“He was an everything kind of kid,” said his older half-brother, Justin Shank. “For just 19 years old, he was amazing. He did it all. Put it in front of him and he could do it.”
As the starting quarterback at Clinton-Massie High School — the Clinton County school where Friday night football not only is a social event for the whole community but has been a “we’re-better-than-most” escape from the economic woes that have rocked the surrounding Wilmington area – he led the Falcons to perfect 10-0 regular seasons in 2009 and 2010 and a 23-2 record overall.
He was the popular, spin-his-sticks drummer of Honour et Fidem, a hard rock/groove metal band that has an ardent following in southwest Ohio and especially at The Attic in Kettering.
“He played drums in his band, but he was an amazing guitarist, he could play the piano and even gave the violin a shot,” Justin said. “He wrote music, too, and sang and played guitar with Mom in church.”
Although he didn’t start wrestling until high school, Jake was fearless on the mat and senior year he won the South Central Ohio League’s 145-pound title with a stunning upset of a highly-favored Miami Trace wrestler.
Because he was so good in the drum line, he was added to the high school marching band as an eighth grader. He won local variety shows, sang in the choir and appeared in several of the school’s musicals, including Bye Bye Birdie and Godspell.
In fact, he was up on that same stage in the school’s Auditeria just a few days ago. This time he drew a big crowd again – at least 1,500 people .
But that’s where the story goes all wrong.
He was on stage in a silver-and-black casket surrounded by bouquets of flowers.
His death nine days earlier in New Orleans was numbing news for everyone here – “When my mom came downstairs about midnight and told me, I just couldn’t breathe,” said Wyatt Running, the Falcons’ star fullback this season – but the stunning way his family says it happened has been especially disconcerting.
While the Orleans Parish coroner’s investigation is yet to be completed, Jake’s death in the shadow of the Superdome has prompted plenty of hurtful rumors and much debate. But Scott and Lisa Richardson, like their son, Justin, and some other relatives and friends, insist the speculation is off base.
They say the real reason is something most people have no clue of and something even they once dismissed.
‘Rarin’ to go’
Justin, who works in Virginia as a field engineer for the CJ Mahan Construction Company, said his brother “got every single bit of his athletic talent from his dad and all his musical talent from Mom.”
Jake had a special bond with his mother and took it hard when she was hit with serious health issues the past few years.
An attorney who had served as a Warren County Juvenile/Probate Court magistrate, Lisa had her right kidney removed in 2009. A year later she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and with that came grueling chemotherapy treatments and numerous surgeries. Now her other kidney has stage two renal failure.
“There were times when he was a senior in high school where I’d be sick and not able to get up,” she said. “He’d come in and play his 12-string guitar until I fell asleep. Jacob was my sunny kid – even when he was a little boy. If I was upset about something, Justin would say, ‘I’ll go get Jakey. He always makes you laugh.’ ”
After graduation, Jake went to Capital University for a semester, then transferred to the University of Cincinnati, moved in with Justin in Loveland and got a job at LensCrafters.
Scott works for CJ Mahan, as well, and when his job took him and Lisa to New Orleans – and Justin left for Virginia – Jake suddenly felt alone. In mid-September he decided to join his parents at their new home in Slidell, a New Orleans suburb on the northeast shore of Lake Pontchartrain.
A workout fanatic, he joined a local gym, thought about going to LSU and, after just a week in town, had the chance to join his dad in a Superdome suite for the New Orleans Saints game with Kansas City on Sept. 23.
“He was rarin’ to go,” Lisa said. “And when they got there, it was like a private party. Shrimp cocktail, meatballs, all the food you could eat, beer on ice. Jake posted a picture of his view from their private box on Facebook. And when the game ended, they were fine. They had had a ball.”
Ugly rumors
Lisa said when they got to the nearby lot where Scott’s truck was parked, traffic was so snarled they decided to “kick back until things cleared out.”
Less than 90 minutes later, she said her husband was awakened by his ringing cell phone. That’s when he saw Jake was not in the truck and the passenger door was wide open.
“When Scott answered the phone, it was the coroner,” Lisa said. “He was told, ‘You need to come to the station. We have your son. He’s dead.’ That’s how my husband found out.
“I was at home and a man called and asked if I knew Christopher J. Richardson. I said, ‘That’s my son.’ And that’s when I asked, ‘Who are you?’ He said he was with the coroner’s forensic division and I said, ‘Are you trying to tell me my son is dead?’ And he said, ‘Yes ma’am, I’m sorry to tell you. He’s dead.’”
Lisa couldn’t believe it. She had just talked to Jake on the phone: “At 5:04 I called him and he said, ‘Hey Mom, we’re trying to get out of here. Can I call you back later?’ I told him sure.”
Not believing he was dead, she rushed to police headquarters as Scott headed to the coroner’s office, where he was shown his son’s belongings, but not the body. Lisa said she was told a new rule in Orleans Parish only allows next-of-kin identification during normal, weekday business hours.
Even so, she said the Times-Picayune newspaper immediately reported that Jake’s death may have been a suicide and that the coroner was investigating it as such. That news quickly traveled back to Clinton County.
Clinton-Massie football coach Dan McSurley said his wife awakened him at 5 a.m. on Monday: “She said it looks like he may have taken his own life, but I just flat knew that wasn’t the case. I coached him in football and wrestling. He’s one of the most positive kids, the most emotionally stable young men I’ve ever been around.”
Rumors, though, quickly swirled around the community. There was talk that he was drunk. That it was suicide. “I heard so many terrible things,” said McSurley, who promptly called a meeting of his current players. “I wanted to make sure we stopped all the hearsay. I told them it had to be a tragic accident.”
Lisa said she and her husband were left in the dark for four days. They didn’t get to see their boy’s body until Thursday, soon after they hired a lawyer.
That’s also when they got their first look at 40 minutes of security video that captured their son’s final actions.
After he got out of the truck, Jake walked into a nearby parking garage. At about that same time Lisa sent him a text and she said he responded with jumbled letters that didn’t spell words. But when he answered the call from her, he sounded clear-headed.
When he said “we’re trying to get out of here,” she assumed he meant he and his dad were trying to get through the traffic. But as the tape showed, he was talking to an imaginary person in the garage.
“He paced back and forth, grabbed a moped and tried to start it,” she said. “You can tell he’s frustrated. Then he disappeared for a while.”
It’s thought that’s when he walked up six floors of ramps to the top of the garage. “He got on the elevator up there and the doors closed and then they opened again and he was still standing there,” Lisa said. “You need a key card to operate them, so he kept standing there and the doors continued to open and close. Then he went out of view again.
“It looks like he took off his shoes and pants, because they were loose. And that’s when a witness said he put one leg over the sixth floor (wall), then the other. He grabbed hold with both hands and hung down, trying to reach with one arm to the next floor. And that’s when he fell.”
He plummeted head first and was killed.
From the glazed, far-away look they saw in his eyes during the video, the family claims it knows what happened.
“He wasn’t dog drunk, blacking out, being an idiot and it wasn’t a suicide attempt,” Justin said “He was happy. He didn’t want to die. He just couldn’t wake up all the way.
“He was sleepwalking.”
‘Not suicidal’
Justin said Jake had trouble sleeping for years:
“He wouldn’t be able to go to sleep until 4 in the morning and he’d be up at 8. And his sleepwalking was getting progressively worse.”
Experts say sleep deprivation is a cause and so is stress – which Jake had plenty of worrying about his mom’s health and then feeling alone.
Wyatt Running said he witnessed the sleepwalking first hand: “Jake stayed over at our house and in the middle of the night he comes walking into my room.”
Lisa saw it, too:
“At first, he’d just sit up in bed and have a conversation or he’d get up and pee in the closet. But it had escalated and I found out later there were a couple times he’d even gotten in his car. Once he ended up in a farmer’s field.”
While sleepwalking is more common in children than adults, a National Sleep Foundation study found it was prevalent in up to 15 percent of the population.
According to Sleep Disorders – A Handbook for Clinicians, sleepwalkers’ “eyes are open and their expression is dim and glazed over.” Trapped between deep sleep and consciousness, they may try to do activities as simple as walking and eating or as extreme as grabbing at hallucinated objects and attempting dangerous, complex tasks.
Lisa said she went to the spot from which her son fell, looked out and saw the lot across the street where Scott’s truck had been parked. Unable to figure out how to get out of the garage and back to his dad, she thinks Jake tried to climb down.
“I know some people will think, ‘Oh that family is in denial. He was suicidal,’ ” she said. “But then he would have simply jumped, not walked around 45 minutes, texted, talked on the phone, tried to get on the elevator all those times and tried to get on a moped.
“My son was not suicidal. He wasn’t a drunk or on drugs. He was a sleepwalker.”
Lisa said she was told the toxicology results may take 10 weeks to come back. The chief investigator for the coroner’s office did not respond to multiple Dayton Daily News requests for comment.
“I did hear from someone in the coroner’s office,” Lisa said. “He apologized for the way we were informed and he said once he saw the film there’s no way it was suicide. It looked like an accident.”
McSurley said “if anything is to be learned here, it’s that people need to be more serious about this. They need to see a sleep specialist.”
Meanwhile, Jake has been buried at Bethel Lane Cemetery, a small, old, all-but-forgotten graveyard surrounded by cornfields south of Wilmington. His grandparents live right next door.
And over at Clinton-Massie, the unbeaten Falcons say they are playing for him.
“He wasn’t the biggest guy, but he packed a punch. He laid kids out when he ran over them,” said senior captain Trent Smart. “And even though he might be gone now, we’re going to make sure he lives on with this team. We’re gonna play all out, just like he did.”
And that’s the way it should be.
Jake Richardson never sleepwalked through anything.
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