Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2003 | 11:02 a.m.
Las Vegas High School football player Edward Gomez died of blunt force trauma to the head, the Clark County coroner ruled on Monday following an autopsy.
The death of 17-year-old Gomez, who died at University Medical Center about 7:15 p.m. on Sunday, was ruled accidental, a coroner's office representative said.
The senior safety had been on a ventilator since collapsing while on the sideline during Friday night's Sunrise Regional championship victory over visiting Desert Pines High School.
Las Vegas High football coach Kris Cinkovich would not answer questions Monday about Gomez's death.
Instead he issued a statement to the press that focused on the emotional impact of the tragedy.
"We will never forget what Edward brought to our lives," Cinkovich said.
Gomez had been a Clark County School District student since kindergarten and was in his fourth year at Las Vegas High, according to district records.
UMC's lobby was filled Saturday with players, parents, cheerleaders and others when doctors told them that they had done all they could for Gomez. The well-wishers were allowed to go into Gomez's room two-by-two, taking a minute to say goodbye to their unconscious friend.
Although Gomez had walked off the field Friday, paramedics rushed to take him to UMC after he collapsed.
Medical specialists have been researching blunt head trauma from contact sports such as football and boxing for decades, Las Vegas neurosurgeon Lonnie Hammargren said Monday.
Fifteen football players died in the United States last year, five after on-field head injuries, according to the American Football Coaches' Committee of Football Injuries. In 2001, 23 American football players died, the organization said.
In general a head injuring occurring while a player is in a collision on the field involves trauma to the brain, said Hammargren, who has not consulted on the Gomez case, said.
Gomez could have bled to death or his brain could have had internal injuries that caused it to swell, Hammargren said. Normally in auto or motorcycle accidents, the brain swells, he said.
"I would hope we could learn more techniques to prevent these types of injuries," Hammargren said.
More scientific research and better helmets could better protect football players, he said.
Cliff Frazier, Basic High School's head football coach, said the football helmets have been improved significantly over the last couple of decades.
"The helmets we have now, they're so much more protected, so much more up to date," Frazier said.
He also said the district's teams "have every single helmet reconditioned, every single year. There's an approval sticker on every single helmet."
Schools also buy some new helmets every year. Every school makes its own decisions about what to buy.
Information about Gomez's helmet -- whether it was a new or reconditioned helmet, how it old it was, whether it had been inspected by equipment managers or coaches prior to Friday's game -- was not available Monday.
Frazier said that two weeks before Gomez's death, Gomez had a number of hard hits while playing against Frazier's team, including one that knocked Basic's Adrian Abril out of the game.
"They had a pretty good collision," Frazier said. "Kris (Cinkovich) called me the next day to see how Adrian was."
Abril was fine, and the hit was a clean one, Frazier said. He noted that it is standard practice in the district to teach players not to lower their heads when tackling.
"If we see that head go down, we yank them out (of the tackling drills)," Frazier said.
As a safety, Gomez played the most statistically dangerous position on the field, according to research done by the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of the 229 catastrophic injuries sustained in all levels of football from 1977-2002, at least 81 were suffered by defensive backs. That accounts for 35.4 percent of all catastrophic injuries, which are defined as a "sport injury that resulted in a brain or spinal cord injury, or skull or spinal fracture."
Players with unknown positions were second on the list at 46, meaning even more could potentially be defensive backs. Linebackers ranked third with 24 injuries.
Players attempting to make tackles accounted for 159, or 69.4 percent, of catastrophic injuries.
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