ROCK HILL, S.C. — The York County Coroner’s Office is expected to share the results of a CTE brain study conducted on Phillip Adams on Tuesday, Dec. 14. Adams is a former NFL player from Rock Hill accused of killing six people in a mass shooting last April before ending his own life.
Police say Adams shot and killed Robert Lesslie, 70, his wife Barbara Lesslie, 69, and two of their grandchildren, Adah, 9, and Noah, 5, as well as two HVAC workers, James Lewis, 38, and Robert Shook, 38 on April 7 in Rock Hill.
Police say Adams took his own life as officers were closing in on him. Adams was from Rock Hill. He played in the NFL six years, most recently with the Atlanta Falcons, until the 2015 season. He had several documented injuries in his career.
Following the shootings, York County Coroner Sabrina Gast obtained special permission to have Phillips’ brain tissue sent in for CTE tests. CTE, or Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is a brain degeneration most likely caused by head trauma, according to the Mayo Clinic.
According to doctors, CTE has been found in professional athletes and symptoms include cognitive, behavioral and mood changes. Right now, the disease can only be diagnosed after death, when doctors use a sample of brain tissue to study the brain.
“Many of the individuals who were diagnosed with CTE in life they had what we call emotional lability, which is basically like a short fuse or flying off the handle quickly,” said Dr. Dan Daneshvar with Harvard Medical Schoo, “These were often significant personality changes from what the individual and their loved ones previously recorded.”
Dr. Daneshvar has studied CTE for 12 years. He says the medical community has known about the disease since the 1920’s, but it started receiving more attention in the last decade when doctors started finding it in football players.
A study published in 2017 showed out of 111 NFL players whose brains were donated for CTE testing, 110 were found to have had the disease.
“We found that playing additional years of football was associated with a higher risk of an individual getting CTE, to the tune of every additional year of football, regardless of level of play, and regardless of position play, in that study, we found was associated with a 30% increased risk of CTE,” said Daneshvar.
But Dr. Daneshvar says anyone who is repeatedly hit in the head is at risk of CTE, including boxers and victims of domestic violence.
On Tuesday, Gast will be joined remotely by Boston University’s Dr. Ann McKee to share if Adams had CTE at the time of the shootings.
Eight months after the fatal shootings, questions about the motive for the murders remain. When police searched Dr. Lesslie’s office, they found no evidence Phillip Adams was his patient.
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