TAMPA — The wounds remain discolored in Kathy Miller’s psyche, as raw and acute as the day they were inflicted.
More than 15 years have elapsed since her youngest son, Joel, was thrust into a scandal of which he wanted no part. Nearly eight have passed since she found him dead in his bedroom at age 29. The passage of time? A mere platitude and placebo. The ensuing years have healed nothing.
“My soul is broken,” Kathy said.
While the grief never dissipates, it can lie dormant — until something sets it off. Like an anniversary. Or a photo. Or an awkward encounter with an old friend, who wonders how you’re doing. The latest trigger point arrived in early June, in the form of a news story.
Former USF football coach Jim Leavitt, who began the Bulls program from scratch and led it to a brief No. 2 national ranking in barely a decade, had been chosen for induction into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame. In early 2010, Leavitt lost his job after a school probe revealed he grabbed a walk-on running back by the throat and slapped him twice in the face during halftime of a game in November 2009.
The walk-on running back: Joel Miller.
“I was devastated, totally mortified,” his mother said recently from the booth of a New Tampa restaurant. The university’s probe also determined that Leavitt didn’t tell the truth to investigators and that he tried to manipulate the testimony of participants, including Miller’s.
“How could they take a coach that hit a student-athlete (into the Hall of Fame)? He let his coaching staff down, his entire staff, because he lied. He interfered with a legal investigation, he gets fired, and then they end up paying him over $2 million to leave, and they’re going to bring him back to the Hall of Fame? That makes no sense to me.”
Kathy Miller, left, mother of former USF football…
Source link : https://www.tampabay.com/sports/bulls/2025/07/10/usf-joel-miller-jim-leavitt-hall-fame-kathy-jamie/
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Publish date : 2025-07-10 09:00:00
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