Wheeler’s Mother Wants Coach, AD Fired

Rashidi Wheeler’s mother said Friday that the Northwestern football staff, including Coach Randy Walker, and the university’s athletic director, Rick Taylor, ought to be ousted.

“I think they need to get rid of the athletic department they have there and put some responsible people in there, people with integrity, someone with a sense of humanity,” Linda Will said.

Will’s remarks mark the first time she has called publicly for Walker, Taylor and others to be fired in the wake of her son’s Aug.3 death. Wheeler, a 22-year-old senior at Northwestern, a defensive back from Ontario, Calif., collapsed while running a preseason conditioning drill. An autopsy ruled that the cause of death was bronchial asthma.

Wheeler’s family filed a lawsuit against the university, Walker, and others.

Walker and Taylor declined to comment Friday. Will had said previously that she would attend Friday’s game against Nevada Las Vegas, which Northwestern won, 37-28. However, she did not. “I didn’t want my presence to be a distraction, for one thing,” she said in a telephone interview.

For another, “It’s too painful.”

A moment of silence was observed before the game, and during that quiet moment Wheeler’s face--along with the stylized Northwestern “N” and the years of his life, 1979-2001--was displayed on the Sam Boyd Stadium scoreboard.

Northwestern has retired Wheeler’s No. 30 jersey and the Wildcats will wear a patch this season on their uniform jerseys bearing Wheeler’s initials, “RAW.”

On Will’s mind Friday, however, were other opportunities for gestures that came and went over the past month. These, she said, would have served as expressions of sensitivity or sorrow.

She said no one from the school rode in the ambulance that rushed her son to the hospital on the day he died. She learned of his death not from a school official, but from a teammate.

And no one from the football staff bothered to meet her at the airport when she arrived in Chicago to recover her son’s body, she said.

“So callous,” she said.

The drill that Aug. 3 afternoon carried on while team trainer Tory Aggeler and then paramedics tended to Wheeler.Will said her son’s pleas for help were ignored. “To continue the drill while someone is laying there dying--they still have their jobs?” Will said Friday. “They’re entrusted with the care of these young men?”

Will said of her son’s death, “I feel I could have accepted it better had he been older, lived more of his life.”