Rower’s family says abusive coach pushed athlete to suicide
On New Year’s Day nearly two years ago, Parker Kinney spent the day with Brian Lilly Jr. at picturesque Scripps Beach in the San Diego area and realized his friend had become a shadow of his former self.
Kinney and Lilly walked on the sand for hours and went to dinner. At the end of the night before saying goodbye, they opened up about their shared struggles while rowing for the coach at the time at University of California-San Diego and how it had affected their well-being.
Yet Kinney couldn’t possibly fully grasp the depths of Lilly’s despair that afternoon: The 19-year-old college rower took his own life just three days later.
Kinney is convinced his friend had been pushed to the edge by verbal abuse from coach Geoff Bond. Lilly’s parents feel the same way.
“This guy basically squashed Brian’s self-esteem, his threat to push Brian off the team. And I don’t need to have a sports psychologist in here to tell me how damaging that was,” father Brian Lilly Sr. said.
Brenda and Brian Lilly Sr., who live in Easton, have filed a wrongful-death suit against Bond and the school, alleging the coach mistreated their son largely because he challenged Bond’s decision to allow a rower to remain on the team despite allegations of sexual misconduct against the athlete. They are adamant their son was verbally abused by Bond, leading to his suicide in January 2021.
Kinney said he saw the abuse.
“I felt like they were trying to sweep the whole sexual assault allegations under the rug and a decent amount of kids had legitimate concerns about this, being like, ‘This is pretty messed up,’” Kinney said. “A lot of kids didn’t speak out about it. Brian did speak out about it, so Geoff retaliated against him. Brian’s main concern was that this would harm the integrity of the team, which I agreed with.”
The defense team for Bond, who coached at UC San Diego until last January, filed a motion to dismiss the Lillys’ case. The defense said Bond hadn’t seen Brian Lilly Jr. for the nine months prior to his death and that the coach reached out during the pandemic lockdown to inquire whether Lilly would return to school in San Diego from the East Coast where he had been living.
UC San Diego declined to comment through a spokesman, citing pending litigation. The school offered no details when Bond departed as coach on Jan. 13.
The Lillys said they are determined to save others from the kind of treatment they say their son endured.
“My whole thing right now is to give my son a voice,” his father said. “He was the ultimate underdog. He was a hero.”
Family attorney Nicholas Lewis said the teen briefly underwent in-patient treatment in July 2020 after experiencing what the attorney called psychotic and schizophrenic symptoms such as paranoia and disorganized thoughts before Lilly stabilized in a matter of days then continued outpatient therapy the rest of that year. Bond’s defense has argued the coach was never aware of Lilly’s emotional state.