoville offered security in its rows of one-story tract homes being carved into the flat farmland--protection from the drugs and gangs the Resces were sure their four children would encounter in Chicago’s hostile neighborhoods. They sent Rosie, Sophie, Pauli and Anna to Catholic schools, where they hoped the four would find the caring and discipline to keep them off the streets.

But they couldn’t protect Pauli, Bertha’s favorite, from himself. From the time he was a weak, skinny youngster, he was rough and frighteningly fearless. He liked to jump from the roof of the house to the front lawn, which worried even his father, a sturdy ex-minor-league baseball player who was proud of his son’s toughness.

Obsessed With Football

“You’re an old man,” Pauli told his father when the elder Resce tried to put a stop to the leaps. “You just have to know how to land.”

As Pauli grew older and prepared to enter Joliet Catholic High School, football became his obsession, despite his father’s attempts to steer him toward baseball. Pauli knew that to make the powerful Joliet Catholic High team, frequent state champion in its division, he would have to bulk up. He took to weight lifting and conditioning with almost manic determination.

“I was pushing him for baseball,” the elder Resce said in the fractured English he and his wife still speak despite 19 years in this country. “He wanted to play football so bad. He was so tough and so rough. He wasn’t scared (of anything).”

But for all his toughness on the football field, Resce could be painfully shy off it.

‘Incredible Shy Streak’

“That’s a funny side to him,” remembered Father Robert Colaresi, president of Joliet Catholic. “He had this radiance that attracted people. Yet, when you met him, you realized that he had an incredible shy streak to him.”

By his senior year, Resce’s devotion to hardening his body and his unyielding competitiveness had made him a fearsome tackler. A 170-pound cornerback, he wasn’t big and he wasn’t fast, but he hit harder than anyone on the team.

“You don’t see people hit like that until you get to college,” said Richard Hirsch, a teammate who was a year behind Resce. “It was just like running into a wall. You could hear it in practice. All of a sudden you’d see Paul come in for the kill . . . and you’d hear the pop! And everybody would just jump back.”

“He wasn’t an arm tackler,” recalled Jim Boyter, the Joliet Catholic football coach. “He made an impact each time. He was fearless, and he liked impact.”

Hit With His Head

Resce particularly liked to hit ball carriers with his head, and continued to do so despite warnings from the team doctor.

“He was a head tackler,” said Dr. Frank Wright. “We kept telling him it was not a good idea. I recall one or two occasions when I gave him hell for doing that.”

In October, 1986, Resce, a senior co-captain of the team, suffered concussions in two consecutive Friday night games. He was hospitalized overnight after the second injury, examined and then released. A CAT scan of his brain revealed no abnormalities, and he played the rest of the season.

The concussions, not uncommon for football players, were pushed to the background as Resce prepared to graduate in June, 1987. By then he had decided, against his mother’s wishes, to join the Marines as a reservist, signing a six-year commitment.

The deal would give him $140 a month toward the cost of attending nearby Aurora College after 78 days of boot camp and 77 more at a Marine communications equipment school. Better yet, he told the family, boot camp would be another test of his body and his will.

“It was something that he wanted to do on his own,” Bertha Resce said. “He wanted to prove himself--not to anybody else, but to himself--that he could do something.”

As part of his recruitment, Resce was required to list his injuries and hospitalizations on a “medical pre-screening form,” which triggers the process by which officials can review a recruit’s physical health. Staff Sgt. Jerry Gatlin, Resce’s recruiter in Joliet, is required to obtain hospital records detailing any recruit’s hospitalizations.

Resce’s parents insist that he listed the hospitalization for head injuries, and that the recruiter must have known of them because he followed newspaper accounts of Resce’s game-winning field goal in the same game in which he suffered his second concussion. They say, however, that Gatlin never asked them or the hospital for the records.

Knowledge Denied

Gatlin is equally adamant that he knew nothing of Resce’s previous head injuries. He noted that he went to great lengths to obtain Resce’s contact lens prescription after Resce noted that he wore them, and said he would have done the same for any injury records Resce had identified.

Lt. Col. Kenneth Sandstrom, who compiled the 1,250-page investigation report, sided with the Resces.

“I believe that (Resce) indicated on the Applicant Medical Pre-screening Form that he wore contact lenses, and I believe he probably indicated that he had been hospitalized,” Sandstrom wrote.

Despite the investigation, the truth may never be revealed, because Resce’s medical screening form cannot be located. His parents say they suspect it was destroyed.

The document is crucial, because Sandstrom concluded that if the civilian records had been obtained, Marine doctors might have kept Resce out of the Corps.

If the Marine physician in Chicago had had Resce’s records, “he might have classified the head injuries as moderate, which requires a two-year observation time (and) complete neurological examination” before Resce could have been inducted, Sandstrom wrote.

Resce clearly told the physician who examined him at the Chicago Military Entrance Processing Station on April 20 that he had suffered two concussions the previous year. Dr. Tomislav Dukic discussed the injuries with Resce, then cleared him for military service as “fully recovered.”

Sandstrom questioned that decision. “In my opinion, the examination should have been completed on 20 April, 1987,” he wrote, “but no decision on acceptance or non-acceptance for military service should have been made until additional medical records had been obtained and studied by the examining physicians.”

A spokesman for the processing station said, however, that “there would have been no change in the decision (to induct Resce) had actual hospital records been viewed by the physician.”

The gravity of that string of events is not lost on Paul and Bertha Resce, who now believe that their son should never have been accepted as a Marine.

“These guys told you everything is just going to be just fine,” Bertha said. “This is the picture I got: Your son is going to be in a safe place, safer than any other place can be.”

Outwardly, at least, Resce was ready when he arrived in San Diego for boot camp May 27. His weight lifting and conditioning had made him strong enough to score 253 points out of a possible 300 on the initial strength test. He improved that score to 282 after the first phase of training, and to 297 after the second.

Moreover, Resce showed the kind of gung-ho spirit the Marines covet. He volunteered for tasks, attacked each obstacle, and weathered the abuse dished out by drill sergeants--including, his mother said, one who spit in his face.

“He knew what he wanted and he was willing to accept the personal discomfort to achieve what he wanted,” said Fulham, the base commander. “If we could recruit 30,000 Private Resces every year, we’d be very happy.”

Everything was going well. Except for the headaches.

Sandstrom’s investigation shows that Resce complained of headaches to other recruits--and to at least one drill instructor--six separate times between June 19 and the Aug. 2 boxing match. At times, the pain was so bad he wept. He wobbled while trying to stand at attention.

Body Shook, Eyes Watered

“The privates were standing on line and Resce was shaking and his eyes were watering,” Pvt. Michael Ray DeBruin told Sandstrom. “And one of the drill instructors called Private Resce up into the classroom to ask him if he was all right and Private Resce said yes. And he came back to this private and told this private that he felt stupid because his head hurt so bad he was crying.”

Curiously, Resce’s parents do not place much importance on the headaches, noting that he commonly suffered headaches as a child, which they attributed to his poor eyesight. Paul Resce Sr. suggested that his son may not have worn his glasses as often as he should have in boot camp.

Despite his buddies’ advice, Resce refused to go to sick call for the head pain. He also did not complain to superiors during nightly “hygiene inspections,” which were conducted to examine cuts and bruises from the day’s training.

Maj. Gen. Fulham maintains that the Marines could not have intervened, because Resce did not notify superiors of the severity of his pain.

Resentment in Romeoville

“I think maybe he carried it beyond the point of what is reasonable,” the major general said. “You can only intercede when you know.”

But in Romeoville, the feeling is that the Marines took a fiery, competitive boy and exploited those characteristics, creating a Marine who was too aggressive for his own good.

“You still have the responsibility of the military to watch out for him,” said Romeoville Police Chief Robert Starke, a friend of the Resces who believes the investigation should have resulted in punishments. “Parents don’t give their son to the military and think: ‘Now he’s on his own entirely.’ ”

But when a young man enters the Marines, “you just don’t think like you normally would,” said Jim Britton of Lubbock, Tex., Resce’s brother-in-law and an active-duty Marine who has been through boot camp. “You’ve got pressure from your peers and a tremendous amount of pressure from your drill instructors.”

The pain intensified after Resce absorbed two hard pugil stick blows to the head that knocked him to the ground July 24--nine days before the boxing match. Pugil stick training is a close-combat exercise in which helmeted Marines battle each other using long staves with padded ends.

In his investigation, Sandstrom concluded that the blows “may have contributed to (Resce’s) injury” in the boxing match.

After the blows, Resce complained daily of headaches and dizziness to his squad leader, Pvt. Ben Parrish. Parrish did not pass along the information to superior officers.

“That was all he really told me, was that his head was hurting,” Parrish told Sandstrom. “ . . . Two or three times a day he’d say that to me. And some nights we’d get up on fire watch and he would say his head would be hurting and I wouldn’t let him get out of the rack (bed); I would tell him just to lay in the rack a while longer.”

Conversation Forgotten

On one occasion, Resce complained to a superior officer. Weeks before the pugil stick encounter, he told Staff Sgt. Kenneth Waltz, a rookie drill instructor, of the headaches and his previous concussions. But Waltz, who was later involved in rounding up volunteers for the boxing match, did not remember that conversation until after Resce collapsed in the ring and could not be revived.

Sandstrom: “You did not recall that he told you about the concussions?”

Waltz: “No, sir.”

Sandstrom: “So it didn’t ring any bells with you as far as maybe he should not fight?”

Waltz: “No, sir . . . Just when he was lying there on the mat, it just came back to me.”

Several neurological experts questioned by The Times said that because of the 10-month span, they doubt a direct link existed between Resce’s October concussions and the August boxing incident. However, medical literature accumulated by Sandstrom suggests that the presence of headaches even months after a concussion can indicate the kind of life-threatening injury from which Resce died.

Although pathologists found no evidence of former injuries to Resce’s brain, the autopsy results were obscured by deterioration of the organ. Resce’s death was attributed to a subdural hematoma--a collection of blood that put pressure on his brain--and to brain swelling.

Some neurologists believe that the only way to prevent a one-punch death like Resce’s--a freak occurrence that cannot be predicted--is to ban boxing.

“There’s no way you could prevent a subdural hematoma by examination on anybody at any time. A vein bursts and it bleeds,” said Dr. Nelson Richards, past president of the American Academy of Neurology.

Headaches a Warning

Others, who believe that boxing can be done safely, expressed concern about Resce’s headaches and the problems they might have indicated.

“I wouldn’t qualify him (to box),” said Dr. Robert Voy, chairman of the sports medicine committee of the U.S. Amateur Boxing Federation. “The reason is you don’t know the cause of the headaches. If it’s something that might be aggravated by further trauma, then you don’t want them to risk that.”

Both opponents and defenders of the sport, however, said the two pugil stick blows Resce received before the fight could have been linked to his death. The blows may have led to a slow bleeding from a vein in his head, or may have damaged the brain to the extent that Schoonmaker’s punch was lethal, a medical theory known as “second impact syndrome.”

Final Screening

The Recruit Depot has a final set of screening mechanisms in place for Marine boxers: regulations designed to weed out recruits who should not fight because of physical problems. Indeed, on the day of Resce’s fight, four of the 10 scheduled bouts were canceled because the weight difference between the combatants was too great.

Other reasons for rejecting recruits include a history of head injuries and inability to “see well” without glasses or contact lenses. In addition, the two fighters must be equally experienced as boxers.

But no one mentioned those items to Paul Resce, nor were his medical records reviewed to determine if he was eligible to box, the investigation found. The facts that Resce often wore black, Marine-issue glasses and was severely nearsighted were ignored.

Although Marine officials didn’t know it at the time, Resce was smart enough not to enter the ring blind: he surreptitiously wore his contact lenses during the bout.

According to the investigation, Sgt. J.H. Medina said he asked the boxers “if they had any injuries that may prevent them from fighting” and “if they had any medical problems that they weren’t sure of,” without specifying what those problems might be.

Opponent Had Advantage

A complete novice, Resce found himself in the ring against an opponent who had trained for a month with a college boxing team--a significant advantage, Marines concluded--but who had not been in any formal boxing matches.

Medina and Sgt. Emil Welock apparently did check on the fighters’ boxing experience, but only by asking whether they had fought in previous bouts. According to Schoonmaker, who knocked out Resce, no changes in the fight schedule were made because of differing experience levels.

Sandstrom: “So it was just noted and then nobody made any switches or canceled any fights because of that or not?”

Schoonmaker: “Sir, no, sir. No fights were canceled.”

Sandstrom wrote: “Private Resce should not have boxed based upon his history of head injuries and impaired vision. Private Resce should not have boxed his opponent even if he had no history of head injuries and good vision, due to the different levels of boxing experience.”

‘It’s Unfortunate’

“It’s unfortunate,” Fulham said, “but I can understand why things happened the way they did. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t, in this case, question in more depth.”

Sandstrom’s investigation found that the Marines running the boxing match believed that the drill instructors overseeing the recruits would screen out ineligible recruits. The drill instructors in charge of the recruits believed that the fight supervisors were responsible for screening.

“It appears that a breakdown occurred between the company and the Physical Training Division as to who was responsible for ensuring the boxers were qualified to box,” Sandstrom wrote.

Bertha Resce worried when her son wrote to say he was going to box. “I said: ‘Don’t you think boxing is kind of dangerous?’ And Paul (her husband) said to me, ‘Bertha, it’s an exhibition and they are mature. They’re just doing it for fun.’ ”

“I should have called and said forget about it,” Resce’s father says now. “But then, knowing Pauli, he likes to try. I can see him saying, ‘What do you think, I’m a sissy or something?’ ”

About 500 people filled St. Andrew the Apostle Church in Romeoville for Resce’s funeral on Aug. 14, the same day his platoon graduated from boot camp. A black streamer on Platoon 3055’s guidon at the graduation parade commemorated his death.

In Romeoville, a Marine honor guard stood sentinel at Resurrection Cemetery, but Bertha Resce would not allow them into the church for their customary duty as pallbearers. Instead, six of Resce’s football teammates carried his coffin out of the church and through the rain to the grave site that his father now visits every day.

The short walk from the grave to his car takes Paul Resce between two trees.

“Every time I come here, I think of these (trees) as the goal posts and this as the goal line,” he said, stepping across.

The Joliet Catholic High football team, wearing Paul’s No. 40 on their helmets, adopted his favorite song, “The Rose,” as its anthem for the 1987 season. Stronger than in Paul’s senior year, when it went 7-4, the team won the state championship.

Lawyers Refused Case

In the months after their son’s death, the Resces contacted two prominent personal-injury lawyers about filing suit against the Marine Corps. Both responded the same way: Under federal law, the government cannot be sued for injuries to military personnel on duty.

Ken Miller, an attorney with the Chicago firm of Corboy & Demetrio, said his firm seriously considered representing the Resces in an attempt to overturn the Federal Torts Claim Act, but ultimately turned down the case.

“My opinion is that (Resce’s death) is an event that certainly shouldn’t have occurred,” Miller said. “The ambition of a young Marine recruit should always be tempered by the wisdom of his superiors in terms of the activities they encourage him to participate in. An essential ingredient in military discipline is to channel these people in the right direction.”

Maj. Gen. Fulham disagrees. “I have the feeling that Private Resce was probably going to die within a short period of time anyway” because of his previous head injuries, he said.

“It could have happened the next day in pugil stick fighting. . . . It could have happened in his final (physical training) run, it could have happened when he got home when somebody slapped him on the back hard, or in a minor traffic accident.”

Fulham, who halted the boxing matches because most recruits watched while only a few fought, is considering resuming the contests as part of the training for all Marines at the Recruit Depot.