Football player mourned; police rule out suicide in shooting
Colorado Mesa University’s stadium fell silent Saturday afternoon.
Football players knelt in the end zone in prayer, fans bowed their heads and the usually raucous scene ground to a halt. Over the weekend, CMU student athlete Brett Ojiyi was fatally shot.
“The whole stadium slowed down,” said Beau Flores, CMU’s student government president.
Responding to reports of a shooting shortly after midnight on Saturday, Grand Junction police found Ojiyi with a gunshot wound to his chest. He died at the scene. The gunshot was not selfinflicted, Grand Junction police confirmed this week.
The Mesa County coroner said the circumstances surrounding Ojiyi’s death are still under investigation.
Ojiyi was a fouryear member of CMU’s football team, playing running back. He was a junior studying exercise sciences, according to The Criterion, the university’s student newspaper.
CMU is a relatively small state university in Grand Junction with just over 8,600 students. It’s the type of place where walking around campus you recognize many of your friends, Flores said. Many in the tightknit community are reeling from the loss of a beloved football player.
Ojiyi grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from West Torrance High School. A former high school teammate, Dale Rouse, remem bers him as the “best player on the team.” When West Torrance lost, it was usually because Ojiyi was injured, Rouse said.
On Twitter, friends memorialized O jiyi with funny videos of him dancing and photos of him on the field.
Driving home early Saturday morning, Haley Wiedeman, a CMU student also studying exercise science, saw the lights of police cars and a firetruck splashing across the quiet road. In the neardowntown residential area, the police presence struck her as odd. Her fears that something terrible had happened were confirmed when she checked her email the next morning, seeing the school’s president message about Ojiyi’s death.
“The entire Colorado Mesa University community is saddened from the news that Brett passed this morning,” CMU president Tim Foster said in a statement. “This tragedy touches all of us in different ways.”
While Wiedeman did not know O jiyi directly, she has several friends who were close to him and shared many of the same classes. Many knew Ojiyi as funloving and charismatic, Wiedeman said. The news spread quickly, and by kick off at 1 p.m., a somber feeling took over the stadium, Flores and Wiedeman said.
For the football players that knew him best, the news hit especially hard.
“You could tell it was weighing heavy on them,” she said, seeing many praying and kneeling during a moment of silence in O jiyi’s honor.
After the silence, the roar of the crowd filled the stadium as CMU scored a 75yard touchdown on its opening play.