Seneca mother who lost son to suicide joins lawsuit vs. governor, IHSA

Lisa Moore isn’t about to let what happened to her son be forgotten and is doing what she can to make sure it doesn’t happen to any other young men and women.

Moore, the mother of a former Seneca High School athlete who committed suicide in October, is one of four parents who on Monday filed a lawsuit in LaSalle County Court against Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois High School Association over the cancellation of high school winter sports.

Michael O’Brien of the Sun-Times was the first to report on the lawsuit.

The lawsuit claims Pritzker’s emergency COVID-19 restrictions on IHSA sports were an “unconstitutional violation” of the four plaintiffs’ right to equal protection under the Illinois constitution. It seeks to have the governor and the IHSA banned from canceling winter sports.

The terrible thing that’s happening to these students is that their lives have been just ripped from them, and while some kids are handling it, there are thousands of kids that are not.

—  Laura Grochocki, the plaintiffs’ attorney

Essentially, the suit claims that the cancellation of high school sports while college and professional sports in this state are allowed to continue is discriminatory and without a rational basis.

In late October, as coronavirus cases surged throughout Illinois, Pritzker and the Illinois Department of Public Health put all medium- and high-risk sports on hold until the spring.

The IHSA tried to defy the order and move forward with the basketball season, which was scheduled to begin with practices Nov. 16, only to have a majority of high schools opt out of the season because of safety and liability concerns.

Laura Grochocki, the plaintiffs’ attorney, believes Pritzker and the IHSA were served with notice of the suit Wednesday. If so, the next move will be to file motions to get it before a judge as soon as possible, perhaps within two or three weeks, seeking a declaratory judgment that will allow prep sports to continue.

“High school sports are being treated very differently, and there is nothing about those sports that makes it inherently more dangerous than other levels,” Grochocki said. “My hope would be that it’s heard soon because people are being harmed, and the point is to try and stop the harm. We don’t want to wait for more bad things to happen.

“The terrible thing that’s happening to these students is that their lives have been just ripped from them, and while some kids are handling it, there are thousands of kids that are not. There are thousands and thousands of kids who rely on sports and activities to get through life. It’s the center of their life. … I’ve had at least 100 parents contact us to be part of a lawsuit. … These four people represent the kind of harm that’s being done to high school students across Illinois, and if we get a positive ruling, it could affect all high school students.”

Trevor Till, a 2020 Seneca High School graduate, participated in cross country, track, drama and band. He had been described by his mother and others as “the ultimate cheerleader, a great kid and a friend to everybody,” including competitors and acquaintances from other schools.

Grochocki said that’s why on Oct. 20, forced by pandemic quarantines to be cut off from sports (he still ran with his friends on the Seneca cross country team last fall) and virtually all of the social interaction that “made him feel worthwhile,” Till took his own life in his dorm room at the University of Illinois in Champaign.

Representatives from a dozen high schools attended his services, many of them by the athletes that Till had befriended on the cross country course or the track, others that he’d met just once at a speech meet.

“It’s only been two months, but the first five weeks, I was lost. Even now, I still can’t look at pictures or see (videos of) him running or singing. It tears at my heart and, for those weeks, I had to remind myself to just breathe,” said Moore, whose son was 18. “But I know Trevor and the kind of person he was, and that was to fight for things he believed in, to stand up for the little guy. He’s just someone who cannot be forgotten, who should not be forgotten, who should still be here. I’m gonna fight for him.

“This is just the beginning. We haven’t seen all the negative effects all this isolation is taking on these kids. It’s scary, and I don’t want anyone else to go through this. It’s just horrific.”