At Baylor, Shock Over Player Who Disappeared

WACO, Texas -- Until 1996, you couldn’t dance here. Not on the campus of Baylor University, this central Texas city’s crown jewel, which calls itself the world’s largest Baptist college. Not officially, anyway, in accordance with pious Baptist principles. Even when the ban was lifted, “gyrating” was still deemed unseemly.

Baylor was founded on religion and rules. The university’s basketball arena may have a golden, honeycombed roof, but it is tucked away in a corner of campus, and athletes are not treated like rock stars here. Dozens of austere steeples in the center of campus -- atop the seminary, the main academic building, the president’s office -- make it clear who is in charge.

Patrick James Dennehy II stepped into this structured atmosphere with pride two years ago. A 6-foot-10, 230-pounder with ferocious rebounding skills, Dennehy had embarked on a promising basketball career at the University of New Mexico but got kicked off the team after a series of high-profile incidents. Here, he became a born-again Christian. He got good grades and often sat in the front row during class. He dreamed of playing professional basketball, and his coaches doted on him.

But along the way, something appears to have gone terribly wrong.

Dennehy, 21, a product of big-time college athletics and perhaps a victim of it, has been missing for three weeks. He told coaches that he felt threatened, and he may have been quarreling with teammates. According to a Waco police affidavit, shortly before he disappeared, he took off with his roommate, teammate and apparent best friend to shoot guns in a patch of scrubland north of Waco known as the Trinity Pits.

There, according to the affidavit, his friend may have shot him in the head with a 9-millimeter pistol.

The mystery has unfolded slowly -- no charges have been filed, no body has been found, and police insist it is still a “missing person” case.

“He’s my life. He is everything to me,” his girlfriend of two years, Jessica De La Rosa, said Tuesday. “We can’t lose hope. We just can’t. I can’t tell you how desperately I want to see him, to hold his hand.”

Waco police spokesman Steven Anderson said Tuesday that his department, now aided by a host of law enforcement agencies including the FBI, has searched about 50 acres near the quarry where Dennehy and his teammate, Carlton Eric Dotson, were reportedly shooting guns that day. Despite an exhaustive search that included two dogs trained to find cadavers, investigators came up empty.

“We still have hopes and thoughts and prayers that Mr. Dennehy might be alive somewhere,” said Larry Holze, a Waco city official and spokesman.

Anderson called Dotson a “person of interest” in the case. He said a Waco detective has returned to Texas from Virginia Beach, Va., where Dennehy’s Chevrolet Tahoe was discovered last week, its license plates removed. On that trip, the detective also interviewed Dotson in the player’s hometown of Hurlock, Md., about 160 miles north of Virginia Beach. Dotson was raised in Hurlock by his grandparents and is believed to be staying at his childhood home this week, Waco police said.

Neither Dennehy nor Dotson were licensed to carry a handgun in Texas, authorities said.

A Key Informant

The information suggesting that Dotson may have played a role in Dennehy’s disappearance came from a confidential informant in Delaware, according to investigators. Police have not named the informant, but they reiterated Tuesday that they believe he is credible.

The informant told investigators that the two players got into an altercation while shooting guns and that Dennehy pointed his gun at Dotson “as if to shoot him,” the affidavit said. Dotson “shot his roommate in the head with a 9-millimeter pistol,” the informant told police, according to the document.

The affidavit, along with the Waco Police Department’s announcement that it was interviewing members of the Baylor basketball team in connection with Dennehy’s disappearance, have floored the university’s tight-knit community.

“You simply don’t conceive that the student sitting in your classroom or players you watch playing sports are capable not only of deeply immoral but illegal behavior,” said Dr. Douglas Henry, acting director of Baylor’s Institute for Faith & Learning. “The taking of human life, as is being alleged, is simply shocking.”

It is particularly shocking to Dennehy’s family and girlfriend, who believed he had taken an important step toward a promising future when he set foot on Baylor’s campus.

An Oakland native, Dennehy grew up in the Bay Area and played high school basketball in Santa Clara and East Palo Alto. Despite missing half his senior season with a torn ligament, he earned a scholarship at the University of New Mexico.

There, he showed great promise. His teammates named him Most Improved Player after his freshman year, in 2000-01, and he was an all-Mountain West Conference honorable mention selection following an impressive sophomore year, when he averaged more than 10 points a game.

During that season, however, Dennehy’s competitive nature began boiling over. During a game against Air Force in February 2002, he argued on the court with teammates, shoved one of them, kicked over a chair, stalked off to the locker room and refused to finish the game.

Team Bickering

After another incident during practice, his coach kicked him off the team. School officials said an unnamed medical condition affected his behavior; De La Rosa and other observers have said that the entire team was divided into factions and weighed down by endless bickering.

“It was dysfunctional,” De La Rosa said. “We were all just waiting for that season to be over.”

Dennehy, suddenly without a team or a scholarship, effectively began the recruiting process again, De La Rosa said. The first time he met the Baylor coaching staff, particularly head coach Dave Bliss, he and De La Rosa knew it was a perfect fit, she said.

Dotson’s basketball fortunes are dimmer. The 6-foot-7 forward was a sensation at North Dorchester High School in Maryland, leading his team to a 64-9 record during his four years there and earning all-state honors twice. But a Division I scholarship at the University of Buffalo fell through after he fell short of NCAA academic standards.

He played for two years at a Texas junior college and was a reserve last season at Baylor, averaging 4.4 points a game. This spring, Bliss told him his scholarship at Baylor would not be renewed, and he was expected to transfer elsewhere, with Bliss’ assistance, Baylor President Robert B. Sloan Jr. said.

Plans for Future

Dennehy was forced to sit out a season because of the transfer. Despite the frustration of waiting, he spoke openly of his plans for the future: to play well, to graduate, to earn a spot on a professional team, then to go into business, possibly in the front office of an NBA team. He hoped to make enough money to start a scholarship program himself, one that would help disadvantaged children attend Bliss’ youth basketball camp.

“People have taken this one incident [at New Mexico] and they are trying to build his character around that,” De La Rosa said. “His mom and I have talked over the last year and a half. She always says that she feels like I keep him together. I told her, ‘You know what? He kept me together.’ ”

De Le Rosa, 20, who lives in Albuquerque, is on the track team at the University of New Mexico, where she has received an academic and athletic scholarship. Before his disappearance, Dennehy called five times a week, offering frequent advice, such as admonitions that she should not run when she is injured, and peppering his conversations with imitations of Scooby Doo and Tony the Tiger.

“Struggling is a part of being a college athlete. But he’s considerate. He’s caring,” said De La Rosa, a junior majoring in international business and finance. “I’m a smart girl. I’m not going to be with someone who isn’t going to treat me right.”

Despite his grand plans and his fresh start, however, there were subtle suggestions this summer that Dennehy remained troubled. And even though it is only beginning, the case is starting to degenerate into finger-pointing and accusations.

The affidavit says a man named “Harvey” may have been threatening him, a detail that police have declined to discuss this week. Dennehy was reportedly quarreling with at least two teammates, and his car was broken into on June 11. A CD player and cash were stolen.

Dennehy’s family has suggested that school officials told the player not to report the threats to police, and assured him that they would resolve the issue privately.

Waco police acknowledged Tuesday that they erred in publicly referring to all of the members of the basketball team as “suspects” last week. And Dennehy had reportedly been missing for more than a week before university officials contacted his relatives.

Sloan, Baylor’s president, defended authorities’ handling of the case Tuesday.

“We haven’t been here before,” Sloan said, referring to the “unimaginable” circumstances of the past three weeks. “The university at this moment, and for a lot of days, has poured its heart and soul into this matter.”

Students Worried

The Baylor campus, meanwhile, is nearly empty. The regular school year has ended, and the first summer session is in its final days. The few students who are there say they have become consumed with the case.

“Students are constantly worrying about it,” said Denise Alvarez, 19, a sophomore history major who stood Tuesday afternoon amid Baylor’s stately brick buildings and rotundas. “We can’t believe that his best friend could do it.”

One of Dennehy’s friends, Kyle Burton, who lives a floor below the $1,500-a-month, four-bedroom apartment Dennehy shared with Dotson and another student, finds that accusation particularly unsettling. Burton, 20, a Waco native and a Baylor student, said Dennehy and Dotson seemed inseparable. The pair were seen together nearly every day, he said, grilling at the apartment complex or heading off to a local basketball court for a pickup game.

“They were really good friends,” he said. “It had to be an accident. It just had to be.”

Times staff writer Eric Stephens in Los Angeles and researcher Lianne Hart in Houston contributed to this report.