Inconvenient truths
Forensic pathologist Bennet Omalu shook the NFL with his findings about traumatic brain injury, said Gabriel Thompson. Now he’s upending California law enforcement with his findings about police violence.
B ENNET OMALU IS not a man who seeks out controversy. He’s been known to flee it, in fact. But it has a way of finding him. Last March, 22-year-old Stephon Clark became the latest flash point in the ongoing national furor over the police use of force against AfricanAmericans. After the unarmed black man was shot and killed by Sacramento police officers in the backyard of his grandmother’s house, Black Lives Matter activists led a march that shut down Interstate 5 and forced the cancellation of a Sacramento Kings NBA game. A week after the shooting, during a game between the Kings and the Boston Celtics, both teams wore jerseys with Clark’s name and the words “Accountability” and “We Are One” on them during warm-ups and the playing of the national anthem.
Soon after Clark’s death, his family contacted Omalu, a forensic pathologist, and asked him to perform a private autopsy. On March 30, Omalu released his findings. He determined that Clark had been shot eight times and that six of the bullets had entered the back of his body. This cast doubt on the veracity of the police report, which stated that Clark had been approaching the officers when they fired. In response to what the county coroner called the “erroneous information” provided by Omalu, the following day the county released its official autopsy, which found that Clark had been shot seven times, only three times in the back.
A soft-spoken, devoutly Catholic, 50-yearold forensic pathologist from Nigeria is not exactly the first person you’d expect to keep materializing at the center of major American controversies involving contested deaths and charges of official cover-ups.
Yet Omalu has now played a leading role in three such scandals—including the mother of all sports-medicine train wrecks, the National Football League concussion debacle.
For a man who became a forensic pathologist in part because, he says, it “placed me as far away as possible from living, breathing patients while still allowing me to practice medicine,” Omalu has had a career—and a life—crowded with highpressure human interaction. He grew up in a village in southern Nigeria during the Biafran War; his family was displaced, and his father was almost killed at a checkpoint manned by militiamen hostile to his Igbo tribe. He earned his medical degree but suffered from depression and desperately wanted to get out of corruption-riddled Nigeria, where he once watched a patient die in a hospital because the surgeon on duty inexplicably refused to operate. In 1994, Omalu managed to obtain a coveted visa and immigrated to the United States to study cancer epidemiology at the University of Washington.
Omalu venerated the United States as a place that “sets you free to be whatever you want to be,” but in Seattle he learned about its darker side: Employees followed him in the grocery store, and police repeatedly stopped him as he walked through his mostly white neighborhood. Omalu didn’t understand what was going on—“I thought there was something wrong with me,” he says—until his landlady suggested that he go to the library and read up on U.S. history. “Slavery, ah! Civil rights, ah!” Omalu says.
After Seattle, Omalu did a residency in clinical and anatomical pathology at Columbia University, then completed several fellowships and earned master’s degrees in public health and business administration at other universities. His curriculum vitae runs to 32 pages. He was determined that his skin color would not hold him back, and he regarded education as the key. “I may have overcompensated,” he jokes. Omalu produced his forensic masterpiece in 2002, as an unknown pathologist in the coroner’s office in Allegheny County, Pa. One day, he was assigned to perform an autopsy on the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster, and he discovered that it was riddled with lesions—the first diagnosed case in an NFL player of what he would come to call chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Additional research confirmed his hypothesis: The repeated blows to the head suffered by most football players put them at risk for serious brain damage.
During a long and tortuous process that culminated in a class-action lawsuit brought by 20,000 former NFL players—and the league finally admitting that there was a link between football and CTE and creating a $765 million fund to help deal with the problem—Omalu became a hot commodity. Journalists sought him out for quotes, and job offers came in from all over the country. But there were just as many negatives: Strange cars began following him; other scientists took credit for his discovery. Battered and overwhelmed, Omalu fell into a deep depression. I wish I had never met Mike Webster, he told himself.
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T THIS MOMENT, an unlikely escape hatch opened: Out in California, an official at San Joaquin General Hospital began wooing him to be the county’s chief forensic pathologist. Omalu and his Kenyan-born wife, Prema, were flown out and given tours of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Napa Valley. Worried about her husband’s depression and smitten with the idea of a move west, Prema urged Omalu to take the job. He did, and in 2007 they moved with their son to Lodi, a midsize city north of Stockton that is surrounded by farmland. It felt like the middle of nowhere, which was just what they were looking for. He and his family soon fell in love with San Joaquin County.
“Lower profile, no NFL presence,” Omalu says, “I just wanted out. A lot of people