Charges dropped in former NFL QB’s case

WEST CHESTER » This news just in: Jeff Komlo is still dead.

A Chester County prosecutor on Monday provided that information — however musty — to a Common Pleas Court judge who had been assigned to oversee the former NFL player’s case some years ago while asking that the criminal charges against him be formally dismissed.

Assistant District Attorney Andrew Davis — who was not alive when the “Saturday Night Live” catchphrase “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead” entered the American lexicon in 1975 — told Judge Patrick Carmody that it was time to close the file on Komlo eight years after his re-

ported death in a car crash in Greece while a fugitive from justice in the county and the state of Florida.

Komlo died in 2009, Davis told Carmody, thus negating the need to keep open the three cases against him on charges of simple assault, recklessly endangering another person, and possession of controlled substances. The case had been kept open this long, Davis said afterward, primarily because Komlo had previously tried to fake his own death to avoid prosecution.

The DA’s Office, in cleaning out old files, had discovered the cases were still active. Carmody agreed to the request and signed an order that the cases be nolle prossed, or formally withdrawn. The date of the crash is listed in records as March 14, 2009.

That year, county detectives announced that the U.S. State Department had used fingerprints to confirm that a crash victim in Greece was indeed 52-year-old William “Jeff” Komlo, a gridiron great at the University of Delaware in the 1970s who played for the Detroit Lions and two other teams in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Then-Chief of Detectives Jim Vito said authorities initially had been skeptical about reports of Komlo’s death in a weekend crash but are now convinced.

“It is unfortunate that the case had to resolve itself in this manner instead of Mr. Komlo facing justice in Chester County,” Vito was quoted as saying.

In July 2005, Komlo failed to show for sentencing on two drunken-driving convictions. He also had failed to show for an unrelated hearing two months earlier. When he vanished, Komlo also was under investigation for setting a fire that destroyed his home in Chester Springs and for setting another fire at a home in Florida. He was also undergoing divorce proceedings in Montgomery County.

Then-Assistant District Attorney Michelle Frei, who prosecuted Komlo on both drunken-driving cases, said at the time of his reported death that it was frustrating that Komlo escaped his punishment. “He wanted his day in court, and he got it. He went to trial, and he lost,” Frei said Friday. “Most defendants show up and face their sentence. This guy ran.”

Komlo was the University of Delaware football team’s All-American quarterback in 1978, who later played several seasons in the NFL with the Detroit Lions and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His pro career ended in 1983. He was the subject of a profile in Sports Illustrated titled, “The Wrong Turn.”

Franco, on the other hand, was a Spanish general who ruled over Spain as a military dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975. The joke about him, “Francisco Franco is still dead,” became popular during the first season of “SNL,” mocking “the weeks-long media reports of the Spanish dictator’s impending death” during slow news periods, according to Wikipedia.