|
 |   |
|
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE |  |
Deadly reminder Rams linebacker Little coping with fatal past
Posted: Friday January 28, 2000 11:06 AM
By Josie Karp, CNNSI.com ATLANTA (CNNSI.com) -- Prior to the first-half kickoff, No. 57 gets lost surrounded by his teammates. He's just another bobbing head getting ready to explode with pregame anticipation. For a moment, he's Leonard Little, football player and not Leonard Little, drunken driver. "Some people meet me sometimes and they sit down and talk to me for a while and ask me my name and say, 'Oh, you're the guy,'" Little says. Little's the one who celebrated his 24th birthday at a St. Louis bar in October of 1998. He's the one who got behind the wheel of his Lincoln Navigator legally drunk. He's the one who ran a red light at a downtown intersection. He's the one who plowed into a much smaller car. He's the one who ended the life of Susan Gutweiler. "I think about it all the time," Little said. "I mean every day I wake up in the morning I think about it. It's always in the back of my mind no matter if you're at the Super Bowl or anything bigger than that. It's always there and I always think about it." Because he's alive to do that, Little is the lucky one. In a St. Louis cemetery, Susan Gutweiler rests beside a daughter who was killed in a car accident 20 years ago. Gutweiler, who was 47 at the time of the accident, left behind a husband and a teenage son. Their pain, Little can only imagine. "It's hard to put yourself in that situation." he said. "It's hard and I try to put myself in the situation whereas if something happened to my mom like that and it would be a hard situation to cope with." Ninety nights of shock time, to be spent in this St. Louis work house, comprise part of the sentence Little received after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter last June. He's completed about a third of that to date and part of 1,000 hours of community service a judge also ordered him to perform. If he finishes both, after four years of probation, his record will be cleared, leaving no legal trace of so many shattered lives.
"It's hard because I've never been in trouble," Little says. "Not a problem kid or anything like that so when you're in the legal system like that, it's always hard on a person for the first time to go through some things like that." Little's back playing football after the NFL suspended him for eight games as punishment for his actions. Bill Gutweiler, Susan's husband, is also back on the sidelines. As an assistant to a Sports Illustrated photographer, he was at the TWA Dome for the NFC Championship game. Little never encountered him there and would not have known what to say if he had. "That's a hard question. I just, that's a really hard question," he says pausing as he speaks. I mean, hopefully him and me can sit down and get some things resolved." With Little getting ready for the Super Bowl far away from a tragedy that's marked in stone back in St. Louis, that may be too much to ask.
| ||||||||||||||||
