Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

A 19-year-old pole vaulter for the University of Southern California San Diego died earlier this month after receiving a traumatic brain injury. According to the Los Angeles Times, sophomore Leon Roach from Huntington Beach, California, had been practicing his vaults on Thursday, September 3. Roach was completing a jump but missed the pads and hit the concrete instead, landing head first.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the accident happened around 7:19 p.m. during a routine rope swing drill at the UC San Diego campus. Reports say that Roach was unresponsive and stopped breathing immediately after the accident occurred. He was transported to emergency medics to Scripps memorial Hospital in La Jolla, where doctors treated him for TBI.

Sadly, Roach’s doctors declared the athlete brain dead on Saturday, September 5, at about 5:00 p.m.  UC San Diego expressed its condolences in a statement it released after Roach’s death. “Words cannot begin to express our sorrow. Our hearts go out to the family and friends of this remarkable student and valued member of the UC San Diego community.”

A report in the Orange County Register said that pole vaulting ran in Roach’s family. “Roach … graduated last year from Marina High School and came from a family where pole vaulting was a tradition. His father, Leon Roach II, was involved in the sport in college, and his older brother, Curtis Hendrick, was also a success at Marina.”

According to the Brain injury Resource Center, approximately 1.4 million Americans sustain some form of TBI every year, 300,000 of which received the injury when playing sports. 1.1 million people are treated for concussion and released from the emergency department, but 235,000 require hospitalization and approximately 50,000 die as a result of their brain injury.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under News, brain injury, safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.