Those who follow the NFL closely know that Rams DE Leonard Little killed Susan Gutweiler years ago while he was driving drunk. Well it turns out, he took it a lot harder than we first thought. He only served 90 days in jail and most people thought he got off easy. But, Little says he tried to kill himself after the incident.
"A few weeks later, I tried to kill myself," Little told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "I had gone back home to my mom’s house outside Knoxville [Tenn.]. And the first thing I did was just go down in the basement. It had no windows and just a bathroom, a sink and a television. I stayed in the dark for days. All I did was cry. I couldn’t deal with what I’d done."
After his mother suggested he see a psychologist, he got an idea one day while staring at the big trees on the side of the road on the way home from the office.
"It was like I was in one of those movies where the good angel is on one shoulder and the bad one’s on the other," he said. "Well, the bad one kept telling me, ‘Just go ahead, Leonard, turn the wheel. It’ll be easy. Crash into those trees, and all this pain will be over.’ I actually did turn the wheel. I did it. I tried to end my life. I swerved the steering wheel. But like I said, I guess there was a good angel on my other shoulder, because just as soon as I swerved, I turned the wheel right back."
Little gave the interview to the Post-Dispatch while talking at a school to a class of seventh graders.
"Please don’t do what I did," he told them. "I killed someone, and I constantly think about the hurt I caused that family. I’m not a bad person, but I made a bad decision, and it cost someone her life and ruined her family’s lives. You don’t want that burden on you."
We have been very critical of the Rams and the NFL for allowing someone like this to play in the NFL (he got a DWI after this incident by the way), but we had no idea he took it so hard. That doesn’t excuse the next DWI however, did you want to kill two people?
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