Amid the noise that will inevitably come with the announcement today that the Jack Yates Lions have added another couple of basketball state titles to their trophy case – thanks to mandatory forfeitures imposed by the UIL on Dallas Madison for playing an ineligible athlete over the previous two years – let’s not lose sight of the fact that all of this investigation started because a young man was senselessly killed and his life cut tragically short.

In the process, another’s was likely ruined for the rest of his.

The Jack Yates Lions – the epitome of a high school basketball powerhouse in the Greater Houston area – now have two more plaques to add to their cache.  And, even as I write this, the news outlets around the Houston area are running with the headlines about it.

But let’s hope they don’t miss the real (and sadder) story.

It’s very likely that the University Interscholastic League might never have learned that Dallas Madison High School was allowing a player who did not meet its residency requirements to play in games for two years if Troy Causey, a senior basketball player at Dallas’ Wilmer-Hutchins High School, had not been killed in south Dallas five months ago.

Causey was allegedly killed by Johnathan Turner, a senior basketball player at Dallas Madison – and Causey’s roommate in a house that neither of them should have been allowed to live in.

In a twisted story that almost has the feel of a Hollywood script, Causey and Turner wound up as roommates because they were apparently recruited to play basketball at their respective schools by coaches who, if the charges are true, blatantly disregarded UIL rules.

They both subsequently played in varsity games for those schools and Turner got to twice experience the thrill of making the trip to the Frank Erwin Center in Austin for the UIL state tournament. And then, both times, he got to experience the added thrill of winning a Class 3A state championship, as Madison knocked off Yates in 2013 and 2014 to take those titles.

A couple of weeks after the most recent championship, on Sunday night, March 23, Turner and Causey somehow got into a fight over a video game at the house on Cinnamon Oaks Drive in Oak Cliff that they shared with some of Causey’s distant relatives.

Accounts of what happened that night vary, but Causey wound up beaten and left for dead with a fractured skull and brain swelling on the street outside the house.  He would be rushed to a local hospital, but died the next day, and Turner would later be arrested and charged with murder.

An investigation followed and, soon enough, the facts of a sad, sordid story began to spill out for anyone who was interested to see.

How had those two teenage boys wound up basically living on their own, away from family?  Who was looking out for them and making sure their basic daily needs were provided for?  How could they even have been allowed to enroll in school, much less make their ways onto their varsity basketball squads?

Draw your own conclusions, but it would appear that both Turner and Causey were let down by anyone and everyone they should have been able to trust.

It is hard for me to take too many digs at parents who now are grieving the losses – although in drastically different ways – of their sons.  Both families are no doubt suffering right now.  Both have said that their intentions in allowing their sons to move to another part of the Metroplex was what they thought would give their boys a chance to use basketball as a way to bigger and better things in life.

It is hard to fault a parent for making some sacrifices to help their kids, even misguided ones.

But, make no mistake about it, those parents let their sons down, if not by sins of commission, at least by sins of omission.  At the very least, they allowed other people to take away their parental control over their children.

Still, it is much easier for me to lay responsibility at the feet of the men who ultimately were responsible for ‘recruiting’ the two to come play for their teams.

Details turned up during the subsequent investigation by Dallas ISD revealed a dirty disregard for playing by the rules at Madison and Wilmer-Hutchins.  And, because of that, at least some of the blame for Causey’s death has to rest on coaches Roderick Johnson at Madison and John Burley at W-H, as well as the administrators at those schools who were either actively involved or passively complicit in the lies that landed Causey and Turner.

It seems that the kids were just commodities to those men, products that might help them attain professional goals and personal glory – and perhaps a stepping stone to bigger and better coaching opportunities.  And until March of this year, Johnson especially might have been feeling that the risk was worth the reward.

He almost got away with it.

There is so much backstory – the history of corruption in DISD’s athletic department, the alleged history of repeated coaching misconduct within the Johnson family and instances of athletic department inmates running the academic asylum at these schools and others – that it would take too long to elaborate with great detail here.  But, let’s not be so naïve that we think this is an isolated case.  And let’s also remember that, in the end, it is the kids that lose.

This time, one lost his life.   And that’s the much bigger story than the transfer of state titles.