LITTLE ROCK — Sometimes, while driving around town, Lori Russell will pass a car with No. 56 painted on its rear window in shoe polish. Then, there was the day when her youngest daughter, Lana, was in the car and noticed the thermostat indicated it was 56 degrees outside. Almost immediately - as if someone was trying to cover up a secret that had been discovered - the temperature changed.
Over the past three months, Blaine Russell and his wife have seen their son’s former Gravette jersey number in odd places - parking lots, football fields and on collection jars at the grocery store.
A framed No. 56 hangs above the door that leads into Blaine Russell’s workshop at New Technology, Inc., where he manufactures steel parts for pet food extruders. The number is tattooed on the father’s right shoulder, and it’s scrawled across the Dodge Power Ram pickup parked outside his shop.
Casey Russell saved up all summer to repaint the truck. His father has driven it since his son’s unexpected death on Sept. 23 from a staph infection.
“I’ll eventually take it off,” Blaine Russell said of the No. 56 written on the pickup’s rear window. “(I’ll) kind of let it wear off if it wants to.”
The number is also with Casey Russell. He was buried in his orange and black Gravette Lions home football jersey.
Sitting beside each other at a conference table, Blaine and Lori Russell maintained their composure last week while talking about their only son - the starting offensive lineman who was never too old or bigto sit on his mom’s lap or give his dad a kiss.
Casey Russell, 17, was among four Northwest Arkansas high school athletes who died in 2009, leaving behind families to grieve and teammates to confront death for the first time in their young lives.
The emotions are still raw for some, and for those forced to celebrate their fi rst Christmas without their son or friend, they’ll carry a sense of loss with them today. Holidays and birthdays just don’t feel the same anymore.
“The hardest part was like when we went out to eat for Blaine’s birthday (on Dec. 7). I couldn’t say, ‘Table for four,’” Lori Russell said, knowing there were five of them not too long ago.
“Lindsey, our oldest (child), had to speak up and say it.”
Making this month even tougher for the mother of three, Sunday is her 45th birthday.
A Community Grieving
Gravette has become the family’s adopted home since 2000, when Blaine Russell was transferred from Texas for his job with Wal-Mart. His oldest daughter, who’s now 21, was a cheerleader at Gravette.
And he can usually be found every Friday night in the fall leaning against the top rail of Lions Stadium, cheering with a group of other parents during Gravette football games.
When Casey Russell died - his parents, who are Catholic, point out it was on the same day St. Padre Pio passed away 41 years earlier - the whole city of Gravette seemed to go into mourning.
“We’re a small school, so everybody knows tons of kids anyway,” said Shannon Mitchell, a Gravette counselor who knows of three students who died during her seven years at the school. “It seemed like (Casey’s death) impacted the whole school, or it really impacted the whole community.”
When several Gravette students hurriedly called a candlelight vigil the night Russell died, about 600 people came out to fill the home side of Lions Stadium. The stands were surprisingly full.
Casey Russell was that likable of a guy - an honor student and two-year starting offensive lineman who could cross between the different high school cliquesand make friends.
“I still think about (his death) a lot, but it’s not overwhelming like it used to be. It happened, and I miss him,” said Gravette off ensive tackle/ center T.J. Chevallier, who had been Casey Russell’s close friend since second grade.
“But it’s not as bad as it was.”
Russell’s parents didn’t attend the candlelight vigil, but they heard all about it.
Blaine Russell had rushed the previous night with his two daughters to Little Rock to be with his wife, who had fl own in the helicopter with their son to Arkansas Children’s Hospital after his emergency surgery took a turn for the worse.
But the father kept getting text messages from people informing him of how many people had arrived at the stadium for the service.
“That’s when it started hitting us, like, ‘Damn.’ We never knew that many people thought that much about him,” Blaine Russell said.
Three weeks after his son’s death, Blaine Russell sat for five hours to get a portrait of Casey tattooed on his meaty, right shoulder. Tattooed next to his son’s smiling face: A Gravette Lion.
The outpouring of support from the community has helped the Russells cope.Lori Russell admitted she still has rough days, especially as Christmas approached. And a memory will occasionally come out of nowhere and blindside her husband while at work.
But the Russells have found they’re not alone. They’ve received dozens of flowers over the months. Cards are still left at their son’s grave. And a woman made a quilt and gave it to his parents after having every Gravette player sign it.
Of course, the quilt had Casey Russell’s No. 56 stitched on it.
Turn For the Worse
Russell’s parents said doctors don’t know from where their son contracted the staph infection or how long it had been in his body before his death. They had never heard of methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureous - better known as MRSA - before it took their son a little more than a month after his 17th birthday.
A couple weeks before his death, Casey Russell had complained about a nagging pain in the right side of his back. At first, his father said he thought his son had a pinched nerve. Then, he believed it was a herniated disc.
Over the next few days, Casey Russell went from a 5-foot-11, 205-pound junior -who had hit his growth spurt earlier this year - to a scared teenager no longer capable of completing basic tasks.
“I was having to help him walk. All of a sudden, his feet weren’t functioning, and he was so aggravated,” said Lori Russell, a woman with short, brown hair and a welcoming smile. “He was like, ‘I’m walking like an old man. What is wrong with me?’”
After seeing both a chiropractor and a family doctor, Casey Russell visited a spinal orthopedist. He was so weak his father had to carry him into the specialist’s oft ce, then take him to Mercy Medical Center for an MRI. When the scan took longer than expected, his parents got worried.
That’s when the specialist met with the Russells and gave them the bad news. The staph infection had spread to their son’s spinal cord, putting him at risk of being paralyzed if emergency surgery wasn’t done immediately.
It was the last time his family would see him alive.
“We were able to tell him, ‘I love you’ before he went into surgery,” Lori Russell said. “Where there’s a lot of people who lose their kids in a car wreck or whatever, they don’t get that closure.”
Blaine Russell admitted that, for some reason, he got thefeeling that day he’d never see his son alive again. He didn’t tell his wife or daughters of his gut instinct at the time, but he knew the staph infection had to be bad for it to cripple his strong son.
“Casey’s been in surgery and I’ve had other kids have surgery, and it doesn’t bug me. I don’t get emotional about it,” Blaine Russell said. “When I kissed him and told him I loved him, I cried because I knew I wouldn’t see him (alive again).”
Dozens of friends, coaches and their family priest arrived at the hospital to show support. For the Russells, though, everything seemed like a blur from the time doctors told them their son wasn’t waking up from surgery until midnight, when the helicopter left for Little Rock with him and his mother onboard.
It was a last-ditch attempt to save him.
“I expected to go up there (to the hospital), and they’d say he was coming out of surgery and everything’s going to be fi ne,” Gravette coach Bill Harrelson said. “He might not be able to play football for a while, a year or whatever.
“But you don’t prepare yourself for something like that, and then having to tell the team the next morning (that Casey had died) was the hardest thingI’ve ever had to do.”
Gravette’s Homecoming game against Pea Ridge was scheduled for two days after Casey Russell’s death. There was talk about postponing it, but everyone figured Casey would’ve wanted it played.
He loved football.
To show his best friend was still a part of Gravette’s team, Chevallier carried Russell’s helmet and set it on the football field when the players began stretching shortly before kickoff .
He placed the helmet where Casey Russell would’ve been standing in the team’s stretching line.
For the remainder of the season, Chevallier brought Russell’s helmet to every game. And when he accidentally forgot it before a game at Shiloh Christian, Chevallier’s father stopped by Gravette’s locker room, grabbed it and brought it to the game.
“It never really got easy,” Chevallier said of seeing the helmet, but not the friend to whom it had belonged. “It was weird standing on the sidelines without Casey there.”
Signs and cars with No. 56 painted on them arrived at Lions Stadium for the Pea Ridge game.
The number was also painted in both end zones. And for the first play of the game, the two teams sent only 10 players onto the fi eld as a tribute to Casey Russell.
After the play ended, Gravette defensive coordinator Duke Mobley grabbed the game ball and ran it up into the stands and presented it to Russell’s parents, who were still in disbelief over their son’s death.
Still, there wasn’t much doubt they’d be at the game as usual.
“As much as (the team) loved him, I wasn’t going to miss a game. I’d go to all the football games anyway, but it was tough,” Blaine Russell said. “It was tough two days after he died being at a football game.
“And a lot of people probably wondered, ‘How can they do that? Or why would they do that?’ But it was about him.”
Gravette defeated Pea Ridge 24-0.
And as far as that game ball, it was placed in Casey Russell’s casket before he was buried. It’s with him - along with his No. 56 jersey.
Sports, Pages 9 on 12/25/2009