McMillan’s death changed lives
When the University of Idaho plays at Troy (Ala.) today, the 50 or so members of Eric McMillan’s family, who planned on attending his homecoming, won’t be in the stands.
A month ago, they buried the 19-year-old next to his grandmother in his hometown of Tuskegee, Ala., 60 miles from Troy. The redshirt freshman cornerback had started Idaho’s first three games, but the day after the Vandals’ 49-8 loss to Washington State on Sept. 18, McMillan was shot to death in his off-campus apartment in Moscow, Idaho.
“All of us were planning on going. His Pee Wee football coaches, junior high coaches, everyone who knows Eric was planning on showing up. Everyone was so proud of him. He made it to that next level,” said John Ligon, McMillan’s uncle and legal guardian, who lives in Orlando, Fla.
No family member had seen McMillan play a college game.
“Unfortunately, that isn’t going to happen,” Ligon said Wednesday while in his living room, surrounded by family portraits on the walls. “I think it’s too hard for the family, but I’m still contemplating going.”
The murder of McMillan has changed a family, a football team and a campus. The uncle, who encouraged McMillan to sign with Idaho in part because it seemed so safe, feels responsible. The Vandals’ cornerbacks coach, who was shot a decade ago also after a fight on a small, quiet campus, wonders why he lived and McMillan died. A teammate blames himself for being involved in a fight at a local club the night before McMillan was shot, perhaps in retaliation. Students lock their doors, check them twice, peer through their peepholes and keep their curtains closed, the assumptions of a carefree college life abruptly altered.
Major crime rare at school
Of the 117 Division I-A schools in the country, Idaho is one of the least likely places for such a crime. Moscow always seemed far removed from big-city crime. Last year at the school, there was one reported aggravated assault, 13 simple assaults, 13 burglaries and three car thefts.
“We haven’t had a homicide in Moscow in five years, much less something like this,” said Moscow Police Capt. Cam Hershaw. “I don’t know of a homicide ever of this nature in Moscow, and I’ve lived in the area for 22 years. We’ve had drug-related homicides and some homicides involving crimes of passion, but those kinds of things happen in every community. But this community here is very safe and very isolated. And the university is full of Idaho kids, farm-raised kids, so this is very rare. It just doesn’t occur.”
The senselessness of the crime — police haven’t established a motive — has only slowed the healing.
“You can never really get over it, but to get closure on it, you want to find out why,” said Idaho cornerbacks coach Alundis Brice. “We’re just waiting. The cops don’t tell you a lot, so you’re in limbo because the one person who can tell you everything isn’t here, and the other two people who can aren’t talking.”
Two Seattle brothers, Matthew and James Wells, who were former athletes and high school coaches themselves in Washington, were charged Sept. 20 with first-degree murder in Latah County, Idaho. The Latah County prosecutor said he hopes to start the murder trial by the spring. First, the Wells brothers are expected to stand trial in Whitman County, Wash., in mid-November on eluding charges after leading police on a chase across Eastern Washington after the shooting.
“The circumstances of this are perplexing,” said Latah County prosecutor Bill Thompson, “because it was brazen, it was daylight and there were people around; other apartment dwellers.”
Though McMillan and some teammates were at a local club called The Beach when a fight broke out the night before the shooting, players said McMillan was not involved in the fight. They believe he tried to break it up. No one can explain why two men showed up at McMillan’s apartment around 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday and shot him in the chest.
“I don’t want to suggest that the altercation at the nightclub is our leading theory,” said Thompson. “It’s the one easiest to define. We’re really looking to see why this happened for any number of reasons, including reasons we don’t know about yet.”
Said Hershaw, the Moscow police captain, “All the information that I can gather this far in the investigation is that Eric’s a good kid, a good student.”
Ligon urged McMillan, whom he calls his son, to sign with Idaho because he saw Moscow as safer than the California schools McMillan was considering. “I feel guilty. I think about that all the time,” Ligon said.
When Eric was in eighth grade in Tuskegee, his grandmother Maggie suggested that he needed “a strong man in his life for some discipline.” His mother, Gwen, raised Eric and his twin sister, Erica, as a single parent.
The family felt the siblings would have more opportunities if they moved to Murrieta, Calif., where Ligon, a former staff sergeant in the Marines and a Gulf War veteran, and his wife Jackie, were living then.
After McMillan’s redshirt season last year when the team went 3-9, the coaching staff was fired and Nick Holt, a former assistant at Southern California, took over. Brice, a former All-Southeastern Conference cornerback at Mississippi who played five years with the Dallas Cowboys, McMillan’s favorite team, became his new position coach. Brice was also from a small town in the South, and the two developed a close relationship in a short time.
“You can be just like him, if you stay focused,” Ligon told McMillan this past summer, words which later took on a much different meaning.
Eerie coincidences
Months before the 1995 NFL draft, Brice, playing peacemaker, was shot in the chest while trying to break up an argument on the Ole Miss campus. “I’ve been reliving things that happened to me. I thought this possibly can’t happen twice in one lifetime,” said Brice.
Starting cornerback J.R. Ruffin struggles with McMillan’s death daily and wonders if the assailants were looking for him and found McMillan by mistake. Ruffin was at the nightclub and was part of the group involved in the fight.
“When Eric first got to Idaho, everyone used to call him my clone because he looked like me and we always dress the same,” said Ruffin, a senior to whom McMillan turned for advice.
“I shouldn’t have let him go (to the club),” Ruffin told Brice after the shooting. “When you oversee someone, you want to make sure they’re safe. I let him down.”
A month removed, Ruffin still feels the same way. “Coach has told me it’s not my fault, but it’s still not hitting home. I was still there. It all could have been avoided.”
The day after McMillan died, Ruffin didn’t practice or go to the weight room. He thought about quitting. “Then Coach Brice talked me into not giving up because stuff like this is going to happen, not people murdered, but bad stuff will happen, you just can’t turn your back on it,” Ruffin said. “He told me that I have a bright future. I decided to keep going. Now I keep going harder, practicing harder.”
The team wears McMillan’s initials and number on their helmets. They have signed his locker, which remains intact. About 20 teammates memorialized McMillan with a tattoo that Ruffin designed featuring a cross, a football, his No. 7, and nickname, E-Mac. His name is still on the board in the cornerbacks’ meeting room.
“He’s still with us; he’s still a part of our group. I’m not taking his name down. He’s still here, you just can’t see him right now,” Brice explained.
The defensive backs miss his loud laugh during meetings. The team, with a 2-6 record, misses his speed and toughness on the field. The Ligons miss their weekly Sunday phone call. He would ask what’s for dinner although he was a few thousand miles away. A twin sister misses her other half, and a mother in Alabama misses it all.
‘We don’t forget’
He is in their thoughts, but they remind themselves they have to go on. McMillan’s roommate, cornerback Kyle Williams, moved out of the apartment where the shooting took place. Ligon will sell the 1991 gray Buick he planned to give to McMillan after the school year.
“We don’t forget,” Brice said. “You keep him alive, but you just got to let him go because you can’t change what’s happened.”
Even though it’s changed them.
“I used to keep everything unlocked because nobody would do anything. I got comfortable. Now I lock my door and lock my windows and don’t leave my curtains open. A couple of people moved out of our apartment building,” said safety Simeon Stewart who lives below McMillan’s apartment. “You don’t think it could happen again, but you’re always looking over your shoulder.”