Three weeks ago, as nurses at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, prepared to remove the cancer from Paul Williams’ colon, they wheeled him into room No. 88 for pre-op. None of them could’ve known how much that meant to one of Demaryius Thomas’ oldest friends.
Williams’ nerves settled, seeing that room. And the longtime high school basketball coach told the nurses the story of his pupil Thomas. Of the young boy he’d met in a gym in Dudley, Georgia, and the smile that changed Williams’ life. Of the man who later told Williams he wanted them to travel across the country and speak to kids about their friendship — a young Black man and an older white coach from Georgia — after he hung up his No. 88 jersey.
Word had already spread through the halls back at Worth County High in Georgia, where Williams now coaches; before his nine-hour operation, an 82-year-old preacher who worked on the custodial staff at Worth County came into his hospital room and prayed.
The man placed his hand on Williams’ hip, right above his tumor.
“I know Demaryius is with you,” the man told Williams.
Four years after the legendary Broncos receiver was found dead in his shower at just 33 years old — due to complications from a seizure disorder, a medical examiner later ruled — the shock of Thomas’ loss still burns through those closest to him. Williams, a man of deep faith, has found himself questioning his God. Thomas’ parents and many friends have been left empty.
This weekend, many of those same people and former Broncos teammates will reassemble in Denver, as the organization honors Thomas with his Ring of Fame induction at the 10-year reunion of the franchise’s Super Bowl 50 team. All are overjoyed at the Broncos’ celebration of No. 88 and honored to attend. But these days will be bittersweet, as dozens of loved ones bring together scattered pieces of Thomas’s beginning and end, still healing from pangs of guilt at a death that’s hard to rationalize.
“It might be a hole that — it’s never filled,” longtime friend Warren McLendon said, speaking personally. “And it’s OK. Because we know, at least it’s filled with the memories.”
They remember, from Denver to Georgia. Former Broncos tight end Virgil Green remembers heading down to a nearby deli to pick up lunch orders for the team, and Thomas slipping him cash to pay, unbeknownst to the rest of the locker room. Former head coach Gary Kubiak remembers Thomas walking into his office countless times to ask if he could host a family with a sick child at practice. Former Denver receivers coach Tyke Tolbert remembers his daughters always baking Thomas a yellow cake with chocolate icing on his birthday, and Thomas barking at teammates: “Don’t touch my cake!”
“At the end of practice,” Tolbert said, “everybody would have some cake.”
On Saturday, the team will unveil Thomas’ bronze statue at their Ring of Fame Plaza. Heading in, his mother, Katina Smith, just hopes her son’s bust features his smile.
“That smile of his, it’s healed a lot of hearts,” Smith said. “It gave hope to a lot of people that felt hopeless.”
Many of those hearts are back, still mending from the grief. Everyone’s tried to come to their own terms, or understanding, of how Thomas died — a man who never had any history of seizures before football, Smith said. Some who knew him best told The Denver Post they believe it was the lifetime of hits. Some believe it was a lifetime of trauma, too. But it’s still hard to comprehend, as Broncos teammate Tyler Polumbus said, how Thomas went from being Superman to being gone in a few short years.
“I’m just still shocked, and in disbelief,” former Broncos tight end Vernon Davis said. “I feel like I don’t have enough answers. Like, I wasn’t given a lot of the specifics as to what really happened. Was it a seizure? Was it CTE?
“What exactly was it,” Davis continued, “that caused him to die in that moment?”
Even those who hurt the most told The Post they don’t have any anger toward football, the mechanism that transformed a kid known as Bay Bay into the legend of DT. Many struggle with blaming themselves, keying in on their own choices that shaped a man who had a well of love to give — and little trust he’d receive it back.
Because in the end, the only person who knew Demaryius Thomas was going to die, loved ones believe, was Demaryius Thomas.
A mother
Still, Katina Smith asks herself why she didn’t take the deal.
Decades later, after a 16-year stint in prison, she loves to hear stories of her son’s rise in Denver. She also still burns with anger at herself. Others got to spend years with her son that she didn’t.
“Every day,” she said, sobbing, in early October. “Every day is hard.”
They came before dawn in March 1999 to the motor home where Smith and her children stayed with her ex-husband. An 11-year-old Thomas could see the lights, red and blue hues spiraling through the windows. He could hear the battering ram smashing down the front door. Officers dragged Smith out of her bed, his mother begging to put some clothes on, unable to convince them she didn’t know anything about the drug money stashed in her home.
Eventually, she asked if she could walk her son to the school bus.
Thomas’ classmates’ faces were plastered to the windows of the bus, staring at the fleet of cop cars parked in the yard. Thomas’ own face drained of life, Smith remembered. She looked at her son and his sister, Tonecia, and told them to stick together.
“I love you,” Smith told them. “I’ll see you soon. Do good in school.”
Smith’s mother, Minnie Pearl Thomas, was running a crack cocaine distribution ring in Georgia, and Smith was offered two chances at a reduced sentence if she’d testify against her mother. Smith agonized, knowing she could be back for her kids sooner. But she couldn’t turn on her mom, she decided.
Thomas didn’t understand why, Williams said. He took up the bass in high school, and took up the tuba, and played three sports. Anything to channel the pain, as Smith reflected, of believing his mother didn’t choose him. Thomas didn’t see his mother in the real world for a decade, until he visited her in prison in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2009, when his Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets played at Florida State.
That year, Smith’s son led the Atlantic Coast Conference in receiving yards and grew into the Broncos’ first-round pick. He and former Tech teammate Calvin Johnson trained together in the summer, and the Detroit Lions superstar saw an indestructible 6-foot-3, 225-pound machine nibbling on his heels. Within four years as a Bronco, Thomas grew into an All-Pro wideout, a receiver that members of the franchise knew always wanted the ball and played through any pain.
“If you could build a character in Madden to play wide receiver,” former Broncos teammate Polumbus said, “that was Demaryius Thomas.”
Smith only saw her son’s stardom from newspaper clippings, taping them up in her locker at the correctional facility in Tallahassee. From 2012 to 2017, Thomas played in 96 of a possible 96 regular-season games. Later on, his mother learned he played most of his career with pain in his hip. She also learned her son suffered so many concussions that he’d lost count.
“I’ve asked myself, ‘If I didn’t go to prison, would DT have been still…?’” Smith said. She cut the final word off. “As hard as he was on himself to push himself to make it, so he would have a better life than what we lived.”
In 2015, she crafted a plea for a presidential pardon without any legal help and received a sentence commutation from then-President Barack Obama. That July, she called Thomas in ecstasy: “I’m coming home!”
Several months later, the Broncos played the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 50, and Smith watched her son play in person for the first time. He had just one catch for 8 yards, and withstood a huge hit from Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly. Still, when the Broncos downed the Panthers 24-10, Smith lay on the field in Santa Clara, California, and bathed in a sea of yellow confetti.
Thomas put his Super Bowl 50 hat on Smith’s head. Her cheeks grew sore from smiling.
Soon, though, the stadium lights at Levi’s Stadium began to bother her son, and he wandered inside.
“You OK?” Smith asked her son.
“I got a bad headache,” Thomas said.
A mentor
Still, Paul Williams asks himself why he left.
One day, a twentysomething Williams was short a player for his weekly pickup runs. Begrudgingly, he wandered over to a 9-year-old boy who was always shooting around during their games. “If you mess up,” Williams told him, “I’m playing with four people.” The kid just smiled and didn’t say a word.
On one of the game’s first plays, Williams tossed the ball to the boy, flashed off a pick-and-roll, and found the rock deposited perfectly into his hands for a layup.
He turned back down the floor, and a young Thomas flashed his trademark ear-to-ear grin.
“Like the happiest kid in the world,” Williams remembered.
Thomas’ mom and grandmother always cheered in the stands. But one day, a couple of years later, Williams arrived at the gym to find Thomas shooting by himself. “Where’s my fan club?” Williams asked. Thomas got quiet.
It was one of the only days Williams didn’t see him smile.
When Smith and her mother went to prison that day in 1999, Thomas’ father, Bobby, was on deployment in the military; Thomas went to stay with his aunt. Eventually, Williams took a job as the basketball coach at West Laurens High in Dexter, Georgia, where Thomas later came up. And Williams took Thomas to the library every day to try to talk.
Thomas never talked about what happened. So Williams walked him through his goals and his future in basketball. When Thomas hit high school, Williams gave him a 15-pound medicine ball one summer to carry everywhere he went. In P.E. class, Thomas showed up with a weighted vest, ankle weights and that medicine ball, and he did 100 box-jumps over a bench. Someone called him Robocop.
In Thomas’ senior year, Williams was offered a job that paid more money three hours south, at Camden County High. So Williams pulled together his team in the locker room at West Laurens and told them he was taking it.
“You joking?” a teenage Thomas asked him, sitting in his wooden cubby.
“Nah,” Williams said.
Thomas tucked his knees into his chest and started crying. Tears turned to sobs. Sobs turned to hollers.
His family thought he’d go to school for basketball. It was Thomas’ first love. But Williams left, and Thomas stopped talking to him and discovered football, and discovered he was better at it.
Williams is still haunted by the thought that if he hadn’t gone to Camden County, maybe Thomas would have never played football. And maybe that could’ve saved him.
“I have it every day — like it’s my fault,” Williams said. “I mean, I do.”
He and Williams eventually mended their relationship, and grew so close that Thomas opened a bank account, deposited some of his Broncos earnings, and told Williams and his wife, Lori, to use the money to buy supplies or gifts for needy kids in the Georgia school system. No questions asked.
Still, at times, when Thomas caught up with Williams, he’d suddenly look at his old coach and mutter a variation of the same few words: “You left me.”
“I blame myself every day for that,” Williams said. “Because — and another thing, I worked him so hard, that it was like, I would train him less and love him more. And that’s hard to say.”
One day after he retired in 2021, Thomas called Williams out of the blue at his home in Dudley. Their conversation ended, and Thomas told Williams he loved him, like he so often told friends. Williams tossed him a “love you, too.”
“See, that’s your problem,” Thomas told him. “On the phone, you always say, ‘Love ya.’”
Williams was struck. He joked to Thomas about needing to be a hard-nosed dad. His kids were nearby.
“I know where you livin’,” Thomas told him. “Ain’t nothing but squirrels and birds out there where you livin’. Ain’t nobody worried about you being soft.”
“I love you, Demaryius,” Williams finally said.
“Yup,” Thomas replied. “The world is perfect now.”
That was the last time they spoke.
A companion
Still, Bianca Stewart asks herself why she didn’t marry him.
When they first met at Georgia Tech, Thomas sat in her dorm. He didn’t say a word. He just sat at the computer. Stewart thought it was cute, in a way. Her mother asked her who this guy was that she was dating. “I don’t even know,” Stewart said.
They were together, off and on, for the entirety of Thomas’ rise to stardom. He was her backbone. He wanted to have children. But he didn’t want to get married, Stewart remembered, due to a general disbelief in the institution of marriage. She didn’t want to have kids until she was married. They fought. Thomas got jealous. Silly stuff, Stewart thinks now.
“Now that we’re here, and he has no one to carry on his legacy,” Stewart said, “that is the most devastating part of all that, for me.”
They had separated for a time, with Stewart living in Los Angeles. Then in 2021, Thomas sent Stewart a video from the Ring camera on his doorbell.
She watched him walk out the door of his house, glance over his shoulder and start spinning. And spinning. He lost his balance and went stiff. He tumbled to the ground without breaking his fall.
“To me,” Stewart said, her voice trembling, “it looked like he was possessed.”
She started sobbing and immediately booked a flight to Georgia.
Thomas’ first seizure came in 2019, friend Warren McLendon said, when he was still with the New York Jets. They came intermittently over the next couple of years. He eventually retired from football in the summer of 2021. He struggled to remember conversations, Williams said, and once told his friend that he had woken up with his pillow soaked in blood. Still, he only revealed tiny snapshots of the picture to others.
Eventually, he couldn’t hide it from Stewart.
They went to a local coffee shop, Thomas collapsed and Stewart had to drag him back to the car. He had five seizures in one month, McLendon said. Stewart remembers Thomas waking up in the hospital, crying, Stewart by his side. He told her to go. She told him she wasn’t leaving. Sometimes, Thomas told her that her husband was going to hate her, Stewart recalled, because she wouldn’t ever be able to get rid of him.
“He would say things like that,” Stewart said, “that I look back on now and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah. He knew he was not going to be there.’”
To the end, Thomas was terrified, Stewart said. To the end, he fought. He bought a hyperbaric chamber for his house, and saw doctors for body work three or four times a week. One day, he sent a video of himself working out to Stewart. He told her he was going to play again.
Two days later, police found Thomas dead in his shower.
In 2022, researchers at Boston University revealed Thomas had Stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy — commonly known as CTE — a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma common among NFL athletes. Bobby Thomas remembers those researchers telling the family that a corner of Thomas’ brain was “pretty much dead.” Katina Smith went numb and didn’t ask many more questions.
“I was just like, this can’t be,” Smith said. “This can’t be. Something that he loved so much — this can’t be something that had played a part.”
In the years since, through the grief, everyone has arrived at their own determinations.
Many believe Thomas’ death was tied to football. A select few, who were there in the final days, paint a fuller picture. Thomas was constantly stressed. He’d stopped answering his phone, exhausted with the number of calls he got from voices in his life asking for money. His body was in constant pain. His mind was foggy, his parents recalled.
“My feeling about it, because we don’t know?” McLendon said. “I think he was tired.”
Stewart can hardly watch football these days. She went to a game a couple of weeks back at SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles and shivered at the crack of helmet on helmet. Still, she will never blame football. Because football is who Thomas was.
Instead, she — and everyone — carries their own guilt. Thomas stopped responding to Williams two months before his death, as family told his beloved coach that Thomas simply didn’t want Williams to see him struggling. Williams still wishes he had been there. Parents Katina and Bobby only knew so much before the fact. They still wish they’d been with their son that day. Stewart was on a brief trip in Los Angeles and will always wish she’d never left.
“He felt like he was there for every single person in his life, and when he was going through the worst possible thing in life that he could possibly go through, that (he felt like) he had no one,” Stewart said.
“And that breaks my heart.”
A city
On Tuesday afternoon at the Denver Broncos Boys & Girls Club, education specialist Malcinia Conley pointed to an old photo of the late Thomas with several Denver youth. This one works here now, she gestured, pointing at one kid. This one’s still around.
Then she pointed to Thomas’ smile and smiled herself at the memory of a man who’d come in around Christmas in a Santa costume and hand out gifts.
“The kids were getting something, but also if the families needed something — he made sure,” Conley said. “… If it was sheets, whatever it was that they needed. Towels, whatever it was.
“He was a giving heart,” Conley continued, a few words later. “He’ll be forever imprinted in my heart, because of what he did.”
Thomas began repeating a saying later in life: “One love.” Many can’t shake that love, ripped away so unexpectedly. Williams took a new job in a new county in Georgia, sold his dream house, and packed up heaps of his Thomas memorabilia and left it in the middle of the floor. Father Bobby Thomas grew so depressed that he had to check himself into a mental health facility for a time. Stewart feels empty.
Some have leaned into their faith, searching for answers. Williams pointed out that Thomas was born on Dec. 25 and died at 33 years old, the same rough age many religious scholars believe Jesus Christ was when he died. Stewart was in her car recently, and without pressing any buttons, one of Thomas’ favorite songs — Tevin Campbell’s “Can We Talk” — started playing.
Thomas always told him that he’d haunt her when he died, she said, laughing.
Many of his family members said they were nervous to return to Empower Field at Mile High this weekend for the celebration of the Broncos’ Super Bowl 50 team. Stewart didn’t know if she could watch the game. But none wanted to miss it. This became Thomas’ calling. This is catharsis for his loved ones, too.
Smith asked The Post to relay a message to the Broncos’ fanbase.
“I would like — and I know DT would agree as well — to let them know that they are appreciated, that they are loved, and that I see DT through each and every one of them,” Smith said. “Because they shared their memories or their pictures with him with me, and that has helped me in my grieving process.”
Former Super Bowl 50 teammates look forward to swapping stories about the old times, and about DT. Family members and friends look forward to seeing his legacy cemented in Denver forever, in the Ring of Fame. They are united in grief. They are united in love for him. One love.
“I know this is gon’ be a big moment,” Williams said. “I think everybody will see a sign that Demaryius is watching. I don’t know what it’s going to be.
“A lot of times,” Williams continued, “I try to look in the clouds and see if I see something. But I never do.”
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