One Shock Wave After Another

Driesell himself wasn't talking, he said over and over. "You all gonna do a hatchet job on me," he said half a dozen times. He argued the point so long he finally got to gabbing and chuckling and eventually started diagramming high school football plays on a chalkboard. Lon Babby, one of his attorneys, called. "No, don't worry, I haven't said anything" Driesell assured him.

"I'm going fishin' tomorrow," was his only statement about the future.

The scene of the Len Bias tragedy last June 19 was Washington Hall. It is a redbrick dormitory with white pillars. Visiting it now, one is aware of a startling irony. The building sits in a sort of pentangle of dorms that face not a common greensward, but what looks like a city playground. Every day, Len Bias, student, stepped out of his dorm room into an expanse of five full-sized paved basketball courts.

"Come on in," offers Dave Dickerson through the window of suite 1103. Dickerson is a sophomore forward at Maryland. He played behind Len Bias last season. He now lives in the suite where Bias took the fatal cocaine.

The suite's living room is tiny, perhaps 12 feet across, with desks in the corners. There are four bedrooms off the living room. Dickerson is sitting in the room in which Bias and three others allegedly took cocaine early on the morning of June 19, and he is remembering his former teammate, the one known to friends as Frosty. "I knew I was playing behind a great player," says Dickerson. "I looked up to him as a role model. He was the leader of the team. You know, you talk about excitement—Michael Jordan didn't have anything on Len Bias.

"I think back, and I've seen him do some incredible things," Dickerson continues, shaking his head. "Incredible...." His voice trails off.

Four months of work by a Prince George's County grand jury has helped fill in some of the details of what happened in suite 1103 on the morning of June 19. As has been recounted before, Bias returned to College Park the evening of June 18 from the two most exciting days of his life. He had gone to New York for the NBA draft, then on to Boston, where his agent, Lee Fentress had come to a handshake agreement on a $1.6 million, five-year endorsement contract for Bias with Reebok shoes.

Bias left his dorm sometime after midnight and met Tribble, who is 24. Specifics of the next few hours are fuzzy, but include two stops at a liquor store. A "mystery woman," whose identity investigators say they still do not know, traveled with Bias and Tribble for almost two hours. Tribble, however, told SI that he knows her whereabouts and promises she will be at his trial.

At about 3 a.m., Bias and Tribble joined Long and Gregg back in suite 1103. A grand jury source confirmed that Long and Gregg, who had cocaine-possession charges against them dropped last month after cooperating in the case, testified that about half a coffee cup of cocaine was piled on a mirror on a table. Long and Gregg are said to have told the grand jurors that Tribble said the cocaine was the last of his stash, but that he expected a new supply in the next day.

The grand jury source confirmed that Long and Gregg continued the story this way: The four friends began snorting the cocaine with cut plastic straws while they sat around the table and talked. All had used cocaine before, including Bias, who had tried it half a dozen times, the source confirmed.