Students remember Liescheski with his own words

 7 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

BY COLLEEN KENNEY / Lincoln Journal Star

No words feel right when a 17-year-old dies abruptly, on a spring day, surrounded by his friends and coaches and his little brother.

So let’s start with his own words, written in his own chicken scratch a few years ago for an assignment — a letter to the man he would become as a high school senior.

Hopefully by this time I will be getting ready for college, hopefully the airforce or marines or other. Maybe I changed my mind but hopefully not

View Slideshow

Friends decorated John Liescheski's parking space at Pius X High School as a memorial Friday. (Heidi Hoffman)

John Liescheski, the Pius X High School junior who collapsed Thursday during spring conditioning drills, wrote those words during a freshman retreat.

Should still be in football and getting a’s and b’s.

His coach read the words to the students Friday morning at an all-school Mass in the gym, and it was as if John were talking to them, said 17-year-old friend Robert Hoppe.

I am supposed to be writing a bunch of crap about strengths and weaknesses but screw that

John’s words had them crying and laughing.

“He was this kid who had one of the deepest voices of anyone you’ve ever met,” said Robert, a fellow football lineman who wrote and read his own letter to John at the Mass, fighting tears to get through it.

They are about the same size: 6-foot-2. Robert is 240. John a little skinnier. John used to tease Robert for being bigger.

Robert had been working out alongside John when he collapsed.

He will not forget two of John’s most famous words.

“He’d always scream ‘Oh, yeah!’ at the top of his lungs.”

Some teammates wrote those words in big letters on their forearms Friday, one on each arm. Robert saw them walk by one another in the hallways and cross their forearms, like crossbones.

Many kids painted “59” — John’s jersey number — on their cars in yellow paint. Almost every visible kid at Pius had “59” on the back of their hands or the sleeves of their white school uniforms.

When the coach read these words John wrote to his future self, Robert said, some kids gasped:

hopefully everyone is still alive but in 4 years allot can happen … so whatever has happened good or bad can’t be changed

No words feel right when you knock on the door of John’s home in southeast Lincoln, walking past John’s old blue Acura on the curb, a gift for his 16th birthday, walking past the Jesus statue and the hanging petunias on the porch and to the back patio.

John’s dad prays with a priest  in the shade, heads bowed.

The priest offers words of a blessing.

John helped build the wooden playset over there in the grass. He and his older brother Phillip and their Polish “Opa,” grandpa, built it. The boys played war games with neighborhood kids. The playset was the fort.

No words can capture John’s life, which his father, Phillip, called “short, but intense.”

“That’s what he was,” he says later, rocking slowly on a glider chair in the family room. “He was an intense person.”

In a way, he’s not surprised John died this way, this intense way. He had no known medical condition, his dad says. He was healthy. He felt good.

The autopsy will be Monday, he says, and he hopes it rules out a congenital illness that could affect the other kids.

He walks to a family photo on the wall — him and Joan and the five kids: Mary, Phillip, John, Mikey and David.

“He’s the middle one; there’s John.”

The father smiles.

“See! He’s got that grin. That grin that just gets him away with murder.”

Football took the meanness out of John, his dad says. He was an angel after practice. But he was the most challenging of the five.

Phillip tells a “classic John story”:

Last fall, early in the season, he made first string. Then the silly kid, the very next game, forgot to bring his uniform! He got knocked down to the fourth string and had to work his way back up.

Thursday afternoon, Phillip got a call from son Mikey, a freshman.

He couldn’t understand Mikey’s words — something about “John” and “the hospital.”

He feared John had been in a car wreck.

Mikey called back again and explained what happened, that John had had a seizure while running sprints.

On the way to the hospital, Phillip says, two words hit him:

John’s dead.

He knew for sure when he got to the ER and saw the nurses crying.

John’s mother, Joan, was in France visiting his older sister, Mary, an exchange student. Phillip planned to pick Joan up in Omaha on Friday evening. The phone reception has been bad, so they haven’t talked much. She was cool and calm, he says.

Because he’s finding it hard even to look things up in the yellow pages, the father says, their oldest son, who’s almost 19, has been taking care of plane tickets and other arrangements.

The father repeats the word “lovable” a lot. Challenging, but lovable. And “fun-loving.”

“I couldn’t stay angry at the kid,” the father continues. “He was not at all ashamed of hugging his mom in public. And I’d think, ‘Would I do that when I was his age?’”

Hopefully my handwriting will be better also

John was to open the letter next spring, his senior year.

When I read this I should be a changed person

He would have been a man.

Goodbye.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.