PITTSBURGH — For a moment, Mike Sullivan’s voice goes soft. The Pittsburgh Steelers quarterbacks coach is sitting on a bench beside the team’s practice fields when the randomness and strangeness and unfairness of Dwayne Haskins’s death suddenly hits him. His eyes water. He grasps for words.
“Everything was coming in place for him,” he finally says, “and then it tragically ends.”
When the Steelers signed Haskins in January 2021, Sullivan had heard the stories. He knew how in two years Haskins had gone from being Washington’s first-round pick in the 2019 NFL draft to getting released after wasting several chances to be the team’s starting quarterback. He had heard Haskins was unreliable, rarely studying or preparing for games. And yet, for the 15 months Haskins was in Pittsburgh, he had been everything a coach could want: driven, diligent and enthusiastic, a candidate to replace the recently retired Ben Roethlisberger.
“He was zeroing in on the chance to start,” Sullivan says.
Then, in the early morning hours of April 9, Haskins was hit by a dump truck and killed while trying to cross Interstate 595 near the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., airport. He had been working with teammates in Florida for a few days, but months later, some of those players still struggle to make sense of what happened.
The Florida Highway Patrol is expected to release a full report on Haskins’s death soon. For now, the only clues come from a Broward County medical examiner’s report with the blunt and gruesome description of “Dump Truck vs. Pedestrian”: a night out at a club, a rental car with an empty gas tank, an apparent search for fuel while a woman was left waiting in the car. Haskins’s blood alcohol content was 2.5 times the legal limit in Florida, and a urine test showed the drug ketamine was in his system.
Left behind is the memory of a player who seemed poised to change the trajectory of his career.
“I definitely saw a different Dwayne in Pittsburgh,” says wide receiver Steven Sims, who played with Haskins in Washington before coming to the Steelers last season.
Haskins could have been one of the great stories of this NFL season, the first-round washout intent on seizing his second chance. Instead, Sullivan smiles sadly as he talks about the quarterback who regularly visited his office with a laugh, a story and a long list of questions about a game he finally wanted to learn the right way.
A short drive away from the Steelers’ facility, Haskins’s wife of barely more than a year, Kalabrya, talks on the phone from the house they got together high on the hill above the downtown towers and the football stadium. On the walls around her are the framed motivational quotes Dwayne had put up to inspire himself. Before her are the self-help books he had been reading before his death.
“He believed in second chances,” she says. “He believed in redemption, and he wanted to show everyone that.”
Haskins had started for only one season at Ohio State before entering the draft, and there were concerns he wasn’t ready for the NFL. Partly for this reason, then-Washington coach Jay Gruden did not want to choose him with the 15th overall pick but was overruled by owner Daniel Snyder, many familiar with the decision said, because Snyder liked the fact that Haskins, who went to the Bullis School in Potomac, Md., could be a local star.
Granted the No. 7 jersey, the same number worn by Joe Theismann, the franchise’s career passing leader, Haskins stumbled through 13 starts in parts of two seasons, showing glimpses of promise offset by mistakes that perplexed coaches and teammates. He famously wasn’t available to take the last snap of his first victory as a starter because he was taking a selfie with fans in the stands.
Few knew what to make of his blithe, almost silly demeanor, sometimes interpreting his easy smile and constant laughs as a lack of caring. At times, he seemed awed by the NFL. Friends who played the Madden video game with him say he insisted on choosing new teams every day, surrounding himself with stars from around the league, almost as if he couldn’t believe he was playing with them.
He had an obsession with Tom Brady, agonizing to his friend Joey White about what he would say to Brady when Washington played the Patriots his rookie season. “I don’t want to be a fanboy,” he told White. Later, Haskins had a mural painted on the wall of his home gym of him and Brady shaking hands after that game. He told people he dreamed of having a career like Brady’s.
But Haskins’s passion for football never revealed itself in Washington. Ron Rivera replaced Gruden, and the new coaches became equally annoyed with what they perceived a lack of commitment. A week before the end of the 2020 season, Rivera released him.
Some around Haskins wondered whether he was distracted by friends and family in Washington. He was very close to his parents and sister, but many speculated that his father, Dwayne Sr., had too strong of an influence — a suspicion fueled by the Bible verses and messages Haskins Sr. regularly would send to reporters and others around Haskins, which often seemed tailored to comment on whatever controversy surrounded the younger Haskins at the time. Dwayne Haskins Sr. did not respond to a request to talk about his son for this story.
Former Washington cornerback Shawn Springs, who befriended the Haskinses when Dwayne was in middle school and helped the family move to Maryland so Haskins could attend Bullis, says Haskins’s childhood was different from a lot of pro football players’ and that Haskins sometimes felt “like an awkward prep school kid” when around the team.
“His personality may have been misunderstood at times because [his journey was] not always the normal path you think a cool kid should have,” Springs says.
Away from football, Haskins was warm, open and consumed with a desire to help others, even as his NFL career was falling apart. One of his closest recent friends was White, a high school student from Connecticut when they first met, who sells shoes and athletic gear to athletes and musicians. White had reached out to Haskins before the 2019 draft, the way he does to many rising professionals, and Haskins responded not only by purchasing a jacket but by buying more and more clothes and cultivating a relationship.
White came to see Haskins as “a father figure” who tried to help White’s business grow, messaging NFL players he barely knew to tell them about White’s shoes and filming a video in which he picked out a game day outfit during his rookie season.
Var Turner, an acquaintance of White’s, shot that video, and Haskins later befriended Turner, too, having him shoot photos and videos of Haskins’s pandemic workouts and inviting him to his Virginia home, where they sat on couches, played video games and talked about life. He commissioned Turner to be a sort of personal photographer and videographer, upgrading his lenses and urging him to quit a job he hated to pursue photography full time.
“He changed my life,” says Turner, who landed a part-time job shooting game day social media video for the NFL not long after Haskins got him the lenses. “He gave me an opportunity; he gave me hope. I was at the lowest point of my life before I met him.”
Kalabrya and Haskins met through mutual friends March 26, 2020, just days into the pandemic. A former Michigan State basketball player, she didn’t follow football and had no idea who Haskins was. She asked him what he did. He told her he was “God’s prophet.” Something about his answer entranced her. He smiled a lot. His words were kind.
He told her that the moment he saw her it was “love at first sight.” She said she felt the same way about him. She went to his home not far from Washington’s practice facility in Ashburn, Va., and hung out all summer. With the world shut down around them, they talked “15 hours a day.” Their first out-of-the-house date came five months later.
“It was very poetic, and it was beautiful on so many levels,” Kalabrya said of those early weeks together. “We liked spending time so much with each other. I never felt like that with anyone before in my life. It was awesome.”
She wonders why no one around Washington could see the Haskins she saw.
“I feel he was misunderstood because he didn’t bother to explain himself,” she said. “He never cared to clear it up. It wasn’t important to him what the media thought about him.
“Dwayne didn’t have time for misery or negativity.”
Haskins idolized Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin. Even when he was still on Washington’s roster, Haskins would tell Kalabrya he wished he was playing for Tomlin instead. He was excited when Pittsburgh called in January 2021 and seemed in a better place mentally.
A few months after Haskins signed with the Steelers, he and Kalabrya quietly got married. His social circle tightened. According to several people, Haskins and his father stopped speaking regularly around the time he went to Pittsburgh — a rift that apparently lingered, given that Kalabrya and Dwayne’s parents held separate funerals for him.
No one would say what led to the split between father and son. Rick Ellsley, Kalabrya’s Fort Lauderdale attorney, wouldn’t let her answer questions about Dwayne’s parents. The best hint comes from a statement put out by Dwayne’s parents explaining they wouldn’t attend his Pittsburgh funeral because they “have never met or spoken to the wife and didn’t want our son’s funeral service to be the place we met her for the first time.”
Whatever the reason, Haskins appeared to be engaged when he showed up to the Steelers’ practice facility in the early spring of 2021.
“Once I met him it was like, ‘Wow, this guy, he’s got something,’” Sullivan said. “He really comes across as sincere and recognizing his shortcomings and some of the things he wished he had done differently in Washington. Early on, it was clear to me that he was focused on being the best player and the best man that he can be.
“He was very forthcoming. There was never a sense of him [saying], ‘Hey, I got it figured out, Coach.’ He told me: ‘I’m ready to be molded. I’m ready to be led and be the best player I can be … [and] he lived it.”
Sullivan’s office at the Steelers’ facility also serves as the quarterbacks’ meeting room, and Haskins visited almost every day during the two offseasons he spent in Pittsburgh. Sometimes he watched film. Sometimes he studied offenses. Sometimes the two men just talked, not about football but about things going on in Haskins’s life, the books he was reading, the mindfulness apps he had put on his phone.
Haskins confessed he had made mistakes in Washington, admitting that he didn’t prepare and neglected to do the extra work required of quarterbacks.
“He admitted that there were some corners cut, and hindsight being 20-20, he would have done differently,” Sullivan said.
Haskins appeared to enjoy the chance to reset his career, learning behind Ben Roethlisberger while not having the pressure of being the starter before understanding all a quarterback needs to do. He was activated for only one game during the 2021 season, but Roethlisberger’s retirement in January of this year created an opening that Haskins seemed determined to seize, even after the team signed former Chicago Bears quarterback Mitch Trubisky. After a short vacation with Kalabrya at season’s end, Haskins returned to Sullivan’s office quietly studying film and typing into his phone and tablet.
One day, Sullivan’s phone buzzed with a text from Haskins. Attached was a long notes file in which Haskins had analyzed, in extensive detail, every pass he had thrown in the NFL — every preseason and regular season game in Washington and in the previous preseason in Pittsburgh. Sullivan had not asked for this. Haskins had broken down the plays on his own.
But what amazed Sullivan was the detail.
“Bad footwork here,” Sullivan said, running through some of Haskins’s comments. “This was a bad decision. I can’t be greedy. I got to go ahead and not lock my hip with my targets. I got to open my hip up. …”
“It was amazing,” Sullivan concluded.
The Steelers’ informal passing camp in Boca Raton, Fla., not far from Trubisky’s home, was intended to be a casual bonding session before Pittsburgh’s offseason practices began, with workouts during the day and chances to hang out at night.
The night of April 8, with the final workout the next day, several Steelers went out in Miami. According to the medical examiner’s report, Haskins went to a club “possibly in Miami” with a friend identified only as “Joey” (two people with knowledge of the situation said this “Joey” is not Joey White). The two, the report says, “drank heavily,” then got into an altercation “before separating.”
Sometime around 6:30 the next morning, a nurse on her way to work driving west on Interstate 595, close to where the highway passes over Interstate 95, saw a man stumbling on the side of the highway, nearly bumping into her car.
“Something seemed terribly wrong,” the woman says in a telephone interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the memory remains traumatic. “He was kind of swaying around in the road.”
The woman pulled over, got out of her car and turned around to look for the man. She found him moments later, lying in the road, dressed in black pants and a black T-shirt. The autopsy report said he had a women’s black and white jacket under his left arm. Two other motorists had stopped traffic, and she knelt and felt for a pulse. She couldn’t find one. She sensed a crowd gathering. Highway patrol officers quickly appeared.
At 6:47 a.m., the officers pronounced Haskins dead. He was 24, less than a month from his 25th birthday.
She remembers looking down at him, prone on the pavement, stunned by how young he seemed.
“Just a baby,” she thought.
Kalabrya does not talk about the accident; it’s another subject her attorney won’t let her address. But she placed a 911 call from Pittsburgh around the time Haskins was hit, telling the dispatcher Dwayne had called her from his car to say he had run out of gas and was going to look for a station. He promised to call her after he got back to the car but hadn’t. Her subsequent calls to him went unanswered.
She also told the dispatcher that Haskins’s phone gave a location of Marina Mile Boulevard and Southwest 19th Terrace, which meant he had walked more than a mile along the off-ramps connecting the two freeways or wandered through several blocks of a residential neighborhood before climbing onto the roadway.
The medical examiner’s report does not say where officers found Haskins’s car, but it says when they arrived, they found a woman inside. According to the report, the woman told the officers she had been with Haskins since 7 the previous night. Haskins’s friends and teammates say they don’t know who she is or how she came to be in the car.
While the medical examiner’s report quotes a Steelers security official as saying Haskins would drink heavily on occasion, several people who knew him at different times in his adult life say they rarely saw him drink anything at all.
“That wasn’t his style,” Sims says.
Later that morning, as news of Haskins’s death spread, the Steelers who were in Florida gathered at Trubisky’s house, trying to grasp what happened.
In Pittsburgh, Tomlin told his assistant coaches.
“It was very hard to deal with,” Sullivan said. “For the longest time, it was an unbelievable sense of shock and sadness.”
Offseason workouts came, and the Steelers gave Haskins’s locker to another player. All tangible signs of him soon dissipated. Left was only the memory of a player who appeared on the verge of salvaging a broken career — and the tormenting question of how it all ended on a Florida highway.