From the media.
Kathy Earhart, the mother of Amanda Earhart-Savel, said she believes that Jacobs killed her daughter, saying: “He was a dangerous man, and she feared him.”
http://publicbroadcasting.net/kera/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1294029§ionID=1DALLAS, TX (2008-06-06) Plano Police Officer Andre Smith says detectives have part of the information they need to close the case of two bodies found inside a home on Honey Creek Lane early yesterday morning. He says a report from the Dallas County Medical Examiner shows that 35 year old, convicted steroids dealer David Jacobs shot himself, twice.
Smith: There were two self inflicted gunshot wounds to Jacobs: one to the abdomen, and the other to the head.
Officer Smith says detectives are waiting for the Medical Examiner's ruling on 30 year old Amanda Earhart-Savell Jacobs' girlfriend.
Smith: What I can tell you her is that there were multiple gunshot wounds to her.
http://www.kansascity.com/sports/story/653363.htmlJacobs once wanted badly to tell his high-profile story. You could see it in interviews and read it between the lines. Most men in his perilous position would run from reporters and the soul-baring spotlight. Not Jacobs.
Once mastermind of one of the nation's largest steroids networks, he gave the NFL canceled checks and e-mails and text messages and names. He figured to "clean up" sports. Go national. Clear his conscience.
Before his death, ruled a suicide Friday by the Dallas County medical examiner, Jacobs kept a running dialogue with reporters from this newspaper. Last month, he reportedly scheduled a meeting with one from ESPN.com.
But something happened to dull Jacobs' chattiness. Could have been the NFL security detail that spooked him when it showed up at his door unannounced. Could have been the friends who suddenly distanced themselves.
Could have been the prospect of becoming a pariah in the town where he lived.
"If Jacobs lived in New York or even Duluth, Minn., things might have been different," wrote ESPN.com's Shaun Assael, author of Steroid Nation. "But he lived in Plano, Texas. ... A town that was thrown onto the steroid map by the suicide of high school pitcher Taylor Hooton – and remains there thanks to the crusading efforts of his father, Don."
Don Hooton, who started a foundation in his son's name to educate parents about the dangers of steroids, understands what that last paragraph means. After Taylor, depressed after going off steroids, took his own life, Don heard the denials.
"Public officials here wanted to think that our tragedy might have been an exception," Hooton said. "We're kidding ourselves in any community to think that.
"And here we had one of the largest dealers in the country right under our noses."
Or at least that's what the feds say about Jacobs. For his testimony, he got three years' probation last month.
He supposedly turned over damning information on a half-dozen well-known NFL players. The only player he named publicly was former Cowboy Matt Lehr, and Lehr's attorney says that, based on his conversations with authorities, his client won't be indicted.
But if what Jacobs alleged is true, the NFL has a BALCO case on its hands.
Consider the possibilities, and it hardly seems much of a stretch. If you think only bodybuilders and baseball stars and Olympians and racehorses have been on steroids, you haven't walked through an NFL locker room in the last 20 years.
Players are bigger and more ripped than ever. The beneficial aspects of steroids (increased ability to work out, thus building muscle mass) and at least one detrimental side effect (aggressive behavior) both would contribute to success in football. To think that at least some players in the most violent of professional sports wouldn't take advantage of such an edge is naïve, at best.
How come they rarely test positive then? For the same reasons that Olympians and others haven't, because of masking agents.
Jacobs reportedly had information about those agents, including finasteride, used in treatment for hair loss.
Frankly, Jacobs made lots of public allegations, which was part of the problem. Besides counting athletes as customers, he said he sold to police officers in Garland, Richardson, Dallas, Arlington and Plano. He even said a Plano cop stole $4,500 from him during a raid last year.
"One of the feds told me that [Jacobs] was talking a lot more than they wanted him to," Hooton said. "They weren't happy about that at all.
"The last thing they want to see is all this stuff on the evening news."
Sometime in the last month, the message must have gotten through to Jacobs. Three days before the ESPN interview, he canceled with an e-mail that read in part:
"Everyone's getting their big stories, front page headlines and bonuses but I am not getting anything in any way except a guarantee of thousands of people to be extremely pissed off at me for ruining the images of their favorite sport and heroes."
So now that Jacobs is dead, as well as his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Amanda Jo Earhart-Savell, what will be his legacy?
Will he become the reformed sinner who forced the NFL to undergo the same scrutiny that has scarred Major League Baseball?
Or will his allegations fade as the uncorroborated testimony of a dealer with delusions of celebrity?
Hard to say. But everything he once alleged so willingly must now be investigated, and not just for its lurid potential. Whether you believe Jacobs' sad story ended in murder-suicide or something even more sinister, it's a story, like Taylor Hooton's, that shouldn't die with him.
