July 12, 2005 dawned as an unremarkable day in Columbia, Missouri. A slightly overcast, unseasonably mild Tuesday. Tiger football players were in the middle of summer conditioning. By the time the sun set, it would be a day that was both notorious and transformative for Mizzou football.

Redshirt freshman linebacker Aaron O'Neal died that day.

O'Neal collapsed about three-quarters of the way through the Tigers' voluntary workout session at Faurot Field. He was pronounced dead within a couple of hours at University Hospital. The medical examiner listed the cause as viral meningitis. O'Neal was found to have the sickle cell trait, which many believe to have contributed to his death.


Ten years later, O'Neal's death still resonates.


"For a couple years, Brad Ek would call me, he would be crying," said Missouri teammate Lorenzo Williams. "He would be like, 'Man, what did we do wrong?' I'd be like, 'I don't know,' and I'd start crying."

PowerMizzou.com talked to high school and college teammates of O'Neal's as well as his high school coach ten years after one of the most unshakeable days of any of their lives. The O'Neal family declined an interview, but did provide the following statement:

"We are honored and humbled by the recognition that Aaron's life will receive this summer. His life was spent loving, caring, and competing in passionate ways and his legacy will provide a living testament to future generations. His blood and extended families all miss him and love him very much and would like to thank everyone involved for continued love, support, encouragement, and prayer. It goes without saying, 'AO' will be forever in our hearts."

Missouri coaches and athletic department personnel were unavailable for comment for this story.

His name still comes up. A lot. Ten years seems like a long time. But for those that knew Aaron O'Neal during the 19 too short years he had, the memories do not fade.

"You can't get over that man. You can't get over that," said Brad Ekwerekwu, a senior wide receiver at Missouri who was at the workout when O'Neal collapsed. "It's so tragic and so, I don't even know what the word is. It's so ingrained. It's a part of you now. I live differently now because of it. It's like written too deep to forget. They say time heals it all. Well, time can help distance you from it, but it's still pretty fresh, man."

"It's amazing how still ten years later I'll run into somebody that we played against in high school, somebody who went to North, how much you still talk about somebody that passed away ten years ago," said Blake Eyres, O'Neal's best friend and his high school quarterback at Parkway North. "We still talk about games that we remember, or times that we hung out with Aaron, or parties, or whatever."

"All the time, man. It's kind of one of those things where it comes up in conversation on a regular basis," said Williams, a defensive lineman at Missouri and now a high school football coach in Springfield. "It's like Aaron used to do this, or it's funny, remember when Aaron did this...It's never not a good time to bring up Aaron. We bring up Aaron all the time. He's close to us."

"Every time you think about it, every time it gets brought up, it kind of takes you back to that place and you're kind of foggy a little bit. Kind of like I am right now," said Martin Rucker, a Tiger tight end at the time. "Thinking back to that time period and everything that happened before and everything that happened because of it and everything that changed. That's a long time ago, but such a significant, significant event."

Eyres has a tattoo on his ribs. Ekwerekwu recently had a son. His middle name is O'Neal. Both have been invited to the O'Neal family reunion on Labor Day weekend by Aaron's father, Lonnie.

O'Neal's likeness plasters the walls at his alma mater. But head coach Bob Bunton says he was--and is--shocked at the outpouring of support from beyond the school immediately after O'Neal's death and its endurance ten years later.

"When Aaron was here in high school he was just a typical student-athlete," Bunton said. "What really came out in the eulogies and the celebrations that the kids had was how many friends he really had outside of football. That was surprising to me. I guess that's what made it that much more tragic and stunning. He was everything you would want to be in a kid.


"I walked out of summer school one day to my car, here came a guy that I didn't know in the community, he said, 'Coach, I just wanted to come by and offer my sympathies to the program.' This isn't a small town. This is a suburb of St. Louis. But what happened around that was so many small town communities come together. It's terrible that a tragedy brought that, but, boy, I just can't think of another word, it was so impactful to a lot of people that didn't have anything to do with football."

Missouri always had two workouts from which players could choose during the summer. The first started at 6:30 a.m. The second was at 1:30 in the afternoon.

"For some reason, I'm talking 99% of my career, I went to the 6:30 workout," Ekwerekwu said. "But for some reason that day I said 'Forget it, the weather's going to be okay, I'll just sleep in, knock my class out and go to the 1:30.'"

About 45 minutes into the workout, O'Neal began to struggle. Teammates and trainers pushed him to finish the drills. Eventually, O'Neal ended up face down on the field.

"It was me and (assistant strength and conditioning coach) Josh Stoner that were left down there with him and that's essentially when he passed was down in the stadium," Ekwerekwu said. "I was left with him in my arms while Stoner went and got that landscaping truck that we transported him from the stadium back to the facility. And in the facility, that's where all the documentation picks up as far as the 911 call, the resuscitation attempts. Then they take him across to the hospital and in a matter of hours he's gone.

"It just totally devastated everybody. I remember being in the shower and just crying for like an hour straight in the shower."

The details would emerge over the next few days and would be the subject of a lawsuit settled later in which Missouri paid the O'Neal family $2 million. But for those close to O'Neal, the events of that day ten years ago are still shocking.

"I remember exactly what I was doing for that entire day and the next three days after that," Williams said. "I'll never forget. You don't forget that, but it's kind of like, you know, you get better with dealing with it, but you never get over it. For me personally, I was shutting it down. I didn't really want to be on guys anymore. Being at that practice, it was like seeing all that, was just ridiculous. I just didn't know where I fit in anymore."

"I was coming back for my second workout and I remember seeing (Missouri wide receiver) Will Franklin there sitting on the step and he said that AO passed away," Mizzou wide receiver Tommy Saunders said. "It was a shock. I was like, what do you mean? How did he pass away? You think, was he in a car wreck? What happened? He said 'They don't know, he collapsed at practice.' It was a shock. It was a real shock."

The news took a bit longer to filter back to St. Louis and to those that knew O'Neal before he was in college. Bunton said his son, Bo, was getting instant messages on his computer that something had happened to O'Neal.

"Bo said, 'Dad, I'm telling you, they said Aaron died today.' I said 'There's no way. I would know by now,'" Bunton recalled. "So I called his cell phone. Obviously went to voicemail and it wasn't within 15 minutes, Cornell (Ford) called and I'll never forget his words. He said, 'Coach, we lost him.' I did not comprehend. I said 'What do you mean we lost him?' He said, 'Coach he died at a workout today.' It was just stunning. The first thing that I thought of was, 'Oh, not Aaron.' I mean, you're talking the most gentle; there's no way. It was disbelief."

Eyres was working his summer job as a waiter at Spiro's in St. Louis, home on break from Truman State, where he had just completed his freshman year as a football player. He ignored multiple messages on his phone. Later in the evening, he finally had a break.

"I finally go to the back, I see a couple text messages, listen to a voicemail from a younger guy from the team. In the voicemail, it was like, 'Hey did you hear about Aaron? Is this true?' I immediately called coach Bunton and he confirmed. Actually, first I called Aaron's cell phone, nothing picked up. I tried to call Lonnie, he didn't pick up. I called coach and..."


Eyres trails off as he does a few times in the interview. Ten years later, the pain is still raw.

A year later, Eyres was done with football.


"My sophomore year I got moved to wide receiver, tore my knee, Aaron had just passed away that summer. I lost all my passion for football, lost my love for football," he said. "That's when I stepped away from the game. I wouldn't say 100 percent. I'm not saying blame that on Aaron's death. I bet you Aaron would have tried to talk me into trying to go and play somewhere else. He knew the fight that was in me."


The trauma from his best friend's death took far longer to let go.

"My second year of dental school I started going to grievance counseling through UMKC because of it. This is like four or five years afterwards. I have dreams, Aaron's in it and I just in the dream I'm like 'What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here.' And I wake up and my pillow's just soaked. Just crying when I'm sleeping.

"I went and did grief counseling four or five years afterwards. Being the quarterback, being the leadership position I was in, I had found out, I never really got to grieve for me personally because I was the one putting the strong face on and everybody coming to me when he passed away. It took me some time.

"After I went through all that, now when I have dreams it's all positive. I realize in my dream that it's a dream and that most of the time we're playing football at Parkway North. We're in the huddle and it's the feeling of, oh, dude, our offense is unstoppable. We're going to go hang out after the game, do this, but I know I'm dreaming and it always ends like 'I'll see you when it's my time.'"

A BUDDING SUPERSTAR


On the field, those that saw him play had no doubt.


"This guy's going Sundays some day," Eyres said.

Eyres and O'Neal started playing together when they were eighth graders, in the Parkway North Junior Viking program. Eyres had played in seventh grade. The team played eight games. It lost all eight. AO showed up as an eighth grader. The team lost its first three games.

"You're talking about all these kids that just started playing football in 7th grade, we've lost our first 11 football games. Everybody's like why did we quit playing soccer?" Eyres said, laughing. "Aaron, he kept everybody's attitude so positive. He's like, 'We're gonna get that game, we're gonna get that game.' Once we did, I mean, we just rolled and won our last five...He was just the guy that was able to, just this aura about him, made everybody wanted to try harder, play harder and be better. "


The pattern repeated itself in high school. Eyres won the starting quarterback job as a sophomore and started every game of the 2001 season. O'Neal sat on the bench until week nine.


"They didn't bring him up to varsity till maybe like the last four or five games," Eyres said. "He just exploded. When we were in districts, he's putting up a couple hundred yards a game and everybody was just like, 'Why didn't you put him in earlier this year?'"

Their coach admits he may have made a mistake there.


"He ran wild," Bunton said. "Boy, did we look stupid. He did not start until week nine his sophomore year."

Once he did, O'Neal went on to set records. His single game record of 254 yards from that Webster game still stands. To be fair, it may have been broken since. Bunton's son, Mike, was awfully close in a 2006 Class 4 quarterfinal against Hannibal. Before coaches could examine the game film to see if Bunton had officially broken the record, Mike told them not to. He did not want O'Neal's name erased from the school record book.


O'Neal had a school-record 36 carries in one game his senior season. Eyres recalls the number wasn't that unusual for the Vikings' workhorse.


"His hands would be so swollen from getting tackled, carrying the ball, people hitting him with their helmet," Eyres remembered. "We had English class together, or if we didn't have class together, I would sneak out of class and go get a bag of ice and just bring it to Aaron because his dad would be like, 'Hey, if the swelling in your hands doesn't go down, you're not going to play this week.' But he never once complained about it. Just the tenacity that he had. I got the best seat in the world to watch him play as a quarterback. Hand off, turn around and you watch this kid."


O'Neal was so valuable as a running back--the Vikings had no real backup if he got hurt--that he never played a down on defense in high school. But Missouri coach Cornell Ford targeted the ultra-athletic tailback to play linebacker in college. The players already knew AO because his brother, Nick, was a student at Mizzou.

"He would come up and stay with Nick and he used to be running around the dorms telling us, 'I'm the best player in Missouri. I'm going to come to Mizzou.' We're like, 'We don't even know you little dude, get out of here.' He was Nick's little brother for the longest time," Williams said. "Then when he signed his Letter of Intent, he came up to the dorms like, 'I told you all I was coming to Mizzou, man!'"


"Man, he would have been Spoon probably before Spoon was Spoon," Williams said, evoking the nickname of three-time all-conference linebacker Sean Weatherspoon. "I mean, that was the guy. When he came in at linebacker, we thought that guy was going to be a very special player for us."

The repetition of that statement makes those who knew O'Neal laugh.


"That would have been surprising to me because Aaron was not a vocal kid," Bunton said. "But people did gravitate to him."


While the personalities may have been different, those who played with him insist the abilities were not.

"He was super athletic. That's one thing that makes Spoon great. He had just such a knack for the ball," Saunders said. "You get the defensive guys that were more headhunters, but AO, he played running back in high school so he was very familiar around the ball, he had that coordination. You get that on top of physical and fast, that is the recipe for a great linebacker."

"He might even have been better than Spoon. Honestly," Ekwerekwu said. "That dude could run. Because I think he was more mobile and more agile than Spoon. Spoon would line you up and hit you. Aaron would run you down and then hit you. That's exactly what AO would have been. And then after he'd knock you out, he would take time to stop and help you up. That's crazy. That was crazy."

The athleticism, combined with tenacity and a fierce work ethic, made for what everyone expected to be one hell of a college football player.

"The only time I ever saw Aaron O'Neal upset, I suspended him his senior year Homecoming for one quarter," Bunton said. "The day before we had a walk through and he showed up ten minutes late because he went to get a Homecoming haircut. He was not happy. And man, did he have a heck of a game. And he hated me that day."

And it was that tenacity that made his death even more shocking to those closest to him.

"That was why it was so wild when he passed away," Eyres said. "I'm like, 'Man, that's so not like Aaron.' It would be 105 out, we would be running sprints and he's the only kid not bent over. He was just a freak athlete, but then also mentally, it was like he's never going to show any sign of any weakness or lack of effort. That was the craziest thing about when the guys were telling me you're not making it through a drill. No, there's never been a lack of effort in the guy.

"Aaron never had a bagging day. He never had a day where he was like, 'Okay I'm only going to put in 80 percent today.' Even when we were in high school and he's by far the best athlete on the team and his 80 percent is better than everybody else's 100 percent, there's no 80 percent days."


"This is ten years later, I didn't think at the time he passed away that Mizzou really knew Aaron," Bunton said. "Pushing Aaron O'Neal? Aaron pushes himself."

From those days in the dorms visiting his brother--even from before that--Aaron O'Neal was born to play at Missouri. He visited his brother, Nick, all the time. He and Eyres went to the 2003 Nebraska game--a 41-24 Missouri victory, its first over the Huskers in 25 years--their senior year.

"We were like the first row, ten-yard line," Eyres said. "It rained the whole game. Me and Aaron are just under my jacket the whole time, standing all four quarters. We moved down with a couple of our other high school teammates and their dads, we were like, 'Hey, we're gonna rush the field. We'll stay with Nick, we'll find our way back on Sunday. But this is epic.' We rushed the field. A couple of the players knew who Aaron was and they pulled us into the locker room. We got to be in the locker room for Gary Pinkel's post game speech. That night, they took us out. That was just one of the coolest experiences we had."

"We knew him so long before he got to college," Williams said. "That was kind of like the reason we were so close to him. He slept on our floor. He slept on my floor a whole bunch of times, me and Monte Wyrick, he slept on our floor, he slept on Brad and Jason Ray's floor. He was always up at school."

"He was so perfect in his life. He was doing what he truly dreamed of doing," Bunton said. "I think everyone that knew Aaron, that was his dream, man, playing for Mizzou."

For O'Neal, that dream ended before he got to play a single game in college.

"He was an instrumental part of everything that happened after that. He was a part of our team still," Rucker said. "We all fought together. He was there for a year before anything happened. We sweated with him, all that stuff. We know how hard it was for us to go through it all, make it through it all and for him to be right there grinding with us and not get to see the end of the road, make it to the end of the rainbow, it's a big deal. Such a young age for a life to be taken. Everything he was working toward, all his goals and everything, were just like ours. His were just cut short."

AO OFF THE FIELD


Those in Columbia mostly knew Aaron O'Neal on the football field. Most who did not know him, but knew who he was, knew because he played football. But those at Parkway North knew AO only partly as a football player.


"Football wasn't just our relationship," Eyres said. "We had a lot of good times together. So much fun. That's why you never forget."

That good came for O'Neal and Eyres in so many places. It came on the bus or the bench or on the basketball court: "I think we won like six games that whole year. On the bus rides, we'd be sitting for the JV games before our varsity games. We got to bond so much. We always got to bond during football, but you got so many more people in the locker room, your bus rides are quiet, a little bit more serious manner. But I'm glad we played. Because I got to spend that much more time with him."

It came at home: "When we'd have away games we'd have maybe an hour to kill. We'd go to my house and it was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The way he made his peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I would be done eating my two sandwiches by the time he was done perfecting his sandwiches. He'd always just look at me with his big smile, he knew, I just made this perfect sandwich. I played with a lot of great athletes. Aaron was a great athlete. Everyone knows that. He was an even greater person."

"One of those guys that could hit you on the field and then as soon as the play was over, as soon as practice was over, you'd be joking with him in the locker room," Rucker said. "One thing I'll never forget about him is he always had a smile on his face."


Rucker sounds like he is going to continue. He pauses, even ten years later fighting back emotion. "Yeah." That's all he can say.

"Aaron was a great young man," Pinkel said two days after O'Neal died. "A million dollar smile, a good student, an exceptional football player with a great work ethic and a player that had a great future. I don't think there is anybody on our football team or anybody who went to high school with him who would have anything negative to say about him."


Aaron O'Neal was a football player. To those who knew him--and now those who only know of him--he was so much more. Blake Eyres' youngest sister--eight years his junior--has Down's Syndrome.


"She still talks about him," Eyres said. "Ten years later she still talks about him. Just as nice as could be to my little sister. So respectful to my parents. He's the kid, never leaves a dish behind or a crumb behind. I pay a lot of those attributes to Lonnie. Nick is the same. All those kids are just as respectful as can be. But when you go over there to his house, Lonnie was kind of, he was fun, but he was stern. He knew how to raise those boys. I have so many great memories."


Beyond his statement at the beginning of this story, Lonnie O'Neal declined to be interviewed. He hasn't spoken to the media on the subject of Aaron's death for ten years. Those who know him can speculate about his feelings about Missouri football in the wake of the tragedy and the lawsuit against many of those involved that day ten years ago, but all say they can't really speak for Lonnie or Aaron's siblings. Eyres and Bunton say some days are harder than others than others for the O'Neal family. Nick is still in St. Louis, a patient at Eyres' dental office. Aaron's younger sister Shameka, lives in Alaska and named her son after her older brother.

"I've said it from the very start of the evening I spoke with him when Aaron died, I could not believe that man what we he went through," Bunton said. "As a parent, I don't know how you move on."

Every year, Lonnie comes to the Parkway North team banquet to present the Aaron O'Neal Most Inspirational Player Award. He has led the team out of the tunnel before games a few times in the years since his son died.

"Lonnie is a man of few words. Always has been, still is today, but those kids know who Mr. O'Neal is," Bunton said. "I don't know if that brings him comfort to come here. I don't know. I don't know how he does it. But wonderful relationship with Lonnie and the kids."

Ekwerkwu and Eyres are in touch with the family. The other teammates of O'Neal's at Mizzou that we spoke to say they were never close to them, other than Aaron and Nick.

"I haven't really been in touch with them at all really since the whole thing with Aaron," Lorenzo Williams said. "I hope they're doing well."

Aaron O'Neal's death was a tragedy. That fact should not, cannot, be lost. Perhaps, his Missouri teammates admit, looking for positives in that is reaching a bit too far. Yet all of them say that after AO's death, the changes in the Missouri football program were drastic.

"You don't want to say that because it kind of implies that we needed somebody to die to be good. That's not the truth," Williams said. "You know, it was like a weird deal and one of those things you wish had never happened that happened, but once it happened it did change everybody's aspect about life and what mattered and that kind of stuff. That kind of helped us become closer. Closer as a team and closer as a group and a unit. I don't know. It kind of changed everybody. It changed everybody and it changed them for the better."

The change came from the top. To a man, the Missouri players who were there before O'Neal's death and after say that Gary Pinkel changed in the wake of the tragedy.

Pinkel has said that himself. At the first press conference after O'Neal's death he said "I feel like I lost one of my children." His players at the time, though, offered much more insight into a side of Pinkel that most fans never see.

"He wouldn't say much at all most times," Williams said. "You see him in the hallway, you didn't want to talk to him, just kind of walk right by him, you were kind of scared. It was kind of like that kind of dynamic. It was a little weird, you know what I mean, to be around him. I think after Aaron died he really took it upon himself to change and get to know the players better, like get involved in our every day lives. I think that made him care about us more, it made us care about him more."

"He became a huge player's coach in terms of what he was before. Much more personable to everybody, much more caring about what the players actually thought," Rucker said. "He put more thought in letting us know that he was there for us and that we were all in it together, not just as coaches versus individuals, but that everybody had lost someone and we were all going to come through this together. I think that really did open his eyes and a lot of good for our team came out of such a bad, bad thing."

"Playing a sport you get this thing of, you hear people say and it sounds kind of cliche at times, it's a family, we're a family, we're a team of brothers, you know," Saunders said. "And it's kind of like that, you don't realize until somebody's gone. That's exactly what it was. You didn't realize how close you were to these guys, to your brothers, to your family, to your teammates, until something like this happens."


Ekwerekwu admits the O'Neal tragedy distanced him from some in the Missouri football program. He includes coaches in that. But he does not deny the changes that came after O'Neal died.

"It was a definite change," he said. "Procedure wise, as far as the summer physicals, the time and effort and care that they took around us was different. It was real. It affected a lot of people in a really, really unique way. And you could see people going through the stages of loss. You could see the people in denial stage, hurt, then blame, then anger and all that kind of stuff. That's what everybody went through and everybody went through it at a different pace. Some of it bonded us together and some of it drew us apart, honestly.

"It was definitely a transformational piece as far as GP and how he viewed players as young men coming into his program. Without a doubt. It made him stop and appreciate not only his players, but his family too. You see a quote unquote softer side of him.

"Not a whole lot of good came out of it, I would say, but at the same time people's perspectives changed. People's lives were transformed because of the time and attention they took moving forward caring about the individual first, caring about the young man as a young man first."

The change wasn't limited to the coaching staff.

"I took everything just a little bit more seriously," Rucker said. "Whether it be my training, whether it be my performance on the field or just hanging out with the guys. After that summer we all moved out, I lived by myself after that, but I would just go to guys' houses to hang out. Guys would be playing games and sometimes I wouldn't even know how to play the games, but I would just hang out on the couch and laugh and joke with everybody because four or five years, it's all over anyway. But it could be over sooner than that. I just made sure I spent as much time with the guys that I was fighting with."

Bunton followed suit at O'Neal's alma mater.


"There was a lot more hugging here with guys that we never did. I'm not exaggerating," the coach said. "The funeral, the support that everybody needed after his death, there was a lot more, and this sounds totally ridiculous, but guy hugging. Just appreciate life, man, because it can be taken from you. Appreciate relationships more."


There were more tangible changes too. Mizzou began testing athletes for the sickle cell trait in 2006. Trainers became more sensitive to struggles in workouts, not just in Columbia, but all over the state.


"It hit home with everyone," Bunton said. "No one wanted to be in that situation. Come on, we've all done that. How do you know a kid is not well? No doubt, no doubt, I think that point was made you've got to back off. The meat on the hook days are over, the Junction Boys, those days are over.

"One of our kids said, 'Hey coach, we need to run more.' I said, 'You know what? I'm gonna tell you right now, since Aaron passed away, ten years, I haven't run kids like I used to. I'm not going there.'"


"I tell every player I got, when we start summer conditioning, if you say you're going to pass out, I take that very seriously," Williams said. "Understand why: I had a friend at a practice at a summer workout, he's telling us he wasn't feeling well, couldn't see, then he passed out and he died on the field. Don't take it lightly. When you're not feeling well, let us know. I've really seen somebody die."

The Parkway North football facility is a constant reminder of O'Neal. His locker from Mizzou stands, untouched behind glass, in the Vikings varsity locker room. There are photos of him there, his number has been retired. A poster displayed at his funeral hangs in the locker room, touched by every player before every game.


In Columbia, the Tigers have named the linebacker room after him in their football complex. His number is not retired at Mizzou. When his recruiting class was seniors, a different one wore 25 every game. Now, a linebacker is voted on before the season to wear that sacred jersey for the duration of his career. Mizzou began a scholarship endowment in his name. Ekwerekwu, who was working as an intern in the athletic department after his playing days, was a key figure in getting that off the ground. For everyone, it is a different tribute that hits home.

"I think that it was a great start to do the scholarship endowment in his name. I think it's a great thing to have somebody wear his number in a commemorative fashion. The meeting room, mural, that thing's pretty cool," he said. "As far as what does it look like now and is the program still affected by it, yeah, I think so, but a lot of the cats now, man, they don't know who that dude is. It happened ten years ago, these cats, they don't know Aaron. They may know his high school and they may know that so and so wears number 25 now. But it's just a story now."

"I loved it when they had the 25-yard line going for him," Eyres said of the team's tradition of running to the 25-yard line to celebrate a win in the years immediately after O'Neal's death. "I think it was the players I respected the most that really kept his memory going on, even now in the NFL wearing the 25."


"I still go to games today with my family. And I would tell you I get very, very emotional," Bunton said. "I know this tradition started when Aaron died when the team runs out and they all go to the end zone and take a knee. I'm sorry, I've been to Mizzou games forever, I never saw that until Aaron died. Proud moment, sad moment, tragic moment. I truly get goosebumps just thinking I know that started when Aaron died. "

The player now wearing 25 at Mizzou is another that Bunton coached. Parkway North alum Donavin Newsom should start at outside linebacker for the Tigers this fall.

"Donavin's the perfect kid. They have a lot in common. We had talked about that when he was here," Bunton said. "Not wearing 25, but hey, you're a linebacker from Parkway North, you two have very similar traits, kind of quiet, you're well liked. Donavin had always said he was kind of proud of that. That was no pressure on him.

"When I first saw him play, it was tough. I said, 'Wow, this is what I missed, what we missed.' There it is man, linebacker, 25. Donavin's just the perfect kid to do that. It is eerie how similar those two kids were."

"To me, it meant a lot," Newsom said when he switched from No. 41 in the spring of 2013. "My coach was always talking about him in high school and I just thought it would be a great compliment if I got to wear his number. I felt like I knew him because of how much my coach talked about him."

"I was so proud. That was amazing, man. That was awesome," Eyres said. "If you go to Parkway North, whether you're a football player or not, you know the story. You know the legacy of this kid."

Many have much more personal tributes to O'Neal.

"We had a shirt made for him and my wife took that shirt and made it into a quilt," Williams said. "It's in my basement. I've got an Aaron O'Neal shirt. I see him every day. When I'm sitting down there watching TV, he's right there with me."

"The very next year we got the first round of new uniforms. The very next year we got new uniforms, he would have worn it," Ekwerekwu said. "I worked there and I had to go in there and see a 25 jersey that would have been his and buy that thing from the tent sale. I have that and then also a commemorative bottle of wine or something like that from Lonnie's 50th birthday. I have those two items and have had those two items since that day. They're fixtures in my office. So I get to talk about him and tell everybody about him. They say, hey, I know you went to Mizzou, you wore number 25? And I say no and I get to stop and tell them about Aaron."


Of course, there is also Ekwerekwu's son, bearing O'Neal's last name as his middle name.

"It's something that my wife and I had talked about. The O'Neal family and our family have been close ever since and something that I really felt led to do honestly to carry on his family legacy. Not only AO, but his family legacy," he said. "I get to talk about it all the time. Obviously now with my son being born, people ask, 'Oh, is O'Neal a family name?' And I say, 'Yeah, actually it is.'"


Eyres commissioned a local artist to do a painting of O'Neal in his No. 25 black and gold jersey. It hangs in the hallway of his office, outside a room where he sees patients.


"Often," Eyres says when asked how frequently he thinks of O'Neal. Then he gestures to the painting. "Every day."

CARRYING ON



It has been ten years since Aaron O'Neal died. Painful lessons were learned. Over time, wounds have scabbed over a little bit, but haven't healed. A life cut so short leaves so many what ifs.

"I think he would have been a great player for Missouri. I think he would have fulfilled his dreams," Bunton said. "Here we are ten years later and I'm telling you people still get emotional over Aaron's death. I can't say time heals all wounds because it's not, for Mr. O'Neal that would be disrespectful. I would just tell you that as the head football coach it's still an honor to carry on his legacy."


"Three of us went out. Man, we had a fun night," Eyres remembered of a night with O'Neal and Parkway North teammate Imani Butler less than a week before O'Neal died. "It was crazy when he passed because I was like, 'I was just with him. I was just with him.' But looking back, I got to spend those last few moments with him.

"After the grievance process; I don't want to say healing process, but after the grieving process you're able to mask out the bad because your tank of good is so overwhelming."