Galen Young’s family wants ‘justice’ after bizarre death, and now there’s an indictment
A grand jury in Tennessee has indicted a 19-year-old woman on vehicular homicide charges that stemmed from an accident in June 2021 when her car plowed into a house in Memphis, killing former Charlotte 49ers basketball star Galen Young.
Young, who family members said was watching a movie at 2:45 a.m. on a desktop computer in the house’s front room, was scheduled to drive to Jackson, Miss., the next day to begin a high school coaching job he was excited about.
Instead, he died at age 45.
“We think about Galen every day,” Tamera Young, Galen’s older sister, said in an interview. “The phone call about the indictment was one we had been waiting for anxiously. Nothing can bring him back. But we do want justice.”
Originally, because so much of the house had collapsed due to the accident and there was fear of a gas leak, Young’s body wasn’t discovered by police. The two-bedroom frame house was his mother’s, and he had returned to it late at night, after she had gone to sleep. So she didn’t know to look for him. It was only the next morning, when family members began clearing the debris in the early morning daylight, that Young’s body was found.
Miracle Renee Rutherford was indicted by the Tennessee grand jury Tuesday but remains free on a $30,000 bond. Her arraignment date has not been set. The grand jury’s indictment alleged that she drove recklessly and created a substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury.
“She needs to know the seriousness of her crime and be held accountable for it,” Tamera Young said. “There are no winners in this, and nothing that takes place in the court system will give us Galen again. But the life she took was important to a lot of people.”
Young was a standout defensive specialist for the Charlotte 49ers for two years in the late 1990s, a junior-college transfer who helped catapult two Charlotte teams into the NCAA tournament. Former Charlotte coach Bobby Lutz said that Young was the “best on-ball defender I’ve ever coached.”
A second-round NBA draft pick in 1999, Young didn’t end up making an NBA roster but played numerous years overseas in Japan, Australia and the Philippines. He left behind twin 9-year-old sons, Grayson and Ellis, and a GoFundMe account has been established for their benefit.
