This story appears in the Dec. 28, 2015, issue of Sports Illustrated. To subscribe, click here.
One late summer morning in 2014 in Lodi, Calif., Dr. Bennet Omalu was doing what he does most days. He was methodically dissecting a human body to determine why it had died.
For Omalu, who is 47 years old and the chief medical examiner of San Joaquin County, the act of performing an autopsy is a spiritual and delicate one. He treats each body, including the young Hispanic woman who now lay before him, as if it were still sentient.