The Best American Sports Writing 2014(24)

It was around this time that Te’o’s Heisman campaign began in earnest, aided in part by the South Bend Tribune. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s October 1 issue, above the headline “The Full Manti.”

And it was around this time that Manti and his father began filling in details about the linebacker’s relationship with Lennay. Brian Te’o told multiple reporters that the family had never met Kekua; the Te’os were supposed to spend time with her when they visited South Bend, Indiana, for Notre Dame’s Senior Day on November 17. The elder Te’o told the South Bend Tribune in October, “We came to the realization that she could be our daughter-in-law. Sadly, it won’t happen now.”

Lennay Kekua’s death resonated across the college football landscape—especially at Notre Dame, where the community immediately embraced her as a fallen sister. Charity funds were started, and donations poured into foundations dedicated to leukemia research. More than $3,000 has been pledged in one IndieGogo campaign raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Te’o’s story moved beyond the world of sports. On the day of the BCS championship game between Notre Dame and Alabama, CBS This Morning ran a three-minute story that featured a direct quote from Lennay Kekua:





Babe, if anything happens to me, you promise that you’ll stay there and you’ll play and you’ll honor me through the way you play.





CBS also displayed a photo of Kekua several times throughout the piece.

This week, we got in touch with a woman living in Torrance, California. We’ll call her Reba, to protect her identity. She was initially confused, then horrified to find that she had become the face of a dead woman. “That picture,” she told us over the phone, “is a picture of me from my Facebook account.”





Manti Te’o and Lennay Kekua did not meet at Stanford in 2009. The real beginning of their relationship apparently occurred on Twitter, as an encounter between @MTeo_5 and @lovalovaloveYOU, on October 10, 2011. Here’s the moment they first made contact.





@lovalovaloveyou nice to meet u too ma’am



—Manti Te’o (@MTeo_5) October 10, 2011





Lennay Kekua’s Twitter name was @lovalovaloveYOU from 2011 until April 2012, @LennayKay from April until September 2012, and has been @LoveMSMK ever since. Their interactions, by and large, consisted of mild flirting. By January 2012, they were a “couple,” and Te’o sprinkled #LMK (for Lennay Marie Kekua) throughout his Twitter timeline in 2012.

As for what Kekua was tweeting, we have only bits and pieces. Her Twitter was private during most of this time, though various Google caches reveal her ever-changing series of avatars and a handful of Twitpics.

All of those photographs—with one important exception—came from the private Facebook and Instagram accounts of Reba, whom we found after an exhaustive related-images search of each of Lennay’s images (most of which had been modified in some way to prevent reverse image searching). We sent her a number of photographs that had appeared on Lennay’s Twitter account, which is now private but apparently still active. One picture in particular brought Reba to a start. It had been used briefly as @LoveMSMK’s Twitter avatar and later in the background of the page.

That photo hadn’t appeared on the Internet—at least, not to Reba’s knowledge. She had taken it in December 2012 and sent it directly to an old high school acquaintance. The two hadn’t talked since graduation, but the classmate, whom Reba remembered fondly, contacted her on Facebook with a somewhat convoluted request: His cousin had been in a serious car accident, and he had seen her photos before and thought she was pretty. Would she be so kind as to take a picture of herself holding up a sign reading MSMK, to put in a slide show to support the cousin’s recovery? (He didn’t explain what MSMK meant, and Reba still doesn’t know.) Baffled but trusting, Reba made the sign and sent along the photo.

And now here it was on a dead girl’s Twitter profile. After Googling Lennay Kekua’s name, Reba began to piece things together. She called up the classmate. He expressed alarm, Reba told us later, and “immediately began acting weird.” “Don’t worry about it,” he told her. Moments after the phone call, Reba’s picture was removed from the @LoveMSMK Twitter profile. Then, in a series of lengthy phone calls, Reba told us everything she knew about the classmate, a star high school quarterback turned religious musician named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo.





Ronaiah Tuiasosopo comes from a big football family. His father, Titus, played for USC in the late ’80s and early ’90s. One uncle, Navy, played for the LA Rams; another uncle, Mike, coaches the defensive line at Colorado. A cousin from an older generation, Manu, went to Seattle in the first round in 1979; another cousin, Marques, went to Oakland in the second round in 2001. A cousin from a different side of the family, Fred Matua, earned All-America honors at guard for USC and played on several NFL teams, before dying this past August of a heart-related issue. (He was 28.)