varsity.roanoke.com

After a long and aggravating run of events, 2006 had not been a happy year for Kevin Crouse. The past couple of months, things had finally started to look up, though.

It had been a bleak late summer and fall for Crouse, a gifted 5-foot-11, 205-pound senior tailback who once stood poised to break Pulaski County High's career rushing yardage record.

Instead, through a series of missteps, he was denied a chance to play his senior season for the Cougars. He had also been suspended from school for the third time in six months for violating terms of the school system's substance abuse policy.

As they had repeatedly during this period, Crouse's parents Bryant Kevin Crouse Sr., and Betty Crouse, went to bat for him with school officials. After a series of meetings that went on for better than a month, their son was readmitted in October following his most recent suspension under special conditions. Crouse was granted permission to finish his degree off campus in what principal Rod Reedy described as "an independent study" situation.

It separated him from his classmates and he was far away from the football field, the place where he had always been at his best.

Still, he kept plugging.

"He was doing OK," Betty Crouse said Saturday.

Nobody really saw it coming.

Friday afternoon, Kevin's grandmother Ora Crouse was next door at her house getting ready for work at a Fairlawn elder care facility. His father, a rubber mixer, had gone hunting. Kevin's mother was just coming home to the small community of New River from her social service job with Pulaski County.

It was Betty who found her son. He was dead by his own hand, a firearm that belonged to the family nearby. He was 18.

"He'd been down maybe a little more during Christmas," his mother said Saturday.

Nothing seemed to be particularly out of the ordinary last week. It was true that Christmas Eve night, Kevin had run afoul of family rules by returning with the car later than he said he would. The parents decided, as they had on occasion in the past when he disobeyed, to ground him.

At the time, it didn't seem to be much of a big deal.

"I regret talking to him like that now," Betty Crouse said. "I really do."

Crouse's death is one more in a series of heartbreaking events for Pulaski County athletics. Just this fall, beloved assistant coach Kenneth Dobson, the retired Pulaski County School Superintendent and the man for whom the football stadium is named, died the morning after a game. In December of 2002, high school junior Michael Casseri, a three-sport letterman and the son of the Cougars' former boys basketball coach, died in a single car crash. Before that, in 1997, lineman Lee Cook died as a result of a freak blow to the chest in a football game with a William Fleming player at Victory Stadium.

The last time Cougars football coach Jack Turner talked to Crouse, a couple of weeks ago, everything seemed fine.

"He was very positive, very upbeat," said Turner, who had been an assistant coach on the football teams that Cook and Casseri had played for. "I'd tried to talk to Kevin every couple of weeks just to see how he was doing."

Turner's team had a tough 2006 season without Crouse. The Cougars were 2-8, beating only Jefferson Forest and River Ridge District rival Cave Spring. Most of the other games ended in frustrating losses.

Turner recalled that during the season, when he talked to Crouse, his former player was trying to cheer his old coach up.

The players are young, Crouse would say. They're going to be all right. The team will get better. They're playing hard. Don't worry.

And so forth.

No sign that Crouse was feeling sorry for himself.

He had to be hurting though. He must have missed football, that Friday night rush in which the whole county shuts down and people start cheering like crazy and going all Cougar burgundy and gold in the face.

"I think it weighed heavy on him," said his grandmother. "It was awfully heavy on him."

Crouse had stopped going to the games. One of the terms of his independent study status was that he could not return to school grounds without permission. His mother offered several times to seek permission for him to at least visit Dobson Stadium for the games. He declined. He skipped the away games as well.

Before his senior year, Crouse was being thought of as one of the best players ever at Pulaski County. A three-year varsity player, Crouse rushed for 3,058 yards and 41 touchdowns as a sophomore and junior. He was the 2004 Timesland Offensive Sizzling Sophomore of the Year.

Crouse ranks second all time on the Cougars' career rushing list and stood an unofficial 1,356 yards from Josh Calfee's school record.

"Kevin would have broken the record if he'd played," Turner said.

Crouse was a powerful runner who did his best work between the tackles. Attempts to stop him with arm tackles only were sure to end in failure.

Although the Cougars didn't pass much out of the wing-T formation, Crouse was a good receiver out of the backfield. He returned kicks, too. As a defender, he could play anything from defensive end to linebacker to defensive back.

Crouse had been a can't-miss high school player. Veteran sandlot coaches in the county said they'd never seen anything like him at that level.

Once he was on the varsity, many looked at Crouse as a Division I college prospect. His name and picture still appear on a number of recruiting Web sites.

The calls hadn't been coming much this fall, however.

"Not to me they weren't," Turner said. "The last thing I did for him was send some film to Concord University. We had also talked about Fork Union Military and Hargrave Military [for a postgraduate season.]"

Recruiting interest seemed to start to drying up when problems began last spring.

In March, he faced his first suspension. According to his mother, somebody saw him exchanging something with another student in the hall during school. Crouse was taken to the school office. He said he was just loaning somebody some lunch money. A subsequent search turned up drug paraphernalia.

Crouse said it belonged to somebody else.

That didn't fly. He served a 10-day suspension, his mother said.

He returned to classes. In May, Betty Crouse was on her way out of town when a call came from school.

Come get Kevin, she was told. Alcohol had been smelled on him. Betty was on her way to Maryland on family business and Kevin's father was at work. Kevin's sister Tameca, 21, went to fetch him.

Another suspension followed. Crouse had been in counseling since the first suspension. In order for him to return to good graces, school officials told the family he would be subject to random drug tests and would have to sign a contract vowing that he would meet terms of school policy.

Summer started. By this time, his parents were more worried than ever. The people he was hanging around with, who were both his age and older, were a problem.

"To put it bluntly, I didn't like them much," Betty said. "Last year, when Kevin was on top of his game, a lot of people wanted to be his friend. Not all of them had his best interests in mind. We told him that. He couldn't see it, though."

The Crouses tried to find Kevin help. Among the strategies was to have him talk with the ministers at his church, First Missionary Baptist in New River. Both Rev. Ronald Brown, the senior pastor, and Rev. Charles Twine Jr., the associate, talked with him at length.

"We felt like he'd been drifting away from the church and we were trying to pull him back in," his mother said.

The last couple of months, Kevin had stopped attending services altogether.

In August, Crouse returned to preseason workouts.

"We never, ever had a bit of trouble from Kevin in football," Turner said. "He was the first to practice and last to leave. He was never late."

Turner talked about Crouse's charisma and popularity with his fellow students. Crouse's mother recalled that he'd been an A-B student.

Others knew him as a forthright, firm handshake, look-you-in-the-eye kind of young man.

"He's been playing since he was 3 years old," his grandmother said. "I took him to a game down in Pulaski when he was that age and he was playing football on the sidelines with some other kids. Some man came up to me and said, 'He's going to be good. He's going to be a star some day.'"

There was no question Crouse changed some in the last year, his mother said.

One tipoff was that football didn't seem to matter to him as much as it had. There had been a time when he'd dreamed of college and professional football, his mother said.

"But you know, it had started to get like it was our dream more than it was his," she said.

Even so, Crouse returned to football when practice started in August. He'd passed a series of four drug tests in order to be eligible for practice again. Turner said Crouse was having a good first couple of weeks of workouts. Crouse played well in the team's first scrimmage, which had involved Bluefield (W.Va.) High and eventual Virginia Group AA Division 3 state champion Richlands.

The following week, Crouse was informed that he'd failed another drug test.

Reedy said there will be counselors available to talk to students who are in need.

Reedy would not discuss the particulars of Crouse's case, but the principal did offer his personal feelings.

"This is a great tragedy," he said. "Our thoughts and prayers go out to Kevin and his family."

The family said Crouse's funeral will be at 1 p.m. Tuesday at First Missionary Baptist Church. There will also be a visitation beginning at 11 a.m.