Tapes of Fatal Game a Mystery

Videotapes of the last football game Eric Hoggatt played depict no clearly extraordinary blows to the 18-year-old Reseda High School running back that might have led to his death a few hours later.

A prominent Los Angeles expert on head injuries cautioned Saturday, however, that even normal contact during a football game can lead to the condition that took Hoggatt’s life.

The Times obtained copies of both Reseda’s and Chatsworth’s game tapes from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The videotapes, shot from roughly the same angle above Reseda’s football field, show Hoggatt played nearly every down on both offense and defense until he was removed from the game with about two minutes remaining. Teammates have said he complained of dizziness and numbness in his legs and fingers.

The tapes show Hoggatt was tackled 14 times, 12 times after running the ball and twice after catching passes. Two of those tackles appeared to be relatively hard hits.

On a play in the third quarter, he was partly spun around by one opponent and knocked to the ground by another; he fumbled the ball on the play. He also was tackled hard on a subsequent kickoff return.

After both plays, Hoggatt got quickly to his feet to rejoin the Reseda huddle, showing no signs of distress.

Only after chasing down an opposing receiver over a long distance late in the game did he linger for a few seconds, kneeling, head bowed, then rise with visible effort to his feet. The tape appears to show he then left the game for two or three plays, returned for one more, then left for good.

Hoggatt’s father, who was among family members shown the tapes in the Chatsworth office of The Times San Fernando Valley Edition, said he could not from what he saw conclude how his son was injured.

“It’s really hard to say from the angle. It seems to be taken from almost 50 yards away. . . . You really can’t tell,” Michael Hoggatt said.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office reported Friday that Hoggatt died of subdural hemorrhage, a buildup of blood inside the skull that exerted fatal pressure on his brain stem. In a preliminary report, a coroner’s spokesman said the bleeding apparently resulted from an accumulation of blows to Hoggatt’s head during Reseda’s game against Chatsworth High on Sept. 12. The youth’s mother found him dead in his bed the following morning.

The absence of an obviously damaging blow doesn’t rule out that Hoggatt died of game-related injuries, said Dr. David Hovda, associate professor of neurosurgery at UCLA and a specialist in head injuries.

“What I mean by that are relatively good hits, or somebody falling to the ground,” Hovda said. “It typically happens, not necessarily when a player is hit, but when his head bounces off the ground.”

In the case of Eric Hoggatt, he said, “what apparently happened is that he had suffered a severe enough concussion . . . [that] later on a vessel that was weakened by the injury sprung a leak. Sometimes these things can happen very slowly over time,” Hovda said.

Hovda said treating subdural hemorrhage is a matter of identifying the extent of bleeding with a CT scan and conducting surgery to remove the blood from the cranial cavity. As a temporary emergency measure, a hole may be drilled in the victim’s skull to relieve the pressure from the buildup of blood.

Hovda, who is president-elect of the American Neurotrauma Society, said acceleration-deceleration head injuries--in which the head moves violently forward or is immediately stopped, as when it strikes the ground--are the most common in football.

He explained that the brain floats in cerebral spinal fluid, “like an ice cube in a glass of iced tea,” and when the head moves suddenly, the brain shifts forward and back so that the ridges in the base of the skull tear into the tissue, causing vessels to be sheared or weakened.

He added that after suffering one concussion, the brain is “exceedingly vulnerable to a subsequent concussion, which, even if very mild, can have devastating consequences.

Eric Hoggatt’s parents, Michael and Verna Hoggatt of South-Central Los Angeles, have indicated they will take legal action against school officials and a volunteer team doctor who did not notify them of their son’s physical complaints. Notified, they’ve said, they might have monitored his condition through the night or taken him to a hospital emergency room to be examined.

The Hoggatts and another family member, Gerald Guidry, viewed the videotapes of the game, which none of them had attended.

“It wasn’t difficult to watch; Eric played a good game. We’re just trying to figure out what happened,” Michael Hoggatt said afterward.