Demetrius DuBose ’93 has been gone almost as long as he lived, killed in a hail of police gunfire in 1999 at age 28.
For Notre Dame football followers, the name might ring a bell — linebacker in the early 1990s, All-American, team captain. The guy rising over the line of scrimmage to bring down an airborne Penn State running back in a posterized image from the famous 1992 “Snow Bowl”? That’s Demetrius DuBose. Etched into Fighting Irish iconography.
Maybe the circumstances surrounding his death stir some recognition. By then, though, he was a few years removed from Notre Dame, struggling to find himself after an unfulfilling NFL career, testing his athleticism on Southern California’s beach volleyball circuit.
That’s why the Seattle native and former Tampa Bay Buccaneer was living in San Diego, where a strange chain of events escalated into a violent scene that left him dead and everyone who knew him at a loss. After playing volleyball on July 24, 1999, DuBose returned to his apartment complex in the Mission Beach area of San Diego. He went on the balcony of an apartment belonging to a neighbor he didn’t know, apparently for a better view of the sunset, then for unknown reasons went inside, lay down and fell asleep.
When the neighbor discovered DuBose, he called police. By the time two officers arrived on the scene, DuBose’s roommate, Randy West, had vouched for him and the situation had been defused.
“It’s a beach community, people are going in and out of each other’s residences all the time, especially in 1999,” says filmmaker John Kouris ’96, a former Notre Dame teammate and friend who’s making the documentary, Demetrius DuBose, All American. “It wasn’t as crazy as it sounds.”
West and others offer recollections in the film about what happened next. Officers questioned DuBose and the exchange became confrontational. When they said they would handcuff him and brandished mace and nunchucks, West says DuBose then fled the complex in a “full-on sprint.”
Official reports include witness statements that DuBose appeared to be under the influence and scuffled with the officers, even wresting their nunchucks away. A toxicology report found traces of alcohol, cocaine and ecstasy in his system, though the medical examiner noted that the presence of the substances indicated nothing conclusive about their effect on DuBose at the time of the incident.
He was shot 12 times, including five times in the back, but The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that ballistics could not establish whether DuBose had been facing away from the officers or the force of the bullets had spun him around. In the documentary, Rita Yancher, a witness who was on the street at the time of the shooting, describes the first bullet hitting him in the back and turning him toward the officers. “There was no danger, period,” Yancher says. “None. Anywhere.”
DuBose’s death did not pass without local protests about the use of force. Over the following months, local and federal investigations ruled that the officers were justified. A citizens’ review board reached the same conclusion, but criticized the police for using insufficient discretion.
Kouris believes that if the shooting had happened more recently, DuBose’s name would be spoken alongside Michael Brown’s or George Floyd’s as another victim of a systemic social ailment. As police shootings became a public flashpoint over the past decade, Kouris felt motivated to make the documentary, but his initial mission evolved. He realized he did not want the focus to be on relitigating his friend’s death. The film had to honor his life.
Stories from those whose warm recollections remain vivid provide an immense mosaic of memories. They reveal a person difficult to distill into anecdotes — the scope of his eclectic interests in music, philosophy and travel, and his impact on people from different walks of life.
Kouris is one of them. Demetrius DuBose, All American, the first half of which he screened at Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center in April, captures many of those memories. The screening generated interest from studio executives, says Kouris, who has been submitting to festivals and meeting with potential distributors in an effort to secure a wide release.
Others do most of the storytelling in the film, but the connection between Kouris and DuBose was the seed of this passion project.
“We really met on the field,” Kouris says. That was August 1992, when Kouris was a walk-on freshman tight end and DuBose was a starting linebacker and senior captain. Preseason practice put them facemask to facemask as the scout-team offense put the starting defense through its paces.
“He took me under his wing as far as just mentoring me, pointing out little things that I was doing techniquewise, kind of looking out for me,” Kouris says. “I think he saw, at times, my frustration. I really wanted to show well out there and show I belonged.”
Kouris had no illusions about playing time. All the Chicago-area native wanted was to earn a place on the dress list for the season-opener against Northwestern at Soldier Field. To wear the uniform and watch from the sidelines while stars like DuBose performed.
Neither of them, as it turned out, would have that chance.
An NCAA investigation found that DuBose had received about $1,300 in benefits from a Seattle couple with Notre Dame ties. They had known him since before his college recruitment, but under NCAA rules at the time, DuBose’s status as a student-athlete made their generosity impermissible. He was suspended for the first two games and required to pay back the value of the gifts.
“It hurts,” he told the media at the time. “I don’t feel like I did anything wrong. It’s hard to deal with emotionally.”
The same day DuBose learned about his suspension, the Northwestern dress list went up. Kouris did not find his name and took his frustrations out on the wall just as DuBose happened to pass by.
“He just kind of unleashed on me,” says Kouris, who recalls blurting out something about quitting, to which DuBose responded, “You might as well go ahead,” and walked away.
Later that night, the suspended captain showed up unexpectedly at the freshman walk-on’s dorm room, offering his counsel and inviting Kouris to come to him if he ever needed anything. They bonded over more than football, talking music and veering into philosophy after DuBose noticed a Heidegger volume on the bookshelf. A government and international studies major who would graduate in three-and-a-half years, DuBose had knowledge on a range of subjects that enlivened conversations.
“He just knew about so many things. I mean, he was really an interesting guy,” Kouris says. “I wanted to be his friend, but at the same time, he’s the captain, a senior, and I just kind of wanted to let him talk and listen to him.”
They shared common doubts and anxieties when it came to football. Unseen by fans, often even unspoken among teammates, the physical and psychological strain of elite competition can deplete players. Because of his importance to the team, DuBose carried the added burden of his punishment and the reaction to it unfolding in public. As he watched from the stands during the second game, at home against rival Michigan, NBC’s sideline reporter asked DuBose to share his “enormous emotional feelings.”
He answered in the measured tone of someone accustomed to microphones amplifying his words. “It’s tough. Before the game I just told all my teammates that I loved them and I cared about them. It really means a lot for me to play in the Michigan game, but it’s an unfortunate situation. Hopefully next week I’ll be back and ready to play.”
DuBose returned to his place at the heart of the Notre Dame defense, helping the team complete a 10-1-1 season. Perhaps the highlight was the last-second, snowy win over Penn State that he helped preserve with his trampoline-leap tackle immortalized in a photograph. Afterward, this time on the field and in uniform, he again encountered NBC’s sideline reporter, who asked a question not so different from his previous one: “Can you describe the feeling?”
“No, not really,” DuBose said, then tried. “I think I’m a part of something great. That’s always been my dream, to come to Notre Dame and be a part of something real, and today the spirit showed. For all those guys that doubt Notre Dame and doubt the spirit, it’s not phony, it exists.”
That spirit, to the legions entranced by the Fighting Irish, takes a form not unlike religious experience: an unseen hand or inner will that lifts a player to make an indelible play in a magical snowfall. For those around the program day-to-day, it’s more tangible. To those who knew him best, DuBose embodied the Notre Dame spirit in action, on the field and off.
“He saw how all the pieces of the puzzle needed to come together to accomplish something,” says Jim Russ, a Notre Dame athletic trainer for three decades who counts DuBose among a handful of favorite players. Russ recalls that DuBose got to know walk-ons, student managers, secretaries, custodians, anyone with a connection to the program and, on a personal level, appreciated them as much as anyone in the huddle with him.
“There were times he went out of his way to help me,” Russ adds, recounting how DuBose urged players who slacked on their treatments to see the trainer and stick to their recovery regimens. Sometimes he clued Russ in about players trying to hide injuries, or hurting in other ways because of personal issues.
In the documentary, former linebacker Germaine Holden ’95 struggles through tears to read the memories he composed in the form of a letter to DuBose after Kouris reached out about the film project. The letter recalls Holden’s freshman season, when he was married at 19 and had an infant son. Many people didn’t know how to react to his family situation, Holden says, but DuBose just went out of his way to help.
“There was one moment that I’ll never forget,” Holden reads from his tablet in the film, wiping his eyes as he chokes up. “There was a day when I was really hard-pressed to find two nickels to rub together, and my son needed diapers. I actually skipped practice that day because I was trying to hustle up the funds.”
DuBose called Holden out of concern about his absence and learned why. Later, DuBose appeared at the door with diapers.
Like Kouris, Holden also recalls the older player helping him adjust on the field when injuries to starters thrust him into playing time as a freshman in 1991. A native of Anderson, South Carolina, Holden at times felt like an outsider and took some ribbing from teammates about his small-town southern ways, including from DuBose.
“Off the field, there were some jokes, because I’m from the South. Now, that didn’t give me warm fuzzies, right? That didn’t make me feel like this guy was trying to look out for me; actually quite the opposite,” Holden says. “But I think he just sensed that I was different from a lot of the other guys, maybe I was more reserved in some ways, and he would just talk to me.”
DuBose had his own differences from the crowd. His Seattle background made him one of the few Black players on the team in those days who were into the grunge music and fashion that bands like Nirvana were exporting from the Pacific Northwest. That was one interest among many, hardly of paramount importance to DuBose, just another unapologetic part of him.
“The thing that really still has him etched in my brain is how he stood out because he never tried to fit in. He never, ever tried to be the most popular, he never tried to be the man. He just tried to be himself, the best version of him that he could be,” Holden says. “And he stayed true to that all the way through, even after football when he got into volleyball. Again, just like I didn’t know any Black people that were into grunge, I didn’t know any males that played volleyball either. But he got into it because he wanted to, and I applaud him for having the courage to make his own tracks. That was Demetrius. He just laid his own tracks.”
Nothing ever changed that. As a second-round NFL draft pick in 1993, he realized a dream, but may, in fact, have been dreaming when it happened.
“I probably called him 10 minutes after they made the announcement on ESPN about Tampa Bay’s selection of Demetrius DuBose from Notre Dame,” Holden says. “It sounded like I woke him up. He was like, ‘Yeah, man. I was just taking a nap.’”
When DuBose joined the Buccaneers, his fellow rookies included kicker Michael Husted from the University of Virginia and safety John Lynch from Stanford. DuBose and Lynch had played against each other in college and sat together on a flight to a preseason game with the middle seat open between them.
“I’m a smaller guy compared to everybody else, so they’re like, ‘Hey, kicker, come sit here,’” Husted says. “They kind of threw me in the middle, you know?”
The three became friends, hanging out during their debut season. Lynch’s marriage the following summer meant he had less time to spend with his teammates, so DuBose and Husted grew closer.
“We liked to philosophize,” Husted says, each playing the devil’s advocate in conversations, to challenge the other. Husted also recalls sharing his favorite alternative music CDs with DuBose — The Smiths, The Cure, Björk — leading them to in-depth interpretations of lyrics.
After their second year in Tampa Bay, the teammates took a monthlong trip through Europe from England to Greece, including a skiing excursion in the French Alps.
“Zest for life, zest for travel,” Husted says. “He was always reading. He was always wanting to go do things, just very active, you know, living life to the fullest.”
A year or two after that trip, with Husted now married and a father, DuBose’s zest took him on a solo journey to China. As he enlarged his sense of the world, his football opportunities were shrinking.
Playing middle linebacker behind Hardy Nickerson, a five-time Pro Bowl selection, DuBose resisted when the team wanted him to switch positions. Signing with the New York Jets as a free agent before the 1997 season, the headstrong linebacker questioned the strength coach’s training regimen in favor of what he felt worked best for him, which did not go over well. The Jets released him, and his NFL career was over.
All indications suggest DuBose felt adrift without football. “Self-medicating,” as Kouris puts it. While in South Bend in 1998, he was arrested at the old Heartland nightclub downtown. He was accused of spitting on an off-duty cop and pulling a water pipe from the ceiling.
Those closest to him in San Diego did not see that side. Their memories echo DuBose’s Notre Dame friends — great athlete, humble and friendly, a pied-piper personality, hungry to improve at his adopted sport.
“He was physically superior to everyone on the beach, right? But he didn’t make you feel that way. Quite the opposite. I remember him, like, ‘Hey, I’m here to learn, this is all new to me,’” says Matt Olson, whose life has revolved around beach volleyball. “He just popped onto the scene, and he was a fixture from the second he got there, for all sorts of positive reasons.”
Olson thought DuBose might have had a future in beach volleyball. He lacked nuanced technical skill, but his athleticism and the fact that players tend to hit their prime in their 30s gave him time to grow.
Then his time ran out.
If the years have dulled the shock, they have only intensified the feeling of loss, the snuffed potential — and, for Kouris, the motivation to memorialize the complicated, competitive, compassionate man whose impact still reverberates.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.