National Post (National Edition)
TAILGATE TRAGEDY
FOOTBALL GAME ALTERCATION LEAVES PAINFUL QUESTIONS — AND A 3-YEAR-OLD WITH NO DAD
SMITHVILLE, MO. • She stops in the hallway and points at the photograph, hoping the boy at her side will remember.
“Who’s that?” Jenni Van Winkle asks Will, her 3-yearold son.
The gears turn in his little mind, same as they did the previous night and the one before that. Jenni waits, nervous he won’t recognize a face she wants him to know.
“Daddy!” Will says, and the tension inside Jenni releases. Now it’s a game. She moves her finger to another picture, this one of “Uncle B.,” then to one of “Nana,” then back to the photo of Will’s dad.
She asks him again. He recognizes him again.
Every night they do this, an important part of the bedtime routine: Will being taught to love a father he barely knew. Seven weeks after Will was born in October 2013, Kyle Van Winkle went with his own father to a Kansas City Chiefs game; following a mysterious confrontation with other fans, he was beaten to death in a parking lot outside Arrowhead Stadium.
In the three years since, Kyle has become another symbol of an alarming problem for the NFL: how to rein in drunken behaviour, rising arrest figures and occasional fan-on-fan violence at its stadiums.
While incidents of extreme violence don’t happen often, they do happen: This season, a man suffered a brain injury after being attacked at a Baltimore Ravens game. Last year, a Dallas man was shot outside a Cowboys game and later died. The year before that, a California man was severely beaten in a restroom at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara.
The year before that, Kyle Van Winkle — a 30-year-old man with a newborn son — went to Arrowhead Stadium and never came home.
Now in this household in suburban Kansas City, the 32-year-old mother understands Will is going to ask a question with a painful and complicated answer: What happened?
“I hate to think about it ... I feel like I have one shot to convey how good he was,” Jenni says. “But even if you convey that, will Will think: Well, why is he gone?”
The police sergeant sits in the corner, ignoring the bread and waving away the waitress. He is in no mood to eat.
This might be the worst part of this: He is the answer man, the longtime detective who found fulfilment in the pursuit of justice and purpose in bringing closure to those families, he says, “who could be mad at God.”
But Dean Van Winkle has told himself closure is not in his future. His son is dead, beaten and left unresponsive in the Arrowhead Stadium parking lot, and Dean was a few hundred yards away when it happened.
In the early 1990s, Grandview Police Sgts. Engert, McKinstry and Van Winkle agreed to go in together on four Chiefs season tickets. Win or lose, the colleagues could suspend shop talk for the day, grill brats and watch the kids chase footballs.
Dean enjoyed tailgating. Arrowhead is known as one of pro football’s iconic game-day atmospheres, and watching the action from behind an end zone wasn’t bad either. But what Dean loved, what kept him coming back for almost two decades, was listening to Kyle talk about what he was seeing on the field.
For years, Dean marked the passage of time by those seasons, and in a flash the boy sitting next to him had become a college student; then a man with a job at a credit union; then, finally, a husband and father himself.
The rhythm of those Sundays had been so subtle, Dean could barely distinguish one season from the next, one game from the last. What, if anything, had been different about that December day in 2013? What, the old detective asked himself, had he missed?
“You just try to make it all fit, but sometimes it just won’t fit,” says Joe McKinstry, a former Grandview detective who shared office hours and Sundays with Dean. “And that’s the worst thing: Sometimes it never fits.”
Dean and Kyle had agreed to meet in Lot A of the Truman Sports Complex, the 220-acre home of Arrowhead and Kauffman stadiums.
A few years earlier, Dean had given up his season tickets. Dean had, over the years, noticed an increase in alcohol-fuelled “drama,” as he calls it, fights or the potential for them making him feel like he was never off-duty.
Dean surrendered his tickets, but he proposed a new tradition: One game each year, a few fathers and sons spending a Sunday together.
They settled on Dec. 1, with the Denver Broncos in town.
Kyle arrived in his friend’s SUV, and Dean greeted his son. They each had a few drinks, Dean would recall, but no one seemed drunk. When they reached their seats, nothing seemed unusual. Kyle announced shortly after kickoff that he was heading to the restroom, and Dean watched his son descend the stadium steps, nothing alarming about his gait.
When the first quarter ended, Dean texted Kyle. He called him. Nothing. Dean would barely notice quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Alex Smith trading touchdown passes, the old sergeant’s gut tightening as the second quarter advanced.
At halftime, Dean could no longer stand it. He left his seat and went looking for Kyle.
For reasons Dean would later struggle to explain, he left the stadium and wandered into the parking lot. He approached Lot A and the SUV Kyle had arrived in, and farther down the same row Dean noticed police surrounding a similar SUV.
Dean walked over, seeing yellow tape and investigators. His instincts were telling him someone was dead. “All I could do,” he says now, “was think of the worst.”
He stopped at the barrier and waved over an investigator he recognized. Dean asked what had happened. The investigator told him he needed to sit down.
Jenni was watching with a friend when the banner spread across the television screen: ARROWHEAD DEATH A HOMICIDE.
More out of curiosity at first, she texted Kyle: What’s going on? After a few minutes, she called and then texted again: Call me. She first felt anger when he didn’t respond, then worry. She called again, texted again. Call me. Call me. Call me. Then she saw headlights turn into her driveway. It was her father’s car. She watched him climb the stairs and walk through the door, saying nothing. Then he fell to his knees and told her Dean had called. Kyle was dead. That was all they knew. Jenni doesn’t remember much after that.
The following days and weeks were a blur; the initial reports suggested that Kyle — the mild-mannered soul who, court records show, had no criminal record — had broken into an SUV and was trying to steal it.
Next came a theory that made more sense: After leaving his seat, he continued into the parking lots; Kyle reached Lot A and climbed into an unlocked SUV, which he apparently thought he had arrived in.
Public records would later describe the 10-year-old son of the SUV owner noticed Kyle asleep in the passenger seat and alerted his father. The owner roused Kyle, who stepped out.
The 10-year-old went looking for help, and a group of nearby tailgaters responded to the commotion. Several of them approached Kyle and, though exactly why it escalated remains unclear, a fight broke out. Kyle fell, and a witness would tell police one of the tailgaters vowed Kyle wouldn’t “be doing that again.”
At one point, public documents describe, a 25-year-old man named Joshua Bradley punched and kicked Kyle while he lay on the pavement; after Bradley retreated, someone in the group said something, and Bradley resumed beating Kyle until he was unconscious.
Someone from the tailgating group propped Kyle up against a nearby bus, apparently unaware that the beating had caused blood to leak into his brain.
Four men would be arrested, and nearly three years later, Bradley would plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter. In June, a judge suspended Bradley’s seven-year sentence and handed him five years’ probation; shortly afterward, Jenni filed a wrongful death civil suit against the Chiefs. In the team’s response, filed in August, it denied responsibility.
Dean pored over documents, asked questions, revisited the scene in his mind. It’s what he had always done.
Had Kyle felt sick after leaving his seat? Exhausted after seven weeks with a newborn? Was he drunk — autopsy toxicology results have been sealed by a Kansas City judge — when he started toward the restroom? Dean wished his son had staggered or slurred; at least then he would’ve gone with him. But there was no way for Dean to know, and the deeper into the rabbit hole he dug, the farther he drifted from closure.
“I’ve thought about it a million times: Why did it happen?” he says. “Why did he go out there? But there is no answer.”
And so he settled into the fog, it seemed, for the long haul. Then one night a memory of Kyle flashed into his mind, and because these fragments of his son were disappearing, he logged into a computer to capture it. Dean began typing, and what emerged was a note to his grandson: “I figured I would leave you something,” he wrote to Will, “from my memory of your Daddy.”
A collection formed: Letters for Will to read in the future, and though this wasn’t the reason he started it, Dean felt a sense of purpose for the first time since that Sunday in 2013. It was to introduce his grandson to Kyle, a father he would otherwise never know.
“He cared about people,” Dean wrote, “and how they felt and how they were treated.
“This trait I find as one of the most I’m proud of in him. It is one I’m sure he would wish for you to find in your own self.” Will is a little boy now. Last month, Will and Jenni stopped in the hallway and looked at the pictures. “Who’s that?” she asked, and he recognized the face, same as always. She asked him about love and bravery, same as always.
Then, almost without planning it, she altered the routine. Will climbed into bed and she asked whether he knew where Daddy was. In heaven, he said, one of the stars in the sky.
“Do you know what happened to Daddy?” she asked him.
The boy looked at her. This time he said nothing.
Jenni took a breath, a young and broken family still lost but searching for the way back, and with delicate words, she began.