Football horror from 1967 still haunt family

Victim's recent death doesn't end ordeal

By Melody Gutierrez - mgutierrez@sacbee.com

Last Updated 8:14 pm PST Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Part one of a two-part series

The last steps Ernie Pelton took were on the sidelines of a football game in 1967. A bone-jarring tackle leveled the Rio Linda High School junior at the end of the second-half kickoff return.

The last breath Ernie took was two months ago. After four decades of fighting to survive, it took three weeks for pneumonia to defeat him.

Ernie's family said their last goodbye inside a North Sacramento chapel, where football and tragedy shared the stage. They spent the past 40 years caring for him, wondering if anyone remembered the athletic boy he was and the quadriplegic man he became.

Few of the players suiting up for this weekend's high school football playoff games will think twice when pulling on a helmet. They won't ponder whether it will protect them. They certainly won't think of Ernie and the landmark Sacramento trial that turned a national spotlight on the need for helmet testing and safety improvements.

But decades later, the reverberations from that 1967 game and the legal drama that followed haunt a handful of people in unexpected ways.

The Elk Grove High School player who tackled Ernie admits today that he can't "help but think about" the play. Nothing, he said, has alleviated the guilt he's felt from that November night 40 years ago.

Ernie's older brother couldn't bear the pain of visiting Ernie when he was in the hospital, and still gets choked up talking about the person he called his best friend.

The Peltons rarely left Ernie's side. When his father died in 1990, his mother became his primary caregiver until she was slowed by a stroke and lost a foot to diabetes. Ernie's sister then took over.

With her brother now gone, his sister says she is lost – and in danger now of losing the home she and Ernie lived in. On disability herself and without the money from Ernie's Social Security account, she no longer can afford to pay off a loan she took out to improve the place.

The Peltons once believed their $3.6 million suit against the Rawlings Sporting Goods Co., the maker of the helmet Ernie was wearing when injured, would provide them enough money to give him the care he needed. Their lawyers felt confident, too. Ernie was hit head-to-head, witnesses said. The helmet did not protect him, the lawyers insisted.

But they didn't count on a lawsuit over the safety of a piece of sports equipment turning into a debate on the game itself. "The future of football rests on the jury's verdict," the defense dramatically argued. Nor were they prepared for the impact that a celebrity witness with an engaging, even magnetic, personality would have on the case – changing, some felt, the trial's outcome months before it actually ended.

'Something was wrong'

The tackle came at the start of the second half. The kickoff was sent into the November sky. Ernie, the team's quickest player who had run the 100-yard dash for the track team, picked it out of the air.

At 5-foot-9, 135 pounds, he wasn't an imposing figure. His speed made him good. His agility made him hard to tackle.

"You had to circle around him because he was so fast," said Mike James, Rio Linda's quarterback.

James, now 57, remembers his teammate as quick to laugh, always joking and smiling.

"He had more energy than nine people," said James, who is retired and lives in Roseville. "He was a kick in the pants. He was the kind of guy who always looked for excitement," the kind who signed up to take a business class because he heard "it was all girls."

Ernie was hit near the Rio Linda sideline after returning the ball 45 yards. James remembers a collision from "the front and from angles in the back." He said the tackle looked like "a tripod." "Bam," he said.

Bob Pelton, in the announcer's booth above where he was calling the game, said he saw a player dive at his brother. Allan Sakaoka, the Elk Grove linebacker who made the hit, said he recalls his helmet butting against Ernie's.

Still, no one thought much of the tackle at first. It wasn't until James called his teammates to the huddle that they noticed things weren't quite right. Ernie was standing, James says today, about a foot too far inside the huddle with his hands on either side of his helmet.

"I knew something was wrong," James said.

Ernie collapsed on the sidelines. His mother, Margaret Pelton, sitting several rows up in the stands, said she rushed to her son's side.

"Ernie, Ernie, are you all right," Margaret remembers asking.

"I'm fine," she said he answered.

Then his eyes closed. His body went limp.

Today, few football games are played without an ambulance stationed by the field. On Nov. 10, 1967, the group at the Rio Linda bench had to wait for one to show up.

"I probably aged 10 years in those minutes," Bob Pelton said.

The game went on. Sakaoka, the Elk Grove player, said when he looked over to the opposing side of the field, all he saw was commotion. He knew it was about the kid he just tackled.

He saw an ambulance arrive. He said he heard it was bad.

Brief signs of hope

Ernie suffered a severe brain injury. He was taken first to McClellan Field Hospital, then was transported to another Sacramento hospital.

Doctors operated three times to relieve the pressure on his brain. The injury – nerve endings between the spinal cord and brain had separated – caused paralysis. He would be comatose for seven months.

Today, Margaret, sitting in Room 33 at Applewood Care Center in South Land Park, recalls initially being hopeful: Eight days after the accident, she and her husband saw two tears in Ernie's eyes and his mouth opened and closed. The headline in The Bee read: "Injured Rio Lindan is slightly improved."

Neighborhood teens pitched in, holding carwashes and collecting donations door to door. The $10,000 or so raised was significant for their blue-collar neighborhood in Elverta.

But the Peltons were told Ernie's medical bills would total $1.5 million over his lifetime, an impossible amount of money. Court records show that Dan Pelton, a World War II veteran who owned a janitorial service, became overwhelmed with stress.

Ernie was transferred to a rehabilitation center in Angels Camp six months after his injury. His weight had dropped to 86 pounds.

In a 1989 Bee interview, Dan Pelton recalled reading on Ernie's medical chart that doctors didn't expect his son to live another two weeks. So he packed Ernie's things and returned him to the family home.

He told the paper: "They didn't want me to take him, but I said, 'He's my son, he'll go where I want.' "

A fight to save football

Long before Ernie gave his father a reason, Dan Pelton despised sports. Bob Pelton says his father had a brother who played college basketball in Ohio but was killed on the way to a game. "He just had a thing against sports," Bob Pelton said of his dad. "He had a grudge."

Margaret said her husband refused to sign the consent form allowing Ernie to play football. Ernie told his parents, she said, that he would forge it if he had to. Margaret said she figured that's what he did.

The helmet Ernie was wearing became Dan Pelton's obsession. In 1967, helmets were typically made of a hard plastic shell with a web of straps inside that held the helmet in suspension on a player's head. Unlike today's helmets, there was little or no padding. Michael Gessford, a Sacramento attorney who helped defend helmet maker Rawlings, said he recalls Ernie's having some padding.

Documents filed with the lawsuit show Dan Pelton wondering why the helmet didn't absorb the impact of the tackle. He blamed it for Ernie's troubles.

The $3.6 million lawsuit, filed on May 15, 1968, in Sacramento County Superior Court, named Rawlings Sporting Goods Co., the Grant school district and the store in Sacramento where the headgear was purchased as defendants. The suit alleged that the "Rawlings helmet was not fit and adequate to protect plaintiff's head and brain."

According to newspaper articles at the time, only a handful of helmet liability cases had been filed, and all had been settled out of court.

One of the Peltons' lawyers, Harry Philo, a Detroit football injury attorney, had settled a similar suit for $125,000. But Rawlings refused to settle this time, and so, Philo said in the 1989 article, the Peltons' case became the first helmet liability lawsuit to go to trial in the United States.

In his opening statement on Jan. 14, 1970, Philo called Rawlings "profit motivated," according to a newspaper account. He told jurors Rawlings failed to design a helmet adequate enough to protect from "foreseeable uses" such as tackling.

Rawlings attorney David Rust countered that football was safer than the home. Six out of every 10,000 housewives, he told the jury in his opening statement, died from accidents in the home every year, compared with two deaths for every 100,000 football players.

What's more, Rust told the jury, the trial wasn't about one boy who was hurt during a game more than two years earlier. It was about Friday nights across America: It was about football, Rust said.

"We will state without reservation," he said, "that the game of football is at stake."

Philo and Richard E. Crow, Philo's co-counsel from Sacramento, told the jury that Rawlings knew better.

The helmet maker could have made a safer product, they said. A former vice president of rival helmet maker Riddell Corp. testified that sporting good companies knew how to design safer helmets, but didn't. He said their helmets could have more padding, according to a Bee article.

Rust told the jury that it was not a head-to-head tackle. Most injuries similar to Ernie's were rotational, he said, meaning Ernie was hit on the chin and his head swiveled around. That caused his brain injury, Rust said.

He pulled out Ernie's helmet and pointed to the chin strap. There was a crack in it, proof, Rust insisted, that he was hit on the chin.

Forty years later, Margaret says she remembers she and her husband feeling confident after the trial's first month. At one point, the jury and court officials traveled 18 miles by chartered bus to Elverta, where the Peltons then lived, to see Ernie.

There was a one-man gurney, a patient hoist to lift Ernie, a tilt table and other medical equipment. "It's almost like a complete hospital," Dan Pelton was quoted as saying in 1989.

Then the judge agreed to allow a witness to be called out of order, and a football star nearing the height of his fame entered the courtroom.

The defense called O.J. Simpson to the stand.

A tragic injury brings change

Family lost suit but spurred era of safer football gear

By Melody Gutierrez - mgutierrez@sacbee.com

Last Updated 7:40 pm PST Thursday, December 13, 2007

Part two of a two-part series

O.J. Simpson didn't know Ernie Pelton. But he did know football. To a Sacramento Superior Court jury, that was all that mattered.

It was March 10, 1970, and Simpson – winner of the Heisman Trophy and an NFL running back – was in town to testify on behalf of football helmet maker Rawlings Sporting Goods Co. The manufacturer was the target of a $3.6 million civil liability lawsuit filed by Ernie's parents.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the bone-jarring tackle that horribly altered Ernie's life. A quick, agile halfback for Rio Linda High School, he was a spirited 18-year-old kid, "a kick in the pants," as one teammate said.

The tackle came on the second-half kickoff return. Ernie took a few staggering footsteps on the sidelines. He would never walk again.

And while he would live an unremarkable life in the decades that followed, cared for until he died by a succession of family members, there are those who believe Ernie Pelton deserves credit for helping to make football safer.

His family said in its lawsuit that his helmet did not protect him when he was tackled, and blamed his subsequent severe brain injury on it. The landmark 1970 Sacramento trial that followed put a national spotlight on the need for helmet testing and safety improvements.

In their opening statement, Rawlings' attorneys had argued passionately that the Peltons' lawsuit threatened not just a sporting goods company, but the future of the game itself. Simpson – in a dark sports coat, white dress shirt and tie – was on the witness stand for one purpose: to vouch not only for the helmet but for the sport of football as well.

"I'll take O.J. Simpson's word any time," David Rust, Rawlings' attorney, told the jury.

'The Pelton boy'

Simpson was called to testify on the 33rd day of the trial.

He said he had worn a Rawlings HND helmet since his high school playing days in San Francisco. It was the same kind Ernie was wearing on Nov. 10, 1967, when he was hit.

"I believe in this helmet," Simpson told the jury, according to newspaper accounts.

The Peltons' lawyer, Harry Philo, a Detroit attorney who had settled one other helmet case out of court, alleged that Ernie had been tackled on a helmet-to-helmet hit by Allan Sakaoka, an Elk Grove High School linebacker.

Philo asked Simpson what would happen if head-down helmet contact – also known as spearing – was eliminated.

"I'd score a thousand touchdowns," Simpson said.

Michael Gessford, a Sacramento attorney helping in Rawlings' defense, had Simpson read the warning label on Ernie's helmet: "Some game impacts will exceed the capabilities of this helmet and you may suffer severe brain injury or death. Avoid all purposeful contact, whether blocking, tackling or carrying the ball."

Gessford: "Do you do that?"

Simpson: "I try but haven't succeeded."

Gessford wondered if Simpson was aware of the risks in football.

"A person would be pretty ignorant if he didn't know," Simpson said. "I know every time I get on the field, there's a chance you can get hurt like the Pelton boy."

The testimony concluded, Simpson left. But not before the jurors sent a note to the judge asking if they could have Simpson's autograph, Gessford said in a recent interview.

In the Sacramento Union newspaper the next day, a picture showed the football star smiling before a group of people. The caption reads: "Simpson signs autographs for jurors."

Margaret Pelton, Ernie's 82-year-old mother who now lives in an assisted-living home in South Land Park, remembers the defeated look on the face of her husband, Dan, following Simpson's testimony.

"My husband told me we had it made until O.J. Simpson came in," she said during a recent interview in her room. "Then he knew we had lost."

For the next 56 court days – the remainder of the trial – the defense hammered on the theory that Ernie was not hit head-to-head and that the helmet was not responsible. It was a rotational injury, the defense said, meaning the damage to his brain occurred after he was hit on the chin and his head swiveled.

"We had support that Ernie Pelton was hit in the jaw," Gessford recalled.

The proof included Ernie's Rawlings helmet. Gessford said it had a crack in the chin strap, "which fit our theory."

The Peltons and their attorneys claimed that a helmet-to-helmet hit had caused the nerve endings between Ernie's spinal cord and brain to separate, ultimately leaving him a quadriplegic. The one person who could have helped the Peltons' case was Sakaoka, the Elk Grove player who collided with Ernie.

Sakaoka was a Marine in Vietnam at the time of the trial. But he had given a deposition on Nov. 19, 1969. Describing the hit, Sakaoka's words were read aloud to the seven women and five men on the jury: "Head-to-head, straight on."

It would do little to sway them. Newspaper stories say that over the 89 days of the trial, the courtroom took on the appearance of a sporting goods store, with hundreds of pieces of athletic equipment. In all, there were 550 exhibits, including 38 helmets.

Among the evidence introduced: a University of California, Davis, study done on Aggie football players that measured the accelerated force of getting hit on the head. Another study used a monkey brain to illustrate a rotational injury.

It took less than three hours for jurors to unanimously decide in favor of Rawlings. The Peltons were awarded nothing.

A sense of urgency

The Peltons may have lost the case, but soon things began to change. Shortly after the trial ended, the National Operating Committee for Standards in Athletic Equipment, a group of medical officials, college and high school sports associations and sporting goods manufacturers, made research on helmet safety a priority.

The NCAA News, a publication of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, said in a Nov. 1, 1970, article that the Pelton verdict "tempered a threat to the continuation of high school and college football and possibly other sports where the chance of injury exists for youthful competitors."

But it warned that the case made the need for improved equipment "more urgent than ever."

The emphasis came as new lawsuits were filed and juries began ruling for the players.

• In 1973, an Indiana eighth-grader was paralyzed during a tackling practice while wearing a Rawlings helmet. He sued and was awarded $5.8 million.

• In 1974, a Rhode Island high school football player was left a quadriplegic following a tackle while wearing a MacGregor Manufacturing Co. helmet. He sued and received $3.2 million.

• Also in 1974, a Texas high school quarterback suffered injuries in a head-to-head collision while wearing a Rawlings helmet. He won $1.5 million.

Frederick Mueller, the director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research in Chapel Hill, N.C., said the lawsuits forced manufacturers to create safer helmets. Mueller's center has compiled statistics on football injuries and deaths dating back to 1931.

In 1976, blocking or tackling with the head down – spearing – was banned in high school and college football. Since then, annual football fatalities in high school – which set a record at 26 in 1968 – have remained in the single digits, according to the catastrophic sports injury research center. Warning labels also were required on all helmets.

By 1980, high schools across the country were required to use helmets certified by the equipment standards committee. Manufacturers did away with suspension helmets, a design typically used in the 1960s that featured a hard plastic shell and a web of straps inside that suspended the helmet on a player's head.

"The designs simply took a huge leap forward with the publication of (those) standards," said James Newman, author of "Modern Sports Helmets: Their History, Science and Art."

Today, helmets don't rely on the polycarbonate shell quite as much, instead adding an improved liner that acts as a shock absorber.

The new standards and liability lawsuits forced many helmet makers out of the business. Rawlings stopped making helmets in 1988, citing 25 liability cases totaling $46 million. From 20 or so helmet makers operating in the 1970s, there are just three today.

A loan gone bad

Ernie died Sept. 9. He was 57 and had battled pneumonia for three weeks.

"The last time I saw him, all he could do was blink his eyes," said Mike James, who played with Ernie on the Rio Linda team in 1967 and now lives in Roseville. "He couldn't move and talk."

James visited Ernie twice. He said it became too difficult emotionally to continue. The Peltons said they understood.

Ernie spent the last 35 years inside a pink house with white shutters in south Sacramento. Dozens of elephant figurines decorated the living room. His small bedroom, filled with medical equipment and stuffed animals, was at the end of a narrow hallway.

In 1968, shortly after he arrived home after seven months in the hospital, Ernie regained some speech and movement in his right arm. But his family said they couldn't afford the therapy that might have given him the freedom to do more than hold a glass, move a straw or squeeze a hand.

Eventually, he lost those abilities.

"He had all his faculties, he just didn't have a body," said his brother Bob.

For many years, plastic covered the single-pane windows of the cinderblock home, and mold and dry rot were visible in corners. Dozens of electrical cords shot from the two outlets in Ernie's room.

A few years ago, the family sent a video plea to the ABC television program "Extreme Home Makeover Edition." They hoped to make Ernie more comfortable.

"He was always cold," said Linda Lacusky, Ernie's 60-year-old sister and primary caregiver.

When Lacusky didn't hear back from the show, she took out a $50,000 loan against the house to pay for the remodeling. Now, without Ernie's Social Security to help repay it, she said she has fallen behind on payments.

She cried during an interview recently as she acknowledged that she may lose her home. She said she saw no other option.

"Part of me went with him," said Lacusky, who has had eight back surgeries and is on disability. "It's been so hard."

Ernie was buried on Sept. 18. Some 60 people attended his funeral at Sunset Lawn Chapel of the Chimes in North Sacramento. His No. 40 Rio Linda jersey – kept for 40 years by his brother Bob – was draped from a metal hanger.

The cherrywood casket was covered with floral arrangements, including a bouquet sent by Richard E. Crow, the son of one of the Peltons' lawyers. Now a Sacramento attorney himself, Crow's connection to what he calls "the helmet case" goes beyond the role his father played.

Shortly after the trial ended in 1970, the younger Crow was working at a summer landscaping job. While making small talk with a co-worker, he brought up his father's case. He asked the man if he was familiar with it.

"He said, 'Yeah, I was the one that hit him,'" Crow said recently. "It bothered him then."

Allan Sakaoka was invited to the funeral. He did not attend.

"I heard so many rumors," Sakaoka, 57, said recently. He is now a pipefitter living in Pioneer in Amador County.

"I heard stories in 1970 that he passed away. I heard he never came out of a coma. This is the first time I learned he was still alive. ... I can't fathom what an ordeal it's been on them."

At the funeral, friends and family walked up to Ernie's casket and said goodbye. When it was his mother's turn, Margaret, who uses a wheelchair after losing a foot to diabetes, leaned forward and kissed the casket.

She placed a red rose on top.

"He's in a better place," she said. "He's in a better place."

Pelton family's plight spurs readers' support

By Melody Gutierrez - mgutierrez@sacbee.com

Published 12:00 am PST Wednesday, December 5, 2007

After reading about the unheralded legacy of Ernie Pelton, many Bee readers said they wanted to make sure he wouldn't be forgotten.

So the Pelton family has set up a fund to benefit Ernie's mother, Margaret Pelton, and sister, Linda Lacusky. The fund was prompted by the support the family received after the story of Ernie Pelton appeared in The Bee on Nov. 28-29.

"I just don't know what to say," said Lacusky, Ernie's 60-year-old sister and primary caregiver. "I'm just so grateful and thankful."

Ernie was a junior halfback at Rio Linda High School in 1967 who became a quadriplegic following a tackle in a game against Elk Grove High School. His family sued helmet maker Rawlings Sporting Goods Co. for $3.6 million, contending the helmet failed to protect him.

The 1970 trial lasted 89 days and included testimony from O.J. Simpson, who spoke to the durability of Rawlings helmets. The jury decided against the Peltons. The family said Simpson's testimony was part of the reason for the verdict.

Though they lost the case, the trial turned a national spotlight on the need for helmet testing and safety standards.

Ernie died Sept. 9 of pneumonia. He was 57.

Bob Pelton, Ernie's older brother, said sharing Ernie's story has been cathartic.

"It's hard to put into words," Bob Pelton said. "There are a lot of nice people out there. It made me feel good that so many people remembered him."

The family is trying to move Ernie's mother, Margaret, from a nursing facility to their home in south Sacramento. Margaret suffered a stroke several years ago and has lost a foot to diabetes.

Lacusky said she is behind on her mortgage and utility payments and could lose her home.

"I'm scared to bring her home until I can get that under control," said Lacusky, who took out a $50,000 loan to fix up her home so that Ernie would be more comfortable.

Donations can be sent to Bank of America, 5744 Stockton Blvd., Sacramento, CA 95824. Checks should be made out to Margaret Pelton