COLLEGE FOOTBALL REPORT : WEEKDAY UPDATE : USC : Oliver Haunted by His Father’s Death

Freshman cornerback Jason Oliver said in an interview this week that he sometimes cries himself to sleep, wondering if he contributed to the death of his father.

Marvin Oliver, highest-ranking black officer in the Kern County Sherriff’s Dept., died Oct. 18 of respiratory failure. Three days earlier, his son and two other USC football players were charged in the alleged sexual battery of a 23-year-old female student.

“I didn’t think his health was that bad,” Oliver told Lisa Nehus Saxon of the Riverside Press-Enterprise. “But now I have to face that maybe because of me, maybe that’s why my dad died. He wasn’t going too bad, and then all of a sudden, he died. He died a couple of days after it came out in the paper that I had been charged. I never even got to talk to him about it. I called him, and he was too sick to talk to me. . . .

“I read in the (Bakersfield Californian) where my dad was tired and had too many worries on him. They said that the fact I had been accused . . . might have weighed heavily on him, making him feel bad and be down. They said it may have caused him to give up. . . .

“I just hate to think that I may have been a contributing factor to my own father’s death . . . but I have to face that.”

Oliver’s mother, Juanda, died of cancer on Sept. 22.