Inside the bizarre death, beautiful life of Charlotte 49ers basketball star Galen Young
Former Charlotte 49er basketball star Galen Young was many things to his family: A brother, a son, a father, a budding coach and the life of any party.
“Galen was a basketball junkie with a wonderful spirit,” said Elliott Young on Monday in a phone interview about his late brother. “Everyone loved Galen. He had a personality as easy as Sunday morning. He was a fierce competitor on the court and everybody’s best friend off it.”
For four awful hours in Memphis early Saturday morning, Galen Young was also a mystery — one his family desperately wanted to solve.
Where was Galen? They kept asking each other that question, but he never answered his phone.
The family finally did solve that mystery on its own.
They did so, Elliott Young said, by digging through a mountain of rubble after a car randomly crashed into Gladys Young’s house around 2:30 a.m.
Close to 7 a.m. — long after the car was towed, the police left and the driver of that 2008 Mitsubishi Galant that hit the house walked away unhurt — family members found Young’s body.
Buried in the debris.
Gladys Young is Galen’s mother, but she was in a different part of the house asleep and was also unhurt. She didn’t think that Galen was inside her home at the time of the crash, her son said.
Family members hadn’t told the police to look for Galen Young, because they didn’t think he was there in the first place.
“We don’t blame the police for not finding him,” Elliott Young said, “because we didn’t know to tell anybody to look for him. At first, I just thought we were looking at material damage. I was just so thankful he wasn’t in the house. And then — a terrible outcome.”
Galen Young was 45 at the time of his death, a well-remembered Charlotte 49er who former Charlotte basketball coach Bobby Lutz contends was the “best on-ball defender I’ve ever coached.”
According to Elliott Young and an accident report from the Memphis Police Department, this is how Galen Young’s bizarre death unfolded.
Charlotte 49ers star in 1990s
Galen Young, 45, was originally from Memphis. His first name was actually Leslie, but no one called him that. He and his brother Elliott, younger by a year, were standout athletes in the 1990s.
“Everywhere we went, we took a ball,” Elliott Young. “You name a basketball court in Memphis, we played on it.”
Elliott Young eventually became a decorated decathlete and went to Southern Illinois to pursue a track career.
Galen’s basketball talent’s took him first to junior college in Mississippi and then to Charlotte, where he starred for two 49ers teams in the late 1990s.
Both those Charlotte teams made the NCAA tournament, and the 6-foot-6 Young was such a dominant defender during those tourney runs that he became a second-round draft choice of the Milwaukee Bucks in 1999. He would never make an NBA roster, but he played many years overseas in places as far-flung as Australia, Japan and the Philippines.
After basketball ended, Young returned to Charlotte to get his degree in criminal justice and began a basketball coaching career, working as an assistant at two small colleges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he returned to his Memphis hometown to live with his mother, see his family and pursue another coaching job (he had just landed one at a Jackson, Miss., high school that was supposed to start Monday).
“Galen was very sociable,” Elliott Young said. “He had lots of friends and he was a night owl. He’d spend the night at our sister’s house sometimes, or with one of his friends.”
On Saturday, Young returned to his mother’s house, but she had already gone to bed and didn’t know he was there.
“He liked to watch movies on this desktop computer we had in one of the rooms,” Elliott Young said. “So we think that’s what he was doing when the car hit.”
At approximately 2:30 a.m. Saturday, a 2008 silver Mitsubishi Galant crashed into the northwest side of the house at 4598 Horn Lake Road in Memphis. The house has been in the Young family for more than 100 years, Young said. It is of modest size and made of wood with vinyl siding.
The driver of the Mitsubishi, according to the Memphis police report on the accident, was 19-year-old Miracle Rutherford. Her rate of speed wasn’t shown on the report and she couldn’t be reached for comment. The Memphis police said in a tweet that the driver of the car was issued a citation in the accident and that their investigation into Young’s death was ongoing.
After the crash, 69-year-old Gladys Young left the house and gathered outside with her family in the middle of the night. For a while, no one was allowed back in to the Young’s home for fear of a gas leak.
‘Worst phone call in the world’
During that time, Elliott Young went to fetch a truck from the local Toyota dealership where he is a general sales manager, so he could start cleaning up the debris. Other family members were eventually allowed back into the house, Young said, and began cleaning up the wreckage from the accident, one piece at a time.
Occasionally, someone would call Galen Young, trying to let him know what had happened.
And after some of the debris was cleared, they heard something during one of those calls.
A phone was ringing under the rubble. It was Galen’s.
“Still, we hoped he had just left his phone at home and gone somewhere,” Elliott Young said.
As family members kept digging, though, they found their loved one a little after 7 a.m., near the computer chair where he had apparently been sitting, watching a movie on a desktop computer. Someone had to inform Elliott Young, on his way back from the dealership.
“Then I got the worst phone call in the world,” Elliott Young said.
After that, the Memphis police were called again at 7:48 a.m. and returned to the house, this time to investigate a fatality.
In the meantime, Elliott Young holds onto many nice memories, including this one.
Only a week before, he and Galen had gone to a friend’s birthday party. For some reason, and Elliott doesn’t know why, he decided that night to record a conversation between him and Galen.
“I’ve got audio and video,” he said, “45 minutes worth. Talking about basketball, life, competition, everything. It was a great night. We loved each other, you know?”
Galen Young’s funeral arrangements are incomplete. His survivors include his mother Gladys Young, brother Elliott Young, sister Tammy Young, and Galen Young’s 8-year-old twin sons, Ellis and Grayson. A GoFundMe account has been established for the twins’ care.
This story was originally published June 7, 2021 at 6:00 PM.
