On ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown Chris Mortensen reported that Major League Baseball is using the Jovan Belcher tragedy to acquire behavioral profiles that will help enable teams to identify players who may need assistance or an intervention.
Sources stated that Belcher was engaged in an employee assistance program six to eight weeks before killing his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins before turning the gun on himself.
The report states that there is data that shows 80 current or former Major League Baseball players have committed suicide, 54 of them from self-inflicted gun wounds.
With the recent tragedy involving the death of Dallas Cowboys linebacker Jerry Brown dead and nose tackle Josh Brent jailed on intoxicated manslaughter, it is safe to assume that will now be included in the data gathering since it was Brent’s second drunk driving incident dating back to his time in college at Illinois.
Both the NFL and MLB are working together in sharing information using FBI behavioral analysis build better profiles on players in an effort more accurately to identify current and former players who may be in some kind of trouble.
