Sunday, July 15, 2007 1:10 AM CDT
What ever happened to Aaron Justice?
Health trauma ends basketball star's career
By RICK DAWSON, Staff Writer
rdawson@jg-tc.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Four years ago, as Hurricane Isabel was bearing down on the East Coast, Aaron Justice was moving into his new home in Maryland about 20 miles south of Washington, D.C. Family members who lived nearby warned that something big was about to hit. He unloaded his truck just in time to get inside.
“It came through, it was bending trees and I think I was without power the first four days,” Justice said.
Considering what he went through long before his move in 2003, “an insane story” to use his own words, a hurricane was virtually academic. Saying that Justice’s tale is unique would be a bit of an understatement. But it started no differently than that of many good athletes.
Playing for a Casey-Westfield basketball team that won the regional in 1993, he had a good enough prep career to catch the eye of Lake Land coach Jim Dudley. Step one was the junior college route.
After finishing his sophomore year in Mattoon, he moved to North Central College before a confusion surrounding his tuition forced him to withdraw after two weeks. With his junior year gone and his basketball future uncertain, a Methodist college in Kentucky, Sue Bennett, stepped forward to recruit him.
Heartened by the opportunity, he attended the college for two semesters. Then, as he left for Christmas break, everything turned strange.
“Right before we went back we started getting letters about the school and that the financial situation wasn’t good,” Justice said. “The tutors were just like, ‘What?’”
Fighting bankruptcy, and with the president’s role in the college’s financial troubles coming under a cloud of suspicion, Sue Bennett was stripped of its accreditation, again leaving Justice in the lurch. His coach started “advertising” players to other programs to help place them and Justice found a spot, along with his roommate, at Oakland City in Indiana.
He was on track to graduate in 1998.
“It was definitely a roller coaster through there,” he said. “After what happened at Sue Bennett I probably should have come closer to home and gone through my schoolwork. But I still wanted to play ball and it was a good way to get everything paid for, so I kept doing it.”
He showed up for his senior year at Oakland City in late August, went through six relatively innocuous weeks and enjoyed a life that seemingly had returned to normal. Then his stomach began to hurt.
At 220 pounds when practice began, he was down to 203 when he saw a doctor for the first time not long before Thanksgiving. His appetite gone, suffering from constant thirst, he participated in an intersquad scrimmage on a Sunday in November, the team’s last before the season was to begin.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” he said. “I had a real good game. I had about 18 points and 10 boards. And Monday I was being admitted to the hospital.”
The diagnosis was ulcerative colitis, an illness with which he was familiar, since his mother and sister suffered from it before him. For about a month he underwent treatment. Even then the seriousness of his condition wasn’t entirely in view.
When his doctor began pushing on his stomach and getting no response, an action that should have caused intense pain, it wasn’t long before surgery was scheduled.
“What really messed me up was after I had my first surgery to remove part of my large intestine,” Justice said. “I came out, I’m doing good and then I basically picked up a hospital-borne bacteria. It started eating away at my insides.
“My organs started shutting down.
“The only way to beat it was to give me lots of antibiotics and then starting to cut out everything around it.”
He lay in an induced coma for nearly a month. Family members were the lone individuals allowed to see him. But little did Justice know what else was going on around him.
As he fought for his life in an intensive care unit in Indianapolis, going through more than a half-dozen surgeries, friends in Casey were organizing an auction. Bids for dozens of donated sports items — Super Bowl tickets, a basketball autographed by Bob Knight, a baseball signed by the entire 1998 New York Yankees World Series team — brought in thousands of dollars to offset medical expenses.
When word reached former NBA player Karl Malone in Utah, who was contacted by a colleague of former Lake Land and University of Utah assistant Jeff Strohm, he asked to talk to Justice in the hospital.
With Aaron incapacitated, his mother answered the phone. As Justice recalls, she was a little sketchy about his identity.
“I think she told him, ‘I know that he really likes Michael Jordan,’” Justice said.
Eventually Malone reached him, offered his cell number, and invited him to a game when Utah traveled to Indiana. It was the first of a number of meetings they would have.
“He even told me, ‘Make sure you call me within the week,’” said Justice, a professed Chicago Bulls fan. “My number changes a lot. It’s not like we’re buddies, but I definitely consider him a friend and a real good guy.
“There’s a lot of famous people that donated a lot of items that were really neat. But what I took out of it most was the community coming together and supporting me and my family. It’s really amazing.”
During his lengthy hospital stay, his longtime girlfriend and now wife Shannon was part of the ordeal. Apart from Shannon attending Indiana State for a semester, the two had crossed paths virtually everywhere. A Casey graduate, Shannon also went to Lake Land, Sue Bennett and Oakland City, where she was when Aaron got sick.
“It was crazy,” she said. “I played basketball, went to school, went through the week and every weekend I would travel to the hospital from Southern Indiana. And then there were a couple of times where they called and I had to rush to the hospital. It was hard. He was unconscious, though, so he was in a medically induced coma. He didn’t know that I was there.”
The couple still lives in Washington, where Shannon says it took her significant time to grow accustomed to a different lifestyle. She now works in Maryland, with a sister living nearby. Aaron is a systems engineer for Immigration & Customs Enforcement, one of 22 agencies operating as an arm of the Department of Homeland Security.
It is home for now, but perhaps not for good. Aaron still talks to his surgeon on a regular basis. He returned to Lake Land College in 2000, where he was honored for his achievements. He maintains contact — his parents still live in Casey — and speaks fondly of his experience there and in Mattoon.
“I cried like a baby when I introduced him and gave him that shirt,” former Lake Land coach Jim Dudley said of the 2000 ceremony. “He’s one of the best persons I’ve ever coached. For what he didn’t have talent-wise, he sure made up for it with effort. I don’t think there’s a person alive who doesn’t like him. I just wish he was closer to us so we could see him once in a while.”
Contact Rick Dawson at rdawson@jg-tc.com or 238-6855.
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