WILDWOOD, Mo. — "He had become just a shell of himself and he would say to me with fear in his eyes, He would say to me, I don't know what's happening to me. I'm so afraid."
Those are the words of Kelli Ewen talking about her late husband in the final years of his life.
"It's devastating. It destroys your entire life," she said.
Todd Ewen was a former St. Louis Blues hockey player who spent more than a decade in the NHL, as one of the league's most aggressive fighters. But off the ice, he was said to be both quiet and funny.
"That's the one thing I really loved about him is that he made me laugh," Kelli said.
But in 2015, at the age of 49, he fatally shot himself.
Despite having all the symptoms of the degenerative neurological disease, CTE, doctors in Toronto who posthumously tested his brain, concluded he didn't have it.
"And I literally fell to my knees. I couldn't believe it," she recalled.
It turned out, the doctors in Toronto were wrong.
Kelli had the brain tissue re-tested by at Boston University and double checked by researchers at the Mayo Clinic and over the weekend we learned that Todd Ewen, did, in fact, have CTE.
Hockey is a physical and sometimes brutal sport but up until now, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman has refused to acknowledge a link between the sport and brain injury.
Kelli Ewen wants that to change.
"There are other guys suffering the same way, I've heard from them," she says. "And I just want to be able for them to get the help that they need."
For the league not to step up and admit to a problem, says Kelli, is to admit they don't care at all about it's players.
"It just makes no sense to me whatsoever," she told us.
