Kwesi Adofo-Mensah first saw Khyree Jackson at the Senior Bowl last year. The Minnesota Vikings need cornerback depth, and Jackson caught his eye while doing one-on-one red-zone drills. “He had a penchant for commentary, let’s say,” Adofo-Mensah said with a wry smile. “The player that he was playing against didn’t seem to be having very much fun, but I think Khyree was.”
Pass-game coordinator Daronte Jones also met with Jackson in Mobile, Ala., and Brian Flores prioritized him in pre-draft sessions.
“You fast forward to top-30 visits when he’s sitting in my office,” said Adofo-Mensah. “I ask a lot of the guys the same question to kind of break down some of the barriers that can happen in those environments and really get to see what’s inside their soul, what kind of things they value, how they were raised.
“And he’s talking me through his favorite song by Major Nine. He said something to me that ultimately helped lead to why we wanted to bring him in this building, but just speaks a lot to how he was brought up.
“He said, ‘Kwesi, there’s no wishes in this life. You get out of life what you put into it.’”
The Vikings drafted Jackson in the fourth round despite having limited draft capital this year. They had traded pick No. 11, a fourth-round pick (No. 129), and a fifth-rounder (No. 157) to trade up to No. 10 and draft J.J. McCarthy. Then they traded pick No. 17, a 2024 fifth-round pick (No. 167), and a third- and fourth-round pick next year to move up and take Dallas Turner. Jackson was their next pick after their first-round selections.
“He had a very, very good spring and was really looking forward to coming back to training camp and being well on his way on that path to having a big impact on our team for this year,” Kevin O’Connell said. “So, just some of my personal dialogue with him and the work he was putting in throughout the summer, you just knew he was going to come back and do that. So, ultimately, a tragedy.”
Jackson took a unique path to the NFL. He attended five schools and three junior colleges. At one point, Jackson quit football and worked at a Harris Teeter supermarket and at Chipotle. However, an impromptu call from a coach at Fort Scott Community College in Kansas reignited his football dream. He later played for Alabama and Oregon before the Vikings drafted him.
O’Connell was on the West Coast when he received an early-morning phone call informing him that Jackson and two of his high school teammates, Isaiah Hazel and A.J. Lytton, had been killed in a car accident. There are still no charges in the three-car crash that ended Jackson’s life, but investigators believe “alcohol may have been a contributing circ*mstance in the crash.”
Multiple coaches and colleagues reached out to O’Connell with their support and condolences. Still, there are no concrete answers after a 24-year-old and his friends perish in a car accident.
“It’s one of those things where I think it is a wake-up call in a lot of ways that we are not guaranteed another day on this earth at any point in time,” said O’Connell. “There’s not one player in that locker room that probably didn’t think about at some point in time in their grieving process, just how unfair to Khyree and his family that this was, and what would that have been like or ‘Could that have been me?’-type of questions.”
The Vikings will honor Jackson by leaving his locker room in the facility unused, and they won’t assign his No. 31 to anyone this season. They will give players helmet decals and pins to staff members and apply honorary stencils to the practice fields. Ownership is also contributing $20,000 to their funeral expenses and will pay his $827,148 signing bonus to his estate. The coaches have also worked to connect players to psychologists and therapists to help them in the grieving process.
“We’ll continue to honor Khyree,” said Adofo-Mensah. “I know I’ve lost a father early, a close friend in college at a young age, and how I honored them. We’ll all honor Khyree by the memories we have of him. [We’ll] think and laugh and smile about what he might have said or what he might have did, how we live our lives, how we smile, how we live with joy, how we work hard, how we approach our craft. That’s how we’ll honor him on a day-to-day basis.”
They’re doing the right thing. The Vikings are taking care of their players and staff, mentally, and Jackson’s family financially while providing reminders of his presence every day. They will think of him throughout the peaks and valleys of the season. He’ll have a presence despite his absence. However, it usually takes a year for people to process grief. They’ll go through camp, the season, and the offseason without him. And come this time next year, it’s hard to think he won’t still be on their minds.
Tom Schreier
Tom Schreier is the founder and proprietor of Zone Coverage. He created Zone Coverage with the goal of mixing new age media with old-school journalism. His goal was to create an economically sustainable platform for sports content for Minnesota fans. Before Zone Coverage, Tom wrote for Bleacher Report and Yahoo! Sports before joining 105 The Ticket in 2014.
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