23 min readIT FELT LIKE the whole world was against him. He needed an escape, perhaps to hide, certainly to rest. And he wanted to see his mom. So, between training sessions, his Louisiana State University classes finished, Kyren Lacy drove to Houston to spend a few days with her. From the minute he arrived at her home, she saw something was off. Different. He wasn’t his upbeat self, his hardworking self. She, of course, knew why.
The accusation that he caused a crash that killed a man, the allegation that he fled the scene, the social media eviscerations, the seeming implosion of his promised NFL career—it was all too much, leeching out all the happiness and the energy and the drive and everything that made Kyren Kyren. At one point during the visit, he sat in a room for close to 18 hours, in conversation with one of his younger brothers. On April 12, 2025, before she left for work—she’s a high school counselor, and it was the day of prom—his mom prayed with him. She anointed his body with oil, crying out to summon divine protection.
In the whorl of a spiraling news cycle that had stretched on for months, Lacy, 24, was sucked into a slow-moving criminal case, saw his character publicly questioned, and was uninvited from the National Football League’s annual recruitment combine. Now, the draft was in a week and a half and he feared his name would go uncalled. The grand jury hearing was 48 hours away, and he was convinced beyond convincing that he’d be treated unfairly. Trapped between the public record and the truth, between what he was supposed to become and what he feared he’d already lost, he ran.
“When you’re going through stuff, it feels like it’s the end,” said his mother later. Kandace Washington, 42, wore big black glasses and, beneath her Tiger-gold cardigan, a glistening silver chain with a locket showing her son’s smile in the middle. “You know what I’m saying? It feels like, ‘I’m not gonna get out of this.’ ”
That evening, his mother still at work, Lacy’s spirit finally broke under all the weight. He demanded his car keys from his brother and a cousin, and when they refused, he pulled a gun and fired a round into the ground outside his mom’s apartment. He would take his own life right there, he said, if they wouldn’t let him leave. They gave him the keys, and Lacy climbed into his Dodge Charger and sped off.
LACY’S PARENTS WERE childhood classmates who became high school co-parents. By the time he was 8, their energetic, big-headed son was a three-sport athlete. The family’s pastor still remembers him as a child racing through rows of sanctuary chairs while his mother tried to focus on choir practice.
In high school, Lacy excelled in football, basketball, and baseball. “He can play anywhere he wants to play,” the football coach at his small high school would later proclaim to a local paper. “The thing with Kyren is he can really run. He runs like a little guy, but he has that physicality and that leaping ability of a bigger guy.”
He had a tougher time with math and Spanish, both of which he failed during his junior year, an academic stumble that kept him from playing on what went on to be the state championship basketball team, yet there he was on the sidelines in the gym before tip-off, leading cheers and dances—heartbroken, but you wouldn’t know it.
His family called a meeting and figured out how he could make up the credits for the courses he had failed. By that fall, Lacy was both eligible and freshly committed to football. Local journalist Chris Singleton, who covered high school sports in the region, showed me a preseason TV interview from that year. Lacy towers above two teammates, and Singleton asks him how far Thibodaux High School’s team will make it. But Lacy keeps breaking into silly, nervous laughter and covering his eyes with his hands before getting to the end of his responses. At one point, he bends over and runs out of the frame as his teammates roll their eyes at his inability to calm his nerves.
His mother still laughs when she thinks about these early interviews. “He really didn’t like being in the spotlight,” she recalls. “He was a homebody.”
After fighting to regain his academic eligibility during a standout senior year, a teary-eyed Lacy accepted a scholarship to the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. By his sophomore year there, he had played well enough to try to make the leap to a major-conference squad. He entered the transfer portal…and his phone lit up. As the offers came, he was initially set on Auburn, but his mom insisted he keep his commitment to visit Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. The 6'2", 213-pound Lacy eventually committed to LSU and suddenly stood on a roster stacked with future NFL players like Jayden Daniels and Malik Nabers.
On the night Daniels and Nabers were drafted in 2024, they had a surprise video call with Lacy that he later posted on Instagram. His excitement is palpable as he smiles a toothy grin, nodding his head, rocking back and forth, and asks to see their new NFL team hats. “I’m proud of y’all boys, bro,” Lacy says. Nabers responds, “We talked about this: You next.” Daniels adds, “Next year, I expect you to be here.”
High expectations that Lacy was determined to meet. “He’s going to have a breakout season,” LSU’s then head coach, Brian Kelly, predicted ahead of Lacy’s senior year. Lacy led the Southeastern Conference with nine touchdown receptions, amassing 58 total receptions and 866 receiving yards. His signature touchdown celebration, the bouncy, strutty Trip Out, ignited the 100,000-plus fans at LSU’s home games and became a thing on TikTok. As the 2025 draft approached, ESPN’s Mel Kiper listed Lacy as the country’s sixth-best prospect at the position, meaning he was a shoo-in to be selected and possibly even a first-round pick, destined to follow in the footsteps of a growing line of southwest Louisiana boys who’ve become high-flying professional wideouts. (Nabers had signed a four-year, $29.2 million deal with the New York Giants—including an $18 million signing bonus.) Lacy talked often of his dream to play in the NFL and how he wanted to take care of his brothers and his mom. Sports agents were supposed to be outfitting his checking account for that kind of payday, which can change things—your family outlook for generations, your own life forever.
LACY'S DESCENT BEGAN eight days before Christmas 2024 and roughly 300 miles east on I-10, in the same place that had first seeded his ascent: his hometown of Thibodaux, a college town planted in a swampy parish of oil field workers and shrimpers, rooted in the Louisiana bayou land south of the Mississippi. Around noon on December 17, Lacy was driving his green Charger, his younger brother in the passenger seat on their way to a workout, when he whipped the car across the solid double yellow line of a winding two-lane road. His speedometer topped 80 as he passed four vehicles, then returned to his lane, at least 72 yards in front of oncoming cars, within the legal passing distance. It was dangerous. It was dumb. It may have—and this is intensely disputed—contributed to a deadly chain of events.
What follows is the “official version,” based on police reports. A gold pickup truck in the oncoming lane braked and then pulled off the road to the right to avoid the green car approaching in the same lane. Behind that truck was a white Kia whose driver, seeing the green Charger approaching, jerked her wheel to the left to avoid rear-ending the pickup—crossing into oncoming traffic and colliding with a car carrying an elderly couple on their way home. Video footage shows Lacy’s car slowly navigating around the wreck, then continuing on his way. When troopers arrived, body camera footage shows, witnesses told them the person to blame for the accident was the driver of a green Charger. The elderly man in the car hit by the white Kia later died at the hospital. Those are the details the police had to start their investigation.
When I asked Lacy’s dad, Kenny, about the immediate aftermath of the crash, he said Kyren had called him to check in. The call started with something unrelated, and everything seemed fine, but toward the end, Kyren mentioned that he had witnessed a car crash. He sounded calm and unworried, Kenny says, and he asked his father if he should have stayed. Kenny says he advised Kyren to ask his stepfather, Jon Allen, an attorney with whom they’ve both worked closely, including on Kyren’s endorsement deals.
“He told me, ‘Man, they had a bad accident, like a head-on collision, in front me…’ He said, ‘Man, you think I should get out and help them?’ ” Allen later posted on social media. (He did not respond to my interview requests for this story.) “I said, ‘Did you cause the wreck or anything?’ He said, ‘Shit, no.’ I said I wouldn’t help because what if they bleeding badly—are you willing to deal with touching and seeing that? He said, ‘No, I wouldn’t be able to help them with that.’ ” They believed that Lacy had done nothing wrong; he was unsure if anyone was seriously hurt, and he didn’t think he was directly involved.
OVER THE NEXT few weeks, the police conducted their investigation, interviewing witnesses. The most outspoken bystander, the driver of an 18-wheeler (one of the four vehicles Lacy had blown past), was the first to speak with officers and provided the most damning version of events—despite being one of the witnesses who was farthest away. Still, he claimed that Lacy passed between the two cars that ultimately crashed into each other. However, reviews of the video footage of the crash that has been released by police reveal that this did not happen. (Men’s Health could not locate the driver of the 18-wheeler for comment.)
The driver of the white Kia partially backed up the 18-wheeler driver’s story, but she also admitted to police that she was distractedly driving in the seconds before she swerved, providing an alternate explanation for the accident. Another witness, the driver behind the white Kia—two cars behind the pickup—said that he saw the pickup driver hit his brakes and only witnessed the green Charger after the accident.
Seemingly the most crucial witness was the pickup truck driver, 60-year-old Dennis Simon, who’d been on the way home after picking up his brother at the hospital. He told police that seeing the green Charger coming toward him, he had applied his brakes, but—and this is important—that he hadn’t stopped abruptly. Simon insisted that the Kia driver behind him, not Lacy, was to blame for the accident.
“I didn’t skid-mark or nothing, because I wasn’t going that fast,” Simon told the trooper who interviewed him, according to partial body camera footage released by Lacy’s attorney. “The lady in the back of me, she didn’t see what’s happening. That’s how she caused that wreck,” he said, contradicting what would become the official version of events. “She was gonna run into the back of me.” The police asked Simon to sign his handwritten five-sentence statement blaming the driver of the green Charger, but he refused. (When I found Simon eating lunch on his porch, he politely declined to discuss the case.)
“All I remember is a white Kia coming straight at my car,” Melinda Hall, who’d been driving the vehicle that was hit, wrote in her signed statement to police. Her 78-year-old husband, Herman, was airlifted to a hospital, where his heart gave out. In eulogy, her daughter told a local reporter that her father, a marine who had worked 36 years for U.S. Customs, loved to garden and used to bike up to 28 miles a day. “They need to have consequences,” she told the reporter. “I don’t want it to be swept under the rug because of who they may or may not be and who they know. We all know that happens. We will make sure there is justice some way.”
Based on these witness statements, a state trooper wrote in the affidavit for an arrest warrant that the pickup truck driver “took evasive action by emergency braking” to avoid Lacy and that the Kia then swerved to “avoid a head-on crash with a rapidly approaching vehicle.” Approximately three weeks after the crash, a judge signed off on a warrant charging negligent homicide, hit-and-run driving, and reckless operation of a vehicle and set bond at $151,000.
Meanwhile, on December 19, Lacy declared for the NFL draft, two days after the accident but before it was public knowledge and before he knew he was being investigated. When he posted on Instagram to thank the LSU fans, the reactions were effusive and positive: “Best of luck in the league!! My fav player last season!” “Come to Washington be wit JD.” “Steelers gone be a great home for you.” Lacy chose not to play in LSU’s Texas Bowl win over Baylor on New Year’s Eve, not because of the accident but to avoid any chance of injury before draft day.
The family first learned that the police were attempting to locate him when his father, a well-known local athletic trainer, got a call from someone whose daughter he once coached. “We live in a small area,” Kenny says. “The guy who sold [the car] to Kyren actually called me and said, ‘Police are over here asking about Kyren and that green Charger.’ ”
The police said that detectives called what turned out to be the wrong number for Lacy multiple times on Monday, January 6, and left a card at his father’s house. When Kenny called them that afternoon, he said that he’d pass along a message. He then called Lacy, who was in Dallas amid intensive training ahead of the draft and who broke into tears. Lacy’s attorney told police he’d get back to them about whether his client would issue a statement. On Wednesday, having not heard back, the police moved to obtain an arrest warrant. By the time they called Lacy’s attorney again on Thursday, January 9, they were no longer asking for a statement—they notified counsel of the arrest warrant, and Lacy’s attorney agreed to have Lacy turn himself in. To the police, he was no longer a witness to an incident, but the focus of an investigation.
Then, on January 10, the police issued a press release announcing Lacy’s arrest warrant in connection with the crash. As he was driven the seven hours back to Louisiana, Lacy sat silently in the back seat of his father’s car, a shirt pulled up over his head. As for his online post declaring for the draft, the tone of the comments changed instantly. More than a thousand arrived, most of them dripping with vitriol. “Enjoy prison.” “Your career is over man.” “Declaring for the draft after you killed someone racing your car is crazy work dawg. I hope for nothing but the worst for you sick individual fr.” That comment had 100 likes. And it wasn’t just trolls on social media. An LSU criminal law professor, asked to give his opinion at the time on Lacy’s legal situation, told the campus paper on January 23 that declaring for the draft after Hall’s death “looks insensitive and remorseless.”
“One day everybody loved him, and then the next day everybody hated him,” says Cydney Theard, 24. She was Lacy’s girlfriend of five years, going back to when they were both students at Louisiana-Lafayette. She’s about a foot shorter than Lacy and speaks with sharp confidence as she recalls that, even as he became known for swaggy touchdown celebration dances, his self-image crumbled beneath the schadenfreude and vitriol. “I couldn’t understand how people could do that.”
When Lacy turned himself in on January 12, his lawyer told the police his client was invoking his right to silence. By then, the story had spread, with virtually every sports media outlet moving articles that quoted the police version of events. “You know, they take something and they run with it and it makes a great headline for their stupid little story,” says Theard, who fielded expressions of disbelief in texts from friends and family members as Lacy’s story spiraled. “A thousand lies is better than one truth.”
In their public statements, the Louisiana State Police would go on to say both that Lacy “fled” the scene and that he called “an attorney” after the crash—claims that were technically accurate, if perhaps lacking greater context. The attorney, we now know, was Lacy’s stepfather. When I asked the state police if they had any evidence, other than that phone call, suggesting Lacy was aware that his driving had contributed to the crash, the department spokesman acknowledged that “the content, reasoning and purpose of the call were unknown.”
“Kyren did not have an ill bone in his body,” Theard says of the man whose burial plot she visits each week, the man who wouldn’t let her kill bugs and whose grocery list still included Laffy Taffy and Ring Pops. “It’s like, there’s no way y’all think this man did this. It was insane.”
THE CHARGES SHOOK him. Lacy had always had a double-edged relationship with the fame that accompanied his athletic success. He loved visiting schools and inspiring kids and goofing off with his friends and teammates. But he was the type to keep his hood up so as not to be bothered when he was out at dinner. After the crash, and the charges, he avoided leaving the house altogether. Theard says they started ordering grocery deliveries rather than make trips to the store.
Lacy’s agent was in contact with the NFL about the combine in February—the most crucial opportunity for him to showcase his talents to professional scouts and ensure his big-league dreams. But after the police issued charges, the league pulled Lacy’s invitation. “To the NFL: Shame on you,” his agent, Rocky Arceneaux, said in a later statement blasting the league. “Kyren had been working hard all of his life to get to a certain point,” Kenny told me. “It really, really, really, really hurt him when they took the combine from him. Man…that took a lot out of him.” Spokespeople for the NFL did not respond to Men’s Health’s request for comment.
It’s easy, in hindsight, to think that Lacy should have stayed off social media, not inhaled the stream of often-anonymous commentary and criticism that multiplied by the day, in which people felt both the freedom and the familiarity to say things in ways they never would have to his face. “It was tough for all of us,” says his mother. “This somebody is making a comment from Canada. We don’t know this person. And who cares what they think? Who cares what they’re saying?” But Lacy cared. He’d worked hard not just for his future, but for his name.
Lacy felt forced to sit silently while waiting for his court date. The noise in his head grew so loud that all he could hear were infuriating fictions: that he was broken, that he was ruined, that he was alone. He was seeing a therapist and was surrounded by friends and family ready and eager to support him. Still, he struggled to process the emotional weight he was carrying.
The charges prompted jokes and hot takes. One commentator posted a screenshot of a touchdown celebration in which Lacy mimicked firing a gun. Tabloids surfaced a tweet from nearly two years earlier in which he said he’d “kill everybody who line up in front of me”—most likely a reference to his on-field dominance.
Those close to Lacy vowed that one day everyone would know the whole story. Those assurances did not soothe him. How could they? Justice often fails a young Black man in Louisiana or, for that matter, anywhere in America. Facts are often inconsequential. Lacy faced a nonzero chance that they’d send him to prison. The accusations alone had upended his life, tarnished his name, and imperiled his future. Yet Lacy was told he should grin and bear it.
“In our culture, we raise our kids that you speak up for yourself,” Washington says in an earnest and considered cadence befitting her job as a counselor. “When something isn’t right, you speak up for yourself. But then you have this situation where you’re this public figure, and the way you’ve been raised to advocate for yourself…you’re not supposed to do that. You’re supposed to be quiet. You’re supposed to let things happen.”
In late March, his legal situation still pending, Lacy excelled at LSU’s pro day. Washington told me he made sure to mention during the interview portion that he was praying for the Hall family. Kenny says his son felt deep remorse over the fact that Hall lost his life. Since the day of the crash, Kenny had become his son’s online defender. Lacy would try to talk his dad down, arguing that the online discourse, even if vitriolic, was in some ways reasonable. A man was dead. “People don’t know that, but the fact that the man died, that weighed on him, especially people saying that he was the reason,” his father says.
“You’ve got to understand, it’s just pressure. Period. The pressure of being the number one wide receiver at LSU, the pressure of everyone saying you’re this great thing, ‘You’re the man,’ ‘You’re my idol,’ ” Kenny says. “And it goes from that to ‘Oh man, that’s a killer.’ Every time you look up on social media, you see something negative about yourself, knowing that you’re not that kind of person.”
What Lacy did not know when he set out late Saturday night from his mom’s apartment in Houston on April 12 was that the following Monday, the district attorney would have a report prepared suggesting that Lacy had a path to avoid criminal conviction on the most serious offenses. There was still a chance all of this could sort itself out legally in time for him to be on an NFL field in the fall.
But that report would come too late. Family members called 911 after Lacy stormed off from his mother’s home. Within 20 minutes, deputies were behind the Charger, lights flashing. But Lacy kept going. He sped through the gate of a local business, careened through a pond, and crashed into a building. By the time deputies reached him, Lacy had shot himself.
A YEAR AFTER Lacy’s death, public understanding of the case remains muddy. Some of this is due to the piecemeal nature of how the police released information, bit by bit from early January to early April, into a fractured, under-resourced media ecosystem. Yet more than anything else, confusion about the Thibodaux crash seems to stem from police attempts to distill a complicated reality into a simple legal narrative with a clear moral arc. An unambiguous story in which blame radiated from a single villainous source named Kyren Lacy.
Lacy’s case feels in many ways singular. You’ve got to have had a shot at the NFL—a burden few of us carry—to understand the pain of losing it. Yet his story lives at the intersection of uniquely American realities. A mental and emotional health epidemic that is increasingly affecting young men. A stratified economy that leaves many of those on its lowest rungs with few options upward other than performing on the stage of professional athletics, their brands and bodies subject to the cruel assessments offered for sport by the rest of us. An Internet culture in which many gain prominence and thus become acquainted with the loneliness that accompanies fame. A race-based social order in which Black men feel uniquely required to shoulder their distress in silence.
Many of the nuances of the case went unknown at the time because no one attempted to know them. Instead, the police’s claims and the implications they carried calcified into truth, objective facts braided into a knotty fiction. Criminal charges and the cherry-picked details that supported them, once publicly proclaimed and entered into the discourse, served as an indictment of Lacy’s character, the idea not that he had made a mistake but that he was a malicious actor.
“I encourage anybody who wants to seek a career in sports media to go do it and crush it—but just having the journalistic integrity to stand back and ask questions and not jump to conclusions,” says Matt Moscona, a Baton Rouge sports talk host who covered Lacy for years.
To Lacy’s mother, the frustrations around the legal case against him and his tragic death fit into the context of the larger crisis engulfing young men, especially young Black men. “It’s very important for men to have a solid foundation of doing the work to heal and be able to just be naked, and I don’t mean physically,” says Washington, who is still in close contact with many of Lacy’s former teammates as they continue to grieve him. “Have those conversations that you’re afraid to have. Embrace your emotions. It’s okay to cry.”
Washington recalls the difficulties she navigated while in her youth. Her own father’s suicide. Becoming pregnant with Kyren as a teenager and worrying that she’d never finish high school. It all would have felt impossible had it been compounded by the expectation that she perform for the public. “I used to tell Kyren all the time, ‘You’re a human being, you’re not a robot. You are programmed to be sad. You’re programmed to be happy. You’re programmed to feel anxiety, stress, work—all those things are normal, human feelings, human reactions.’ ”
In the months after Lacy’s death, both the state police and Lacy’s attorney released portions of the evidence relating to the crash. It is unclear, given the state’s documented history of noncompliance with public records laws, if the full police file will ever become public. But the materials that have been released, supplemented by interviews with those who knew Lacy and new details from police and prosecutors, allow for the most complete account of not only the crash in Thibodaux, but also the crucial months before Lacy took his life in Houston—filling in vital holes in the investigation of what is one of the most tragic sports stories in recent memory.
This evidence makes clear that Lacy was thrust into a process that, from the onset, seemed set on establishing his guilt. Once the allegations were made, he encountered a public and a press willing to immediately believe the worst about him, no doubt based at least in part on his various identities: as a young Black man, as a famous Black man, as a young famous Black man.
One expert who reviewed the arrest affidavit told me that it improperly excluded context and contradictory evidence that may have prevented it from ever being issued. While it was true that multiple witnesses pointed the finger at Lacy, the judge should have been given the opportunity to consider the contradictions within their claims. “You have to allow the judge to really have a full totality of the circumstances,” says Scott Courrege, a law enforcement officer turned attorney who teaches affidavit writing at the police academy. “You’re supposed to present a neutral and full picture of the evidence—the good, the bad, and the ugly.” None of this narrative nuance was given to the judge. “This affidavit is, on its face, improper,” Courrege opined. “At minimum, he failed to disclose the contradictory statements.”
While the police continue to defend their investigatory process, MH’s review of all the evidence released to date shows that the version of events officers presented to the judge—and to the public—relied on cherry-picking details from inconsistent witness accounts.
“You can never go into any type of investigation with preconceived notions, to try to make the facts fit your theory,” says Joseph P. Raspanti, a veteran Louisiana attorney whose clients have included civil plaintiffs and also the Police Association of New Orleans. “It appears here that they did not look at what I saw with my eyes: the body cam footage, which painted a picture that did not implicate [Lacy].”
A spokesman for the Louisiana State Police said the agency stands by its statements and the affidavit for Lacy’s arrest. He added that the agency stands by its position that the pickup truck driver made efforts to avoid Lacy, and he noted that the agency’s initial releases—which included more sweeping language—highlighted that they were based on preliminary findings.
However, various aspects of the evidence, and how the police interpreted it, were called into question by a reinvestigation of the accident, which was initiated by Lafourche Parish district attorney Kristine Russell. Two and a half weeks after the crash, on January 2, 2025, police investigators met with Russell and her staff to discuss their findings. But for reasons that remain unclear, once the warrant was procured and Lacy turned himself in on January 12, Russell’s office elected to continue the investigation prior to taking the evidence to a grand jury, assigning the case to Warren Callais, a veteran investigator in her office.
As those who review these types of cases for a living know, just because something has been investigated, it is a mistake to assume that the investigation was ethically or well conducted or that its conclusions are trustworthy. “The DA did not simply accept the charges presented by the state police. Instead, she took a step that many would not have: She conducted her own independent investigation,” Matthew Ory, Lacy’s attorney, said in October. “Thanks to her diligent work, discrepancies within the state police report were uncovered.”
The district attorney’s investigation fundamentally undercut the narrative that had already hardened around the case. In a 13-page report, Callais recounted a stunning number of issues with the state police investigation. While the existence of his review has been previously reported, some of its most damning conclusions have never entered the public record.
The police had written that the gold pickup “came to a controlled stop” to avoid Lacy and that Simon “immediately applied his brakes and swerved to the right to avoid a head-on collision.” Here’s what Callais concluded about that: “All evidence for this case contradicts this statement.”
Callais wrote that the audio from the gas station video released by police was not properly synchronized, leading a viewer to believe Lacy was closer to the crash than he was. And by consulting the raw video of police interviews with witnesses, Callais uncovered additional evidence that cut against the police narrative.
According to Callais’s report, when interviewed by police at the hospital on January 3, Bryhana Gray, the driver of the white Kia, admitted to being distracted behind the wheel. “I’m eating my Funyuns. I got them in the middle of my lap and driving. I’m listening to my music. All of a sudden, I see the car get in the other person’s lane,” she told the trooper. Gray, who did not respond to messages seeking further comment, also told police she was driving the speed limit behind the pickup truck. Callais determined this was untrue: She was driving close to 50 miles per hour in a 40 zone. Callais also concluded that the trooper may have improperly coaxed her statements. “Bryhana Gray made several statements that do not match the submitted report or written statement,” Callais wrote. “When it came to obtaining the written statement, the trooper tells Bryhana Gray what to document on the statement as she is writing.”
The prosecutor’s investigator finished and dated the report on April 11, the day before Lacy’s death. This was the report that might have cleared him of the most serious charges he was facing and that suggested the accident may have resulted from other factors.
“Bryhana Gray was following too close which caused her to take evasive action to avoid hitting the back of Dennis Simon’s truck,” Callais wrote. “The evidence submitted in the crash report does not support that Kyren Lacy should have known that his actions were the cause of the crash that happened approximately 72 yards in front of him.”
The case is currently being reviewed by Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill, a Republican who has signaled she intends to stand by the police investigation. “It’s not as simple as anybody being able to come out and say that Kyren Lacy is innocent and he was wrongly accused,” she said last October. “There’s nothing that I’ve seen in anything in the record that indicates that anybody did anything other than their jobs.”
LAST FALL, Thibodaux High School installed glossy banners facing its football field that feature the names, photos, and statistics of its six graduates who went on to play football professionally. It’s impossible not to mourn the man who would, who should, have been on a seventh banner.
A version of Kyren Lacy died long before that evening in Houston. But had he been able to survive the criminal justice system, the media, and social media, Lacy might have seen that much of his center had held. It seemed impossible to shout down the headlines, but those who mattered most already believed him. “If love could have saved Kyren, he still would have been here,” Ebony Hoskins, 28, a childhood friend of his, told me the last time I visited Thibodaux.
In its namesake’s absence, the Kyren K2 Foundation,whose mission is suicide awareness and mental health support for young athletes, was holding a Thanksgiving turkey drive that day. His mother oversaw an assembly line operation to shuttle more than 200 birds and 100 hams from beneath an awning and into each trunk or back seat of the vehicles that snaked nearly around Peltier Park from early morning until nearly noon.
During a slower moment, his girlfriend laughed with me about Lacy’s love for NBAYoungboy and showed me her shoes, a picture of Lacy in his LSU jersey screen-printed on each. Later, when she set up her phone and filmed TikTok dances, Washington briefly jumped into the camera frame to join in.
Lacy’s siblings and cousins were among the dozens of young men who’d come out to volunteer. None of the online commenters or sports talking heads were present. Washington says she’s made peace with her son’s death, and that she believes Kyren had completed the race he’d been meant to run. Still, Theard told me, Kyren left a life, no matter the setbacks, still set on the cusp of greatness. “God saw how hard he worked,” Theard says. “So there was no doubt in my mind that God was going to give him more blessings.
Wesley Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who writes about race, law enforcement, and justice.
