by Neil Hayes
Maurice Drew picks up tough yards against the Jackrabbits.
Britt Cecil, Chris Biller, and Terrance Kelly (front row: left to right) relax during halftime of the Long Beach Poly game.
Quarterback Britt Cecil played the best game of his career in the biggest game of De La Salle’s 2002 season.
Erik Sandie and John Chan celebrate a 28–7 win over Long Beach Poly.
Cameron looks at the photo and wonders what his life would’ve been like if not for the long, dark procession of tragedies and scandals that filled local newspapers for nearly a decade and shook this close-knit blue-collar community to its core. He wonders how his life would be different if his father hadn’t died, if his mother hadn’t been accused of murdering him, and if his uncle hadn’t confessed to one of the most notorious crimes in Contra Costa County history.
One by one, those pictured who were closest to him disappeared from his life, until only he and Saimone were left.
His father was the first to go, and it came without warning on an August night in 1992. John Cameron Colvin was thirty-nine, a painter and carpenter. Cam remembers that he admired civil rights leader Malcolm X, that his Muslim name was Sudan Shahied Fard, and that he was a fan of the Oakland A’s and Rickey Henderson. Cam remembers his father being a quiet man who enjoyed cooking for his family.
The coroner found twenty times the legal dose of morphine in John Colvin’s system and ruled his death an accident caused by acute morphine intoxication. John’s family suspected foul play. One year later, the local police department began a murder investigation.
Cam and Saimone were prepared for their mother’s possible arrest. Still, it came as a shock when Cameron saw his mother sitting between two officers in the back seat of an unmarked police car. Soon the police were searching the house.
The prosecution painted John as the victim of a murderous plot. They claimed that Veronica had brought a bottle of pharmaceutical morphine home from her mother’s house following her death from cancer in 1992. Prosecutors accused Veronica of lacing her husband’s cough medicine with the morphine in order to collect on two life insurance policies John Colvin had taken out in the two years before his death. They claimed Veronica had called to inquire about one of the policies a month before her husband died.
The prosecution sought the death penalty.
The defense painted John Colvin as a closet drug user who accidentally overdosed on liquid morphine.
Veronica’s arrest left Cam and Saimone dazed and disoriented. “They wouldn’t let us have contact visits at first,” Cam said. “We had to talk to her behind the glass. It was real awkward. It was like something you see on TV or in the movies. You’d never think you’d be in that situation.”
Their Great Grandma moved in and took care of Cam and Saimone in her granddaughter’s absence. Veronica called often and mailed letters, drawings, and connect-the-dots pictures home to her children daily.
The trial lasted four weeks. Saimone went almost every day. She remembers her mother’s lawyers taking her out to lunch after testifying on her thirteenth birthday. Cameron was in the courtroom for closing arguments.
“The jury was staring at me,” he said. “Everybody was staring at the kids. It was uncomfortable. It was real tough to hear what was being said.”
It ended in a mistrial. Nine jurors voted to acquit. Three believed she was guilty. The charges against Veronica Nell Colvin were dismissed on Cameron’s eleventh birthday, almost five years after his father’s death.
The trial attracted headlines in part because Veronica was the sister of George Elzie, whose own arrest and subsequent trial shocked the community.
★ ★ ★
George Elzie was a former Pittsburg High School class president and baseball star who received a scholarship to Oregon State. He returned to his hometown after college and joined the police department, where he was given several high-profile assignments and was considered a rising star.
He and his sister Veronica were extremely close, and he doted on her two kids, Cameron and Saimone. He stopped by to see them almost every day, and he let them each pick out four presents at the toy store every Christmas. It was Uncle George who told his niece and nephew that their father had passed away.
“He’s the one who got me started on sports,” Cam says. “When my father first died I was sitting around the house doing nothing. One day Uncle George came and said, ‘We’re going to sign you up for baseball.’ I didn’t know if I wanted to do it, but ever since he signed me up I loved it. I’ve loved sports ever since.”
A passerby discovered twenty-eight-year-old Cynthia Kempf’s body in a field south of the rural town of Brentwood on the morning of March 14, 1988. She was wearing a black hood secured with duct tape and had nine bullet holes in her back. Her death remained a mystery for six months until police linked the case to a Pittsburg police officer suspected of a string of armed robberies that had confounded authorities.
It wasn’t until six years later that it was alleged that George Elzie had been one of four men who kidnapped Kempf for the purpose of gaining entrance to the Safeway store she managed. When their attempts to divert police from the store’s parking lot failed, they panicked. All four men had fired shots so they would share in the culpability.
Because he testified against the gang’s ringleader, George Elzie was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, kidnapping for robbery. After a trial that for a time ran concurrently with Veronica Colvin’s murder trial, George was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
“I looked up to him a lot,” Cameron said. “It was kind of hard to understand at first. My mother would tell me all the stuff that was going on in the newspaper. There were all these articles about her and my uncle. It was real tough.”
It had been his mother’s idea for him to attend De La Salle. He was warm to the notion, having idolized D. J. Williams, another Pittsburg youth football legend who went to the Christian Brothers school. Cameron was wavering when his junior high basketball coach Jay Lightner, who by then had become a family friend, convinced him to try De La Salle for a year. Lightner was so convinced that it gave Cameron the best chance of escaping his past and earning a college scholarship that he even offered to pay Cameron’s tuition so Veronica wouldn’t be burdened financially. If Cameron didn’t feel at home at De La Salle, Lightner promised to personally enroll him in Pittsburg High for his sophomore year.
A month into his freshman year Cam called Lightner and told him he would not be transferring. He wanted to graduate from De La Salle.
“You don’t have to worry about anything,” Cameron said of his new school. “All you have to focus on is your football and your school. You don’t have to worry about people backstabbing you. Everybody is there for the same reason. Everybody wants to be the best. The place just gets in your heart.”
★ ★ ★
Oddly enough, Veronica’s death was the easiest for Cameron to accept.
“I kind of understood her death,” he said. “I was happy for it. She didn’t have to struggle anymore. She didn’t have to worry about paying bills or my tuition. She had a lot of bills to pay. My sister was graduating. She had to pay for the senior ball and all that stuff. She had a lot on her plate. She got a rest from all that. I’m glad she got a rest. She had a tough life.”
Cam had overslept on his mother’s last morning at home and was rushing to get ready for school. The carpool driver was late. Cameron went into his mother’s room to see if she could take him to school. She was in the bathroom, her eyes rolling in her head.
Saimone was half awake. She had heard a strange thump come from the master bathroom. It was Veronica’s head hitting the wall.
Saimone took care of them both. She studied sports medicine at Pittsburg High and had long played the role of Veronica’s caregiver and administrative assistant. She sorted her mother’s many medications, helped her dress when she awoke disoriented, assisted with a myriad of other chores, and always, always looked out for
Cameron.
By the time Saimone reached the bathroom, Veronica was slowly sliding down the wall, eyes rolling, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Saimone dragged her mother to the bed and was holding the phone when she heard a honking horn on the street. Cameron’s ride had arrived. She knew her mother wouldn’t want Cam to see her like this. Saimone pushed him out the door.
“He said he thought everything would be fine, but he knew [otherwise],” Saimone said. “He wanted to stay but he did what we told him to do.”
Saimone’s worst fears were confirmed when she met her mother at the hospital. Veronica’s right eye was dropping and drool was pooling in the corner of her mouth. She had suffered another stroke.
Veronica slipped into a coma the following night and was placed on life support. She had suffered a second aneurysm, and the doctors couldn’t operate this time. They wanted to know how long the family wanted to leave her on life support. Saimone thought it over while giving her mother a sponge bath in the hospital.
“I kept thinking, ‘I shouldn’t be the one to make this decision,’ ” Saimone remembers. “I’m too young to make this decision.”
Her mother wouldn’t have wanted this. So Saimone set a deadline. If Veronica didn’t wake from her coma in three days, they would take her off the respirator and hope and pray she would survive. The deadline had come and gone when Cam visited his mother in the hospital. He told her he loved her. Saimone promised to take care of Cam.
“We knew she could hear us because she was crying,” Saimone said.
That was on a Thursday night. Cam worked out with his teammates on Friday afternoon, shocking everybody. Nobody knew what to say. They knew his mother was in the hospital.
He kept telling himself she would pull through, as she had during her previous hospitalizations. Ladouceur and Aliotti told him again and again that they were there for him. Take as much time as you need. Forget about off-season workouts. Come back when you’re ready.
What they didn’t understand was that his relationships with his teammates were all he had left. That’s why he practiced on that Friday afternoon and why he stunned everybody by showing up to a voluntary workout early Saturday morning. It had been less than twelve hours since the respirator was unplugged and Veronica Colvin drifted away, leaving her children to wonder what would happen next.
“She went peacefully,” Saimone told her brother.
“The whole week I was saying she’s going to come out of the coma, she’s going to be all right, she’s going to pull through,” Cam said. “But when Saimone told me that it just crushed me. It shattered me.”
The football team was the only thing he had left that made sense in his life. He wasn’t going to lose that, too.
“That’s getting away for me, just being with the team,” he said. “When I was with the team and coaches I didn’t even think about it. I’m focused on what I want to do. Nothing else matters. That’s my family now. I have a relationship with everybody on that team. I have forty-seven brothers.”
Blasquez hugged Cameron when he saw him that Saturday morning. Then he walked Cam into the locker room and told the team to gather round for a prayer, a prayer for Veronica, whom they all knew and liked, but most of all a prayer for Cameron Colvin.
Cameron remained stoic throughout his mother’s funeral. He was just like his father, he was told; John Colvin never showed his emotions, either. Cameron didn’t know what to do next. He didn’t want to return to his family’s home—too many memories. He didn’t want to abandon his sister, either, and she was determined to remain in the house and build a life her mother would be proud of.
He had grown close to Jay Lightner, his former basketball coach. Jay was director of a mentoring program in nearby Antioch and had three foster children and his own young son at home. He too had lost his father, and he related to the boy. Cameron moved in with Jay and focused on football and school. Going to De La Salle had been his mother’s idea. He would dedicate his junior season to her.
“When you talk about us being a family, make sure you mean it because I do,” Colvin would tell his teammates in an early-season chapel service. “You guys are about the only family I have left.”
★ ★ ★
Maurice Drew takes a handoff on the second play from scrimmage and bolts into the secondary behind two crushing blocks. A gasp rises from the crowd at Aloha Stadium as he bursts into the open field. He blows past two defensive backs charging up to stop the run.
Drew was the first De La Salle player to emerge from the locker room before the game. He had begun testing his injured ankle midway through the fourth quarter of Long Beach Poly’s 42–16 demolition of two-time defending state champion Kahuku. The first game had been sobering for De La Salle coaches, who knew the Spartans would host powerful Long Beach Poly in three short weeks, and also for the 30,050 fans that had come to watch two local powerhouses defend the honor of Hawaiian football.
With the outcome of the first game determined, the anticipation mounted for the main event. Every eye was on Drew as he stretched and ran. “Without Drew in the lineup, The Streak is in serious jeopardy,” television analyst John Veneri said as the cameras focused on Drew during pre-game warm-ups.
Now every eye is on him again as number twenty-one heads for the end zone. A St. Louis defender dives at his feet from behind and manages to trip him up. Drew staggers for 20 yards before falling at the St. Louis 9-yard line to complete a 51-yard play. He feels the same sharp pain in his ankle that he felt during Thursday’s practice. This time he doesn’t scream. He knows the pain will subside. He’s OK.
Jackie Bates, who will be expected to replace Drew next season, runs the next two plays while Drew rests, but the junior has trouble keeping his feet. An incomplete pass on third down sets up a chip-shot field goal attempt for Tony Binswanger, who had wowed the crowd by kicking a 50-yard field goal in warm-ups.
Binswanger was playing varsity soccer as a sophomore when his best friend, football player Matt Kavanaugh, led him unknowingly into the coaching office and introduced him as the junior varsity’s new kicker. Binswanger was stunned. His mother had discouraged him from playing football because she didn’t want him to get hurt. Tony had never kicked a football in his life.
Kavanaugh led him to the practice field after school for a tryout. Binswanger’s first extra-point attempt was true. After field goals from 30 and 35 yards sailed through the uprights, the junior varsity coach congratulated him. He had officially joined the football team.
Now Tony Binswanger is lining up for his second field goal attempt of the season as Ladouceur watches from the sideline, his fingers on his chin. It’s a chip-shot considering his leg strength, but his low, hooking attempt never has a chance. Drew’s electrifying run has been wasted. The kick is wide left. St. Louis takes over.
The Crusaders have been a run-and-shoot team since Cal Lee was hired in 1983, which means they throw the ball all over the field. However, Coach Delbert Tengan made a bold decision when he discovered that De La Salle’s defensive line averaged 218 pounds. The strategy is apparent from the moment St. Louis breaks the huddle. Instead of the offensive linemen lining up a yard or more apart in a typical run-and-shoot alignment, they stand shoe to shoe. The intent is obvious. Behind their mammoth offensive line, they plan to run the ball right at the Spartans’ undersize defense.
The first play is a handoff around right end. The undersize defensive linemen hold their ground and occupy their man, allowing linebacker Cole Smith and defensive backs Matt Kavanaugh and Chris Wilhelmy to tackle the ball carrier for a 2-yard loss. A fireplug fullback pounds up the middle on the next play but gains only a yard. Quarterback Bobby George throws deep for game-breaking receiver Jason Rivers on third down, but Jackie Bates and Damon Jenkins have Rivers double-covered and the pass falls harmlessly to the artificial turf. The Crusaders are forced to punt.
That puts the ball back in Spartans quarterback Britt Cecil’s hands. Before the game, the De La Salle pl
ayers wrote inspirational messages on the T-shirts they would wear beneath their shoulder pads. Linebacker Parker Hanks opted for “The only pain that matters is the pain you inflict.” Cecil, the mild-mannered senior who has yet to morph into the leader Ladouceur requires his quarterbacks to be, chose something more introspective and cerebral: “Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” It’s a quote from Calvin Coolidge.
Britt is going to need Coolidge’s wisdom. With Drew less than one hundred percent he must be a playmaker. Now, on De La Salle’s second possession, he does just that—with a little help. On third and long, Cecil drops back and throws deep down the middle for Cameron Colvin.
Now two St. Louis defenders run stride for stride with De La Salle’s 6-foot, 180-pound receiver. It seems an ill-advised pass until Colvin, who is slowing down to catch the underthrown ball, uses his body to shield one defender and leaps up and catches the ball over the other for a 46-yard gain.
A late hit by a frustrated defensive back gives De La Salle a first down on the St. Louis 7-yard line. Running back Gino Ottoboni picks up six yards on the next play.
De La Salle offensive linemen crouch at the line of scrimmage when Cecil barks “down” and drop into their stances when they hear “set.” A second later, when Cecil shouts “hut,” they fire off the ball—a snarling, bloody-knuckled chorus line—as three separate movements become one fluid motion.
This unit isn’t as quick or as synchronized as Ladouceur would like, but they are still quicker off the ball than anything the Crusaders have encountered as Cecil scores on a quarterback sneak to give the Spartans a 7–0 lead.
“St. Louis is good, but De La Salle is a machine,” says one of the many Hawaiian observers on the sideline.
The De La Salle offense is executing with a crisp efficiency that was absent the week before. These seem like different De La Salle players than the ones who piled into elevators after the previous night’s team meeting. You could see the change as they filed through the buffet line for breakfast. There was a newfound resolve. Their body language changed overnight.
