Florida high school football player who collapsed after tackle declared 'completely brain dead', taken off life support
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA: A high school football player in Florida who suddenly collapsed during a game on Friday, September 20, was declared "completely brain dead" and taken off life support on Monday, September 23.
Jacquez Welch, a 17-year-old senior linebacker/running back at the Northeast High School in St. Petersburg, had taken to the field for a varsity game against Osceola and was playing incredibly well, scoring a 60-yard run within the first three minutes of action, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
However, at one point during the game, Welch made a tackle and never got back up. He was rushed to Bayfront Health, where doctors discovered he had an arteriovenous malformation — an abnormal tangle of blood vessels and arteries that can cause bleeding in the brain if ruptured.
There was reportedly nothing anyone could have done to prevent the tragedy either, as the condition is usually present before birth and can easily go undetected.
Welch was taken off life support on Monday, and it was announced that his organs would be donated. His mother, Marcia Nelson, revealed to a congregation full of Northeast faculty and students at Gateway Baptist Church that doctors had said seven lives would be saved thanks to her son's selflessness.
"Quez was a giving person," she said. "He would give to anyone and everyone if he had it. He wanted to do this."
She also refused to blame Welch's death on football, a sport he was obsessed with to the point that he had hatched a plan to earn a scholarship playing college football even before enrolling at Northeast three years ago and had enrolled in a summer algebra course to ensure his grades didn't suffer.
Nelson said brain AVMs are rare and that its symptoms, such as headaches or seizures, only start showing up in adulthood. She said that, until Friday, there had never been any indication that her son was anything but healthy.
Northeast coach Jeremy Frioud had initially set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for Welch's treatment, with proceeds now set to go towards his funeral and covering his previous medical expenses. It has raised over $13,000 of a possible $25,000 goal at the time of writing.
The school also plans to set up a $5,000 scholarship in Welch's honor. "He left this world doing what he loved more than anything else," Frioud said. "And that needs to be remembered and that needs to be honored… If he could have picked his ending, this would have been his ending."