The rise – and rage – of Colts rookie Darius Leonard

I. Loss.

It’s been six years and he still can’t sleep on his right side, because he can’t stomach seeing the face of the brother he lost. Six years, and he still can’t make it through the night without tossing and turning and wrestling himself awake, because therapy never worked and closure never came and the pain never left. To this day it haunts him in the darkness. Darius Leonard keeps the TV on low, humming out the late-night silence, so his mind won’t wander back to the night Keivonte was killed.

For a while, he couldn’t eat. He dropped weight. He churned through grief counselors. He walled off the world. For 17 years they slept in the same room, Keivonte on the left, Darius the right, brothers and best friends born a year apart. Then the older brother went to a nightclub one night and ended up in the hospital, and the younger brother’s cellphone rang once, twice, 10 times in a row while he slumped in a booth with his future wife at Huddle House.

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