Jan. 8—”Dan was a very bright light, had a beaming smile and a brightness to his eyes. He had a personality that went a long way. He was very open and gregarious and became not just a teammate, but a brother,” John Husby, on Dan Grayson, his WSU football teammate in 1988-89.
That is the Dan Grayson that Tina Harding Grayson fell in love with while attending Washington State — the man who beat great odds to become a star linebacker and co-captain for the Cougars, got a good job and was a caring husband and father to Tina and their three children.
That version of Dan Grayson bears little resemblance to the man who died at 54 on Aug. 1, 2021, in the parking lot of a Quality Inn in Kennewick. Grayson suffered a sudden cardiac death because of acute methamphetamine intoxication after police say he tried to rob drugs and cash from a felon.
Why did Dan Grayson turn violent, impulsive and erratic — a man feared by Tina, who asked for a divorce and was granted a restraining order?
Tina is certain she knows.
His behavior was consistent with symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the term used to describe brain degeneration likely caused by repeated head trauma.
“I know for a fact — I lived with it,” she said. “There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Tina begins telling her husband’s story. It occasionally brings her to tears, but she feels duty-bound to tell it.
She hopes telling it might help someone. Maybe it can encourage someone to seek help.
“I don’t want anybody else to go through what I have,” she said.
The rise to stardom
Tina said Grayson didn’t “have the best of circumstances growing up, and had it kind of rough.”
Grayson told The Seattle Times in 2013 that his father was an alcoholic. Soon after leaving his hometown of Woodland to play football for Wenatchee Valley Community College, his mother was killed by a drunken driver.
Grayson played tight end at Wenatchee Valley, competing with Kevin Andal, and the two became great friends.
After two years at Wenatchee Valley, the two walked on at Washington State, but Grayson decided to play linebacker.
“I got to Wazzu about a month before he did, and was telling the guys: ‘Wait until my friend gets here, because you won’t believe it. I look like a regular dude, but this guy …,’ ” Andal said. “All along, I knew he had something special.”
Grayson arrived at WSU with his possessions in a garbage bag and no place to live until Andal let him share his one-bedroom apartment.
During spring practice in 1988, Grayson made a big hit that forced a fumble, impressing new WSU coach Dennis Erickson, who said he was giving Grayson a scholarship on the spot.
Grayson was friendly off the field and a tackling machine on it, quickly winning over his teammates.
“For a guy who wasn’t part of the group from the start, he sure assimilated fast,” said Husby, the WSU center who was a co-captain with Grayson in 1989. “On the field, he had another switch, which was, ‘We’re going to win.’ We saw that in the weight room, during training, before practice and after practice. He became that critical piece to our team.”
Said wide receiver Tim Stallworth, who played with Grayson for two years at WSU:
“That cat was a great motivator as far as work ethic and just the team camaraderie that he brought as a co-captain. That’s what he was, and a great guy, too. A great guy.”
Grayson helped lead WSU to an Aloha Bowl win in 1988, and in 1989 he was first-team All-Pac-12 after making 133 tackles. He had 25 tackles in one game (tied for second-best in WSU history) and 20 in another.
Hitting made Grayson a star, but Tina said it came at a cost.
“The damage done to a linebacker is one of the worst — hitting over and over again,” Tina said. “That’s what he was coached to do.”
Grayson was drafted in the seventh round in 1990 by the Pittsburgh Steelers. His roommate at training camp was Justin Strzelczyk, a subject of the movie “Concussion,” the 2015 film that chronicled the forensic pathologist who fought against the NFL’s effort to suppress his research on CTE suffered by players.
Strzelczyk died in 2004, when after being chased for 40 miles by state troopers, he ran into a truck at an estimated 90 mph while going the wrong way on a toll road. Later, it was determined he was suffering from CTE.
Grayson did not make the Steeler’s’ opening-day roster, getting released during the team’s final cut. He played a year for the Saskatchewan Rough Riders in the Canadian Football League before settling down in Kennewick with his wife. Dan eventually landed a job with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland.
“He coached the kids and was a family guy,” his wife said. “He was very intelligent, and had a high national security clearance to be cleared to do the things he did, traveling nationally and internationally for a global-threat reduction program.”
Changed man
With the benefit of hindsight, Tina said the first signs Dan was changing came about 10 years ago.
Then came bigger changes, including domestic disputes that Tina didn’t want to discuss in detail beyond saying that they got physical.
She said it steadily got worse.
“He didn’t have the empathy and the understanding that he did,” Tina said. “It was more of a narcissistic attitude and behavior, which wasn’t the way he was.”
She said Grayson became more erratic and impulsive, and he started to self-medicate, which didn’t help.
“It’s a progressive disease — your brain is dying,” she said, “Sometimes people call it a mental illness and yeah, they act that way, but it’s because of the damage to the frontal lobe of the brain. You take that portion of the brain away — the reasoning and decision-making and being able to handle emotions — and you just don’t handle things the same.”
She said Grayson was aware something wasn’t right.
“After (Hall of Fame linebacker) Junior Seau committed suicide and all these football guys were starting to suffer — he said, ‘I want to be studied,'” Tina said.
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CTE can only be diagnosed after death. Tina said results from tests on Grayson’s brain at the University of Washington are months away. Seau was diagnosed with CTE, as have many other former NFL players, including most recently, star receiver Vincent Jackson.
Tina said 2017 and 2018 were very tough years and “the last interaction I had with Dan was (in 2019) when I woke up in the middle of the night with a door on top of me.”
A couple of nights later, she said a friend of Grayson’s called her parents, imploring them to get Tina out of the house because Grayson was going to kill her.
Tina left, filed for divorce and was granted a restraining order, which she said he violated more than 500 times.
The last time she saw Dan was in 2019 in a courtroom, but the news of her former husband’s death last summer hit her hard.
“I got no closure,” she said. “We were married for 28 years. It’s so frustrating to have lost him. I was his advocate, saying, ‘He needs help, he needs help.’ I had no way to help him.”
A tragic end
Andal, too, noticed changes.
“The last couple of years he did seem different,” Andal said. “Just a different look in his eyes was the biggest thing I noticed.”
A few years back, while driving to Chelan with Husby and Randy Gray for the annual trip of former WSU teammates, Andal had a request.
“I said, I’m not sure about Dan. Will you watch him this weekend and on the way home tell me your thoughts?,” Andal said. “We all concluded we weren’t sure what was going on but there were some differences. I don’t know if we noticed or saw the level that it was.”
Nothing prepared his friends for the end.
According to the Kennewick police report, Dan was dropped off at the Quality Inn by a woman, who identified herself as his girlfriend, where he and an accomplice “orchestrated and intended to commit a robbery and to take the narcotics and money from (the victim).”
According to the report, Grayson got into a physical altercation with the victim in the victim’s room and eventually ran out of the room. Not long after, he was dead in the parking lot.
In the report, Grayson’s girlfriend is quoted talking about his brain issues, describing him as being “easy influenced” and “weak minded.”
The Benton County coroner’s office said the sudden cardiac arrest because of acute methamphetamine intoxication was exacerbated by the physical altercation. It said underlying health conditions contributed to his death as well.
Grayson’s death was initially investigated as a homicide. That was ruled out when the cause of death was determined, but the robbery aspect of the case regarding his accomplice (not named because he has not been charged) is still under investigation.
The sad ending shook Grayson’s friends.
“I choose to remember Dan for the light that he was and the teammate that he was and the brother he was,” Husby said. “But I will say this: CTE is real. Blows to the head are real.”
“He was not one in a million, he was one in a billion,” Andal said. “I would have done anything for that guy as he would have for any of his friends.”
Because of that, Andal can’t help but wonder whether there was something more he could have done.
“In retrospect, I wish I would have followed my heart in thinking maybe there were things going on in his mind,” he said. “I can’t beat myself up over it, but to have it end tragically like that, you look back and reflect on the signs. Should I have been more involved with tough questions?”
Moving forward
Tina gains strength from the hope that telling her story will make a difference.
“The good will come if we can help people,” she said. “That’s my hope. The only way to get through it is to keep talking about it.”
She said she has nothing against football “because there are some very good things that come from sports and they teach more than you will ever know.”
“But we must make people aware about the downside of it, and it’s not just football,” she said. “It’s going to be hockey, soccer or anything that causes the brain to shift.”
Tina said it’s not just the person suffering from a brain injury who needs help.
“A traumatic brain injury is hard and people need to know it is OK to get help,” she said. “They look normal and it’s easy to be a manipulator for people not to see. Dan managed it well outside, but when he got home, it was living hell because he could let down his guard and do and say whatever he wanted. At the end, it was with no remorse.
“I needed help. I needed somebody to help me to be able to help him. There was no support system, and it needs to be there for people.'”
Grayson was buried next to his mother in Cougar, 30 miles northeast of Woodland, his hometown.
“He’s at peace,” Tina said. “I miss him terribly, but not in the state that he was. He’s at peace, and I ‘m OK with that. It’s the only way that I get through it.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly named Kevin Andal as Kevin Atwal.
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