Football helps broken community to mend after teen's death

DES MOINES — The father stands, walks slowly to the podium, and through the silence come sniffles, then sobs. He looks into the crowd, hundreds packed into the pews at Christian Faith Center on Tuesday afternoon, and clears his throat.

Time for Timothy Miller to eulogize his 16-year-old son. Michael Miller lies below the podium in a wooden casket. And just beyond the casket sit five brothers — including one stepbrother charged with first-degree manslaughter in Mikey's death.

"I have broken many bones," Miller says, his voice cracking and wavering. "I have passed hundreds of kidney stones. I have had a heart attack, and I have had a stroke. And you know what?

"I'd rather endure all those right now and be set on fire than deal with what I'm dealing with now. Such is the love that I have for my son."

A box of tissues floats through the church until both empty nearly three hours after the service started. The undefeated Evergreen High School football team joins the burial procession and then it's off to practice.

The season team members dedicated to Mikey's memory has three games left before the playoffs. First, they have the opportunity to fulfill one of his greatest wishes — to beat Kennedy, their rival, Friday night.

The incident

The makeshift memorial runs the length of the fence outside the house where Mikey died three weeks ago. Flowers of every hue are bunched so tightly at the bottom that they obscure the base. Balloons hang from the posts. Some read, "Happy Birthday!" But Mikey never made it to Oct. 4. He would have turned 17 that day.

Mikey's friends are there so often that his father set up a tent in the front yard. And on those nights when he cannot sleep, Miller heads outside to the memorial.

"I'm not eating well, and I'm not sleeping well," he says. "But I am keeping my home together best I can."

His infant son became ill the night of Sept. 21. And so it was at a local hospital that he caught the news of a shooting near his South King County neighborhood. The family thought they recognized their car in the TV coverage, and grew concerned.

Ten minutes later, their pastor called.

Tim Miller, 18, Mikey's older brother, awoke that night to his aunt screaming, "Call 911! Call 911!" He found his brother sprawled awkwardly on the floor in another bedroom, blood everywhere. Mikey looked like he was choking on something.

The paramedics came. Mikey was pronounced dead at the scene.

"I went crazy," Tim says. "Throwing stuff. Yelling."

He ran out of the house, sprinting down the street, hoping that Mikey would be sitting there when he got back, that big, goofy grin spread across his face. Maybe if he ran far enough and fast enough he could outrun the reality.

Police say his stepbrother, 16-year-old Jordan Tautua-Jantoc, had stolen a gun from his stepfather, traded it to another Evergreen student for a .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun and accidentally shot Mikey near his collarbone.

Teammate Joe Thomsen lives next door. He gathered with a crowd outside the house. Police told the crowd what happened — "Jordan shot Mikey," Thomsen says — and cellphones across White Center and Burien started chirping.

Coach Shaun Tarantola says it felt like waking from a bad dream. He had never lost someone that close to him, and there was no blueprint for dealing with this loss.

All he knew is that two Miller brothers were on his team. One dead. The other crying outside the locker room with teammates whose emotions ranged from shock to disbelief to anger. And Tarantola knew he had to say something.

He moved the team into the library and started talking. He reminded them that Mikey almost didn't play football that season. Talked about dedicating this season to Mikey's memory, playing the way Mikey would have played, the way he would have wanted it.

The team decided to hold practice. It was their best effort to date this season. And when practice ended, they filed onto a bus that stopped in front of the memorial. Each player held a carnation with a message on it, and one by one they shook hands with Mikey's parents. Then the players broke into "Lean on Me."

The next day, Evergreen beat Lindbergh, 35-7. The team cordoned off a section of Highline Stadium for the family, which numbered about 100. Students broke out glow sticks and candles and wore T-shirts with Mikey's face on the front. At halftime, they sang "Amazing Grace."

The team

Right then, Tarantola says, he realized the power of sports — for distraction and for communities and for the healing process. His broken kids were mending each other right there on the football field, bonding with a community that had lost just as much and needed something, anything, to hold onto.

"The positive of this tragedy is that you saw the power of this community, the potential of this community," Tarantola says. "Our crowds the last few weeks are way bigger than we've had. And it's not because we're winning.

"This is a way of remembering Mikey, of celebrating him."

Tarantola and his two buddies — three privileged guys from the Eastside — took over the inner-city program at Evergreen last season after a stint at Liberty High School.

They knew the facts: They would work between 70 and 90 hours a week in season, teaching and coaching, with minimal compensation. They'd be coaching a team with players of at least 10 different ethnicities, at a school where 38 languages are spoken. Most of their kids are from low-income, single-parent families.

"They have every reason in the world to be down on themselves," says Lele Teo, an assistant coach, "to be pissed off at the world. But they handle things really well because they know they have a family here that will take care of them."

It didn't work that way at first. Tarantola was the third coach at Evergreen in four years, and during each of those four years, the team learned a different system.

Tarantola said other coaches told him he would need to lower his expectations because of who he coached. He would not hear it.

And still, there came a point last season when the coaches gathered for a few pitchers at the local watering hole after another loss, shaking their heads, wondering if their approach would work at a school like Evergreen.

The kids needed structure.

The coaches needed the kids' trust.

They gained it last summer at a football camp. Everyone on the team stayed in the dorms at the University of Washington, and one night, they formed a circle with a "hot seat" in the middle and declared no question off-limits. There were funny questions, gross questions, questions that came from everywhere. And there were serious questions, the kind that showed the insecurities behind all the tough-guy exteriors the coaches were so accustomed to.

The one that sticks: Do you wish you'd stayed at Liberty?

No, and Tarantola never worried after that.

"All the players on the team are my brothers," teammate Malu Le'iato says. "One fights. I fight with him. One falls. I'll fall with him. Or I'll try to catch him. With the group that we have, this tight-knit group, it's like this jersey. You can't rip it."

And after all of that, after going through everything they went through just to make it on the football field, in the midst of the best season any of them can remember, Mikey died. Now, teammate Thomsen says, "Every single play is for him."

The boy and his legacy

A natural salesman. That was Mikey. He sold 60 discount cards during a fundraiser, almost double his next teammate, and after collecting $60 in prize money, what did Mikey do? He gave the money back to Evergreen in another football fundraiser.

Friendly. That was Mikey, too. The kind of kid who bagged groceries at the local Albertsons, bugging people with one item to insist on carryout just so he could talk with them en route to their car.

"Anyone that invested in Mikey got 10 times the effort from him back, 10 times the reward," Tarantola says.

And loyal. That was Mikey also. Like the time his older brother got in a fight at school, and out of nowhere, without even a single word, there was Mikey at his side.

He had a wild streak, too. Like the time earlier in his childhood when Mikey started blowing up mailboxes with the mail in them. And a chatty side, incessant and bordering on obnoxious, striking up conversations about the leaves on trees.

Miller also knew the other side of his son, the recent side, a sweeter side. The kid found God four summers ago. Tamed his inner beast. And then he died, and his father listened to all the stories. He had no idea.

"You see one side of your kid in front of you," he says. "And then when they're away, you wonder what they're really like. Oh my gosh, if I only could have known that he was actually better than I thought he was.

"I've lived a long life, and I don't know a fraction of the people Mikey knew."

Miller stands at the center of a complicated tragedy. An inspiration, assistant coach Teo says. The kind of father who went to two-a-day practices this summer so he could know the people his kids were hanging out with.

Now one son is dead. Another is charged as an adult with first-degree manslaughter, for recklessness, according to police. And four other sons, all so young, are trying to make sense of it.

Speaking about Jordan, the stepbrother charged in Mikey's death, Miller chokes up again. He doesn't want Jordan to go to jail.

"He revered Mikey and loved him," Miller says. "It was one child using bad judgment. And for this to happen, it's a bad nightmare from which he cannot wake up."

The house where Mikey died is quieter these days, and future family outings won't be quite as full. Sometimes they blame each other. And then they remember Mikey, and they know that's the last thing he would have wanted.

So they choose to remember him instead, to celebrate his life, same as all his teammates and all his coaches and all the people he met and touched in 16 years.

They wear T-shirts that read "Miller Time. 59. Forever in our Hearts." Tim Miller writes "RIP little bro" on the glove covering his left hand. And a cheerleader painted her stand in Mikey's memory.

"One, two, three," the team chants at midfield before their latest win, last Saturday against Renton, which improved their record to 6-0. "Miller Time!"

They have not forgotten Mikey. Or his wishes, starting with the game against Kennedy on Friday night.

Sometimes teammate Le'iato struggles with his faith. Sometimes Tim Miller seeks solitude to cry. Something sparks a memory — Mikey's locker, his letterman's jacket, his clothes still hanging in the closet. And all of them come back to the question that doesn't have an answer.

Why?

"I just know that Mikey is going to save a lot of lives," says Teo, the assistant coach. "A lot of parents are going to look more carefully at guns. A lot of people are going to remember Mikey."

The father stands again, walks slowly to the podium, and instructs the hundreds in attendance at the funeral to look one final time at the boy lying in the casket. The line snakes around the church.

Both of Mikey's families — his relatives and his team — meet there. Mikey brought them all together again, and they peer inside and hold each other and say goodbye.

Greg Bishop: 206-464-3191 or gbishop@seattletimes.com