MINI TRUE CRIME ROUNDUP: An Epstein survivor speaks out, student athletes worked to death and sextortion scams turn fatal

**Sharlene Rochard** (0:04)
I started modeling when I was 12 years old, and like so many young girls, I dreamed of traveling the world and building a successful career, and modeling gave me incredible opportunities, but it also exposed me to environments where young people weren't always protected. So Jeffrey Epstein understood those vulnerabilities, and he used Promises Opportunity, Influential Connections, and access to gain trust to exploit children.

**Lauren Barry** (0:34)
This is a True Crime Roundup from The On Deadline Podcast. We explore crime stories reported on by Audacy's radio newsrooms across the country. I'm your host, Lauren Barry. This week, we're focusing on crimes that target children, adolescents, and young adults. Crimes that are often overlooked. These aren't grisly murder cases. They're incidents that often happen in a pattern, seemingly right before our eyes.
Young athletes pushed beyond their limits until they die. Curious teens extorted to the point where they take their own lives. Jeffrey Epstein's systemic abuse of girls. That voice you heard at the top of the show belongs to model Sharlene Rochard. She's an Epstein survivor. We'll hear more from her, as well as from Kansas City journalist Sam Zeff, on a trend that's been claiming the lives of student athletes. And we'll also hear from crime and terrorism expert Brad Garrett on sextortion scams that have been leading to teen suicides.
Over the past 26 years, more than 20 Division I college football players have died from exertion-related illnesses suffered during a workout or practice. That's according to an analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland. The Howard Center said that coaches rarely face repercussions for these deaths. But then, something happened this week. A former strength and conditioning coach at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, was charged Monday in the death of a freshman football player who collapsed during training. Sam Zeff of KCUR in Kansas City wrote about a similar death back in 2019
19-year-old football player Braden Bradforth from New Jersey died from exertional heat stroke after just one practice in Kansas City. Zeff joined Dana Wright and Sam Stevie III of the Dana & Parks Show out of Audacy Station KMBZ in Kansas City this week to discuss this disturbing pattern of student-athlete deaths.
First, here's Dana and Sam's discussion of the Bucknell case.

**Dana Wright** (3:10)
It's important to me that we update this story because I believe this is the first time we are seeing criminal charges against a coach for the death, the preventable death of an athlete. Sent this to Sam last night. I said, here we go from the Associated Press. A former strength and conditioning coach at Bucknell University has been charged in the death of a football player who collapsed during training and then died. Calvin CJ. Dickey Jr. was a freshman training in July of 2024 at the university in Pennsylvania when Mark Colbus told him and other football players to do 100 up-downs. I'm going to stop there because when we get to my interview with the journalist who's covered these deaths for us locally, some of these deaths involved something called up-downs.
All of the deaths have happened during the very first practices of the year when it's 110 degrees outside.

**Sam Stevie III** (4:23)
Up-downs are a very typical starting conditioning thing. I say starting not in the, you're building up your conditioning, but when you first hit the football field for those early practices, they're just trying to see how hard you're willing to push.
And they're incredibly difficult. Think like a burpee without the push-up.

**Dana Wright** (4:41)
Yep, he told CJ Dickey and all of the other football players to do 100 up-downs along with full body plank drills.
Dickey also happened to have a sickle cell trait, a medical condition that we know increases the risk of serious injury or death following extreme exertion. Some of the local cases involved athletes who happened to have sickle cell. Some of them didn't. Some of our local cases involved athletes that had just gotten here from different elevations, different temperatures. Some of them didn't. Dickey was recruited to play lineman positions at the university.
He started struggling and passed out according to the attorney general's office. Colbus was the only coach present at the time. Dickey was taken to the hospital and died two days later. An autopsy found that his death was caused by the exercises along with that sickle cell trait, body weight, and something called exertional rhabdomyelosis, a rare but life-threatening condition in which your muscles literally start breaking down from over-exertion. I also want to mention here that in so many of our local cases where we have lost young athletes, they are linemen. They are almost exclusively the big guys, the big guys in training who die.