Less than two weeks after a high school quarterback in New Jersey died after suffering a lacerated spleen during a game, two more high school football players have died, bringing the number of fatalities to five this fall.
On Monday, 17-year-old Kenney Bui, a senior at Evergreen (Wash.) High School, died three days after suffering a head injury during the fourth quarter of a football game against Highline High School. Bui, who played defensive back for Evergreen, was injured while making a tackle, according to USA Today.
He was taken in an ambulance to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, where he died three days later. According to ABC News, Bui underwent surgery upon arriving at the hospital, and was then transferred to the intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator.
“It is with great sadness that School Board President Bernie Dorsey and I share with you that TEC High School senior Kenney Bui, who was critically injured in Friday night’s Evergreen v. Highline football game, died Monday morning at the hospital,” said Highline Superintendent Susan Enfield in a statement posted on the district’s website. “This is a devastating loss for all of us—Evergreen students, families, and staff, and our entire Highline community.”
Rod Williams, a 17-year-old offensive lineman at Burke County (Ga.) High School, also died Monday, nearly two weeks after collapsing during practice on Sept. 22, according to the Augusta Chronicle.
“We were initially told he had some drastic sudden event with his heart,” Williams’ coach, Eric Parker, told the paper. “We were hoping and praying he would come back; it just wasn’t meant to be.”
According to the Chronicle, Williams collapsed roughly six or seven minutes into practice, which prompted medical staffers to perform CPR. He was treated at the Children’s Hospital of Georgia, where autopsy results have not yet been released.
The deaths of Bui and Parker were the fourth and fifth of this high school football season. Beyond Evan Murray, the aforementioned New Jersey quarterback, 16-year-old Tyrell Cameron of Franklin Parish (La.) High School reportedly broke his neck during a punt return in September and later died, while Ben Hamm, a junior at Wesleyan (Okla.) Christian School, died after suffering a head injury in September as well.
According to the Seattle Times, Bui’s death wasn’t the only high school football-related tragedy to strike the Washington community this past weekend. David Young Jr., a17-year-old senior at Adna High School, suffered a neck fracture during a game Friday and remains hospitalized.
From 2005 through 2014, there have been 32 deaths directly attributable to high school football, according to the National Center of Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. The high point since 1990 came in both 2001 and 2013, when eight high school football players died each of those years.