Mother crusades for athletic reforms A year after son’s death, questions unanswered at Belfast Area High School

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BELFAST – Losing her 14-year-old son was bad enough, but what haunts Maura Diprete is her belief that he could have been saved.

Joe Diprete-DiGioia, a freshman student-athlete at Belfast Area High School, died while running a cross country meet at a nearby school on Oct. 4, 2003.

This weekend, more than a year later, hundreds of student-athletes will run the same course on which Diprete’s son died – and where he couldn’t be found for more than two hours after he apparently collapsed in tall grass just a few yards from the trail at Troy Howard Middle School.

Whether today’s runners will be safer with the new procedures adopted by Belfast coaches is not clear.

Diprete doesn’t think they will be.

Diprete-DiGioia apparently stumbled off the course about 1.5 miles into the 3-mile race and collapsed. The race in which he competed began about 12:50 p.m. Two more races were run before his absence was noticed, and a coach found him in the tall grass about 3 p.m.

He was pronounced dead on arrival at Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast about 3:30 p.m.

In an interview this week, his mother said a physician at the hospital put the time of death at 30 to 60 minutes earlier, which means that Diprete-DiGioia may have been alive for an hour or more while coaches, race officials, volunteers and family members frantically searched for him.

About 1:30 p.m. that Oct. 4, when the last runner in that race crossed the finish line and Diprete realized her son had not completed the course, she and the boy’s father, Michael DiGioia, alerted coaches. The parents and coaches began searching along the course, but it wasn’t until 3 p.m. that Diprete-DiGioia was found, lying in the 3- to 4-foot-tall grass, not far from the course.

“That was horrible – seeing him right by the trail,” Diprete said. “I came off the trail and saw him lying there. I was horrified he was right there.” He was still warm to the touch, she said.

According to a legal document served to school officials by Diprete’s attorney, the emergency room physician put the boy’s body temperature at 96.6 degrees. “We’ll never know if he was still alive” from 1 to about 2:30 p.m. School officials did not perform CPR on the boy, she said.

Diprete said her son probably died of cardiac arrhythmia. An autopsy showed no structural heart abnormalities.

Belfast coaches and race officials from the Maine Principals’ Association said soon after the death last year that it is not uncommon for runners to fail to appear at a finish line. Runners sometimes twist ankles and limp off to a locker room or team bus or they become ill and stumble into the woods to vomit or recover from cramps.

When Diprete began reflecting on what happened after her son failed to cross the finish line that day, she said, she decided to work to ensure that a similar incident does not occur.

“Generally good and caring people made some tragic errors that day,” she wrote last week in a letter about her son’s death. “Common sense slipped away in the excitement and pressure of a large event.”

The boy was running in an invitational cross country meet at Troy Howard but sponsored by Belfast Area High School and Brewer High School. Some 600 runners competed.

Last year, Jeff Sturgis, assistant executive director of the Maine Principals’ Association, said the circumstances surrounding Diprete-DiGioia’s death would be discussed during the off-season with an eye toward creating a protocol to help avoid a similar tragedy.

This week, Sturgis said he could not comment on the matter because, in April, Diprete served a legal notice of claim in the case. The notice reserves her right to sue MPA, Belfast Area High School and Brewer High School for damages on a negligence complaint sometime in the next year, said her attorney, Jackie Rider of Portland.

Before filing the notice, Diprete attended a meeting with school officials to discuss changes to the procedures coaches should follow when a runner is missing. Diprete concluded that she was not heard at that meeting.

“Walkie-talkies were there, but they weren’t used. The P.A. system was there, but it wasn’t used,” Diprete said. Coaches also failed to question the 100 or so runners who were behind Diprete-DiGioia in the race, she said.

For her part, Diprete donated an automatic defibrillator to the school, which will be on hand at the state meet at Troy Howard today. The defibrillator is used to deliver an electric shock to restart a heart that has stopped beating.

Belfast Area High School Athletic Director Terry Kenniston said many of Diprete’s suggestions about race protocols have been adopted. Among the changes:

. A school nurse has trained four or five staff members to use the defibrillator, and a grant has been sought to pay for more such devices.

. Two-way radio is used by race officials.

. The school uses two all-terrain vehicles to “sweep” the course between races. One of the vehicles can carry an injured runner.

. An adult on a mountain bike follows the last runner on the course, Kenniston said, and the school recruits parents, teachers and coaches to serve as spotters along the way.

“We probably have more spotters than in any race in the state of Maine,” he said.

The school also created a “missing runner” procedure document that is distributed to coaches who bring teams to meets in Belfast.

The procedure calls for coaches to tell runners to report to the next spotter along the course any runner who appears to be injured or ill. The spotter then contacts race officials, who direct first aid response to the runner.

If a runner is missing, two “sweepers” will search along both sides of the course from one direction, while two more search the sides from the other. Runners in the last race will be simultaneously questioned, and the school building, parking lot and nearby YMCA will be searched.

All races will be suspended until a missing runner is found. If the runner is not located after the above procedures are followed, a search party of 20 to 25 people is organized and a more extensive search would be conducted.

Diprete said she waited six months before filing the notice of claim, hoping to see changes made in the race protocols. After six months, she would have lost her right to file, Rider said. SAD 34 Superintendent Bob Young declined to comment on the matter, also citing the notice of claim.

Diprete said the new procedures aren’t enough.

“It just doesn’t prevent it from happening again,” she said. “This isn’t specific enough. I think they’re trying to OK what they did. Something in the protocol should say who does what.”

Still, she acknowledges that the procedure seems an improvement. She would like to see it put in place throughout the state.

Michael DiGioia, Joe’s father, wrote a letter to MPA after his son’s death, suggesting some of the same procedures Diprete should be mandated. Though DiGioia, Diprete and his brother searched for Joe, the father said, once the races ended, it took just 10 minutes to find him.

“There was just too much left up to a panicking father and a panicking mother and a panicking brother,” he said.