BOSTON — When David Gove returned from the rink that day in November 2012 to his home in Marstons Mills on Cape Cod, he opened the door and stooped down to play with his cherished beagle Bauer, as was his daily custom. When he entered the kitchen, his fiancée Katie Gannon rounded the corner, with both hands held behind her back.

Pick a hand, she told him.

He gestured toward her right.

It didn’t matter which hand he chose. Gannon was clutching a positive pregnancy test in both, fool-proofing a way to tell Gove the couple would be expecting their first child.

From that day on, Gove would kiss her belly each night. A former Western Michigan University standout and Hobey Baker finalist who went on to play in the NHL, earning a Stanley Cup ring with the Carolina Hurricanes, Gove was the perfect partner to experience pregnancy with. He spoiled Gannon with flowers and ice cream and promised to gain weight with her, jutting out his stomach to show her they had matching “bumps.” When the pair found out that they were having a son, the doctor had to ask Gove to stop jumping up and down so he could get an ultrasound picture of the baby.

His reaction, Gannon says, was so quintessentially Dave — childlike in his boundless energy and enthusiasm and utterly overjoyed. It didn’t take long before Gove began fantasizing that his boy would one day play hockey.

Cullen arrived in September of 2013, and before long he and Gove were inseparable. Best buds. Same cheeky grin, same infectious personality. But while the birth of his son brought Gove an overwhelming sense of joy, it also brought an unrelenting fear. It was all-consuming and kept him awake at night, leaving him ragged and distraught.

Ultimately, he shared that fear with Gannon:

“I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through.”

Gove met with law enforcement in 2014 and told them that he had been abused as a youth hockey player, sexually assaulted by a coach for years.

He had harbored that secret since he was a young teenager, afraid he would be disbelieved, and that it would dash his dreams of reaching the NHL. But Gove could no longer stay silent. He was terrified that if he did not speak up something similar would happen to another child, perhaps his own.

Detective Michael Sullivan, a 12-year veteran of the Boston Police Department who is part of the Crimes Against Children task force, worked on Gove’s case. In Gove, Sullivan found a witness who was “credible” and “engaging.”

“To come forward as an adult survivor is a courageous decision for anyone who has gone through that,” Sullivan says. “Dave came forward to protect other kids.”

Gove was 13 years old when Robert G. Richardson, an influential coach in the Boston area, helped place Gove on a prestigious local select youth hockey team. According to court documents, Gove said that is when the abuse began.

Richardson coached at several prominent universities in the Northeast and was a former NHL scout for the Dallas Stars and Calgary Flames. He was regarded as someone with connections and the ability to guide young players to the elite programs in the area, kids like Gove, a promising talent from the Cape from a single-parent home.

“The defendant invited the victim to spend several nights each week at the defendant’s home in Dorchester. It was there — in the bedroom they shared — that the defendant began abusing the boy sexually,” according to a summary statement included in the case file. The alleged abuse was said to have taken place from 1990 until 1994.

In those documents, first reported by the Boston Globe in August, Gove told authorities that Richardson raped him, forcing him to perform anal intercourse. It was not the first time accusations of sexual abuse had been made against the coach. He had been tried on similar charges in 2005 and was acquitted.

Multiple attempts to reach Richardson, 64, for this story were unsuccessful. He did not answer the door at his condo in Dorchester, nor did he respond to a letter left in his mailbox. Calls to his residence and emails went unreturned.

Gove, an undersized but skilled forward, was a member of the Carolina Hurricanes’ “Black Aces” during the team’s Stanley Cup Championship run in 2006. (Mike Stobe /Getty Images)

On September 30, 2015, the Grand Jury for Suffolk County returned a three-count indictment against Richardson for the rape of a child under the age of sixteen. Though Gove’s identity was not made public at the time, his family has since asked that his name be revealed in hopes that his story will help others.

It is not uncommon, according to Sullivan, for adult survivors of sexual abuse to develop substance abuse problems. Gove was no exception.

He dabbled with prescription pills following a career-ending neck injury in 2008. And, in the years after he contacted police about the alleged abuse, his drug use increased. Without hockey as a daily refuge, he often felt rudderless.

“He was such a happy-go-lucky kid. That’s why it kills me (now) to know the demons he was battling,” says Arizona Coyotes assistant coach Scott Allen, who coached Gove with the ECHL’s Johnstown Chiefs. “It absolutely kills me.”

Gove was reinvigorated when the Penguins organization asked him to coach the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers in 2015 — he felt he had found his new career path — but it didn’t stop his drug use.

Gove asked around the rink for extra pills — from players, trainers and visiting teams — and would sometimes pass out on the bus ride home and be difficult to wake. Ultimately, players went to management, and Nailers owner Don Rigby and Penguins assistant general manager Jason Botterill staged an intervention. With the Nailers in the second round of the playoffs, Gove took a leave of absence. The Penguins continued to pay his salary, and Rigby paid for his stay in a rehab facility in Ohio.

When Gove emerged from rehab, he looked “amazing,” according to his family and friends. But he had begun a relationship with a fellow rehab patient that concerned those around him (Gannon did not find out about this relationship until after his death). And in the months that followed, as his date to testify against Richardson approached, Gove started using heroin, a cheaper alternative to pills.

Meanwhile, scheduling issues twice postponed the trial, the latter of which caused the date to be pushed from March 13, 2017 to June 5, 2017.

In January of 2017, Gove was admitted to a Pittsburgh hospital with an infection from intravenous drug use and diagnosed with endocarditis, a common heart infection among heavy drug users. Following his discharge, Gove entered a respite care facility in Pittsburgh where he could get medical attention and monitoring.

Even those closest to Gove didn’t know the extent of his problem. His sisters, Kim and Kristen, who still live on Cape Cod, would only learn the extent of his drug use later.

Gannon says the stress of the approaching trial caused his usage to increase.

“It was really tough and isolating,” Gannon says. “Revisiting all the details (for him), I think it started to push things up heavier.”

Gove’s best friend from childhood Chris Ferreira says he spoke with Gove in February and tried to assure him he was doing the right thing in coming forward. Gove expressed concern about the backlash he’d face testifying against Richardson.

“It wasn’t so much facing Bob,” Ferreira says of Gove’s concerns. “It was more what people would think of him.”

On Monday, April 3, 2017, Kristen talked with Gove and felt he didn’t sound right. Something was off. She tried calling him multiple times over the next day and a half, but he couldn’t be reached.

On April 5, 2017, two months before Gove was set to testify, he was found dead of an apparent heroin overdose.

“There was so much in his mind,” Kristen says. “The drugs, he just wanted to wash it all away.”

Gove’s death left the DA’s office without its key witness in the case against Richardson. No victim, no case.

“The trial team was devastated when they got the news. Putting the case aside entirely, his life was cut suddenly and tragically short,” DA’s office spokesperson Jake Wark told The Athletic via email, adding that the DA’s office was gutted to hear “that he died alone and far from home.”

The last page of the case file of Commonwealth v. Robert G. Richardson reads: As a result of the death of the victim in this case, the Commonwealth is unable to sustain its burden of proof at trial. The Commonwealth is, therefore, exercising its discretion in terminating the prosecution of this case.

Says Sullivan, the police detective: “It’s frustrating that Dave and his family and his friends didn’t have their day in court. It’s frustrating to see a young man, with a son, who was so talented, who displayed so much courage to come forward to protect others, die so young.”

Gove would have turned 40 next month.

“We could have helped each other.”

That’s what gnaws at Chris Weiss as he lays on a nondescript hospital bed, watching a rerun of “Supernatural” in a medical rehab facility in Worcester, some 45 miles from the courtroom in which Gove would have testified. After a few moments, he slips on the flannel-lined slippers on the floor and draws back the curtain on the window of his room. After seeing the bleak visage of worn-down row homes, alleys and power lines below, he closes them again.

Weiss’ room is sparse, but he’s grateful that his state health insurance affords him this, a sterile corner room on the fifth floor. On the nightstand beside Weiss’ bed sits a foil-covered chocolate bunny and a jar full of gummy candies, leftovers from a friend’s Easter visit the previous weekend. And there is a photo of him and a childhood friend, with Weiss as a young kid wearing a Lowell River Hawks shirt and smiling a wide, toothy grin.

“That’s about the same time as when …” Weiss says, trailing off.

Weiss never met Gove, never even spoke to him on the phone, but their stories are inextricably linked.

Weiss is the first person who alleged that Richardson sexually abused him as a youth hockey player. Though his identity was not disclosed during his court case — he was identified as John Doe back in 2003 — he has since agreed to use his name.

According to the court documents summarizing grand jury testimony, Weiss said he had attended a summer hockey camp Richardson worked at Boston University. Weiss had broken his toe and was back in his dorm room waiting for his parents to arrive when he said Richardson came into his room and fondled him.

Asked about what he did after the incident, Weiss told police in a videotaped interview: “I laid in bed and cried.”

Weiss detailed two other incidents in which he said Richardson assaulted him, forcing him to perform oral sex and to have anal intercourse. One incident occurred after Richardson asked Weiss to join him at a BU hockey game. According to Weiss, Richardson instead took him to his condo in Dorchester.

Richardson, according to Weiss’ interview with police, told him that this was something he did with his “favorite” players and instructed him he could “never tell anybody about this,” especially his parents.

Weiss, pictured here with a childhood friend at approximately the same age as when he said the abuse began, grew up idolizing Bruins goaltender Andy Moog. (Photo courtesy of Chris Weiss)

Brian Kelley, an assistant athletic director who works with the men’s ice hockey program at BU, says that the department’s records do not go back far enough to determine when Richardson worked a camp at the university. Another school spokesperson declined to discuss the allegations about Richardson and any alleged connection he had with the university.

As his day in court approached and Weiss readied himself to testify, he worried whether people would believe him, what others would think once they knew what had happened to him.

“Shit got real. And it became overwhelming. The realness of what you have to do, what you have to admit to,” Weiss says.

Weiss had struggled in the years after the alleged abuse. Jurors heard about Weiss’ prior arrest — he later pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge — his drug history and the fact that he was admitted to a psychiatric facility. The defense questioned his credibility and his competency during his statement to police.

After an eight-day trial, Richardson was found not guilty.

Weiss was not in the courtroom when the verdict was read; someone from the DA’s office called to deliver the news. It was shattering. Like Gove, Weiss eventually turned to heroin.

“(Heroin) takes everything away. It’s like oblivion. You don’t have to think about anything,” Weiss says. “But then there are consequences.”

At first glance, Weiss, now 34, doesn’t look like he’s struggling. He is neatly groomed, with strawberry-blonde hair tucked behind his ears and clear-rimmed glasses. He is smart and funny and thoughtful; he texts with cartoon-like Bitmojis and loves “The Walking Dead.“ Look closer though, and you’ll notice the scar tissue on the inside of his left biceps where the skin is mottled from the abscesses that have accrued from years of heroin use. When he lifts up his shirt, you’ll see a large horizontal scar in the middle of his chest from the open-heart surgery he underwent two months ago as a result of his endocarditis — an infection of the inner lining of the heart, a common side effect of intravenous drug use. There is also the grisly zipper scar on his right knee from septic arthritis.

“I should have been dead ten years ago,” Weiss says.

He was once a kid who loved to play hockey, a scrawny goaltender — just 5-foot-3 and 97 pounds — who idolized Bruins netminder Andy Moog, who did well in school, “the type of kid who wanted to make his dad proud, his parents proud,” Weiss says.

But then, after what he said Richardson did, he was consumed with anger and rage. He says he felt he could no longer trust adults. He dropped out of hockey and then from school. He moved to Texas with his father, with whom he remained close, and began to use marijuana, Vicodin, Adderall, and then heavier drugs.

After the trial, Weiss had stretches of stability — he once had a steady girlfriend; for a spell he had a job as a licensed chemical dependency intern who taught group education — but he says he relapsed in 2013 after witnessing the suicide of his father, who had Parkinson’s disease and was dealing with chronic pain.

“I’ve lost everything in my life. My family barely talks to me. Financially, it’s a mess. My health, everything’s destroyed,” Weiss says.

Still, his life is not without purpose. Sitting in his room at the hospital, he details how he wants to help others going through what he endured both before and after his trial. He wants them to feel supported, to know they are not alone.

Weiss says he wishes the DA’s office had connected him to Gove when Gove came forward. They could have helped each other. He of all people knows what that was like in that trying period leading up to trial.

Weiss has been sober since November, his latest attempt to stay clean aided by a clear goal: He wants to be there should someone else come forward.

According to internal data from USA Hockey, the organization has received 118 reports involving sexual abuse allegations from September 1, 2016 to March 21, 2018. Of those 118 reports noted, 70 have gone directly to the U.S. Center for SafeSport.

Richardson is no longer certified to coach by USA Hockey. He is serving an interim suspension, which means a final determination has yet to be made, according to a spokesperson working on behalf of the U.S. Center for SafeSport, which investigates allegations of sexual abuse in any of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s national governing bodies, including USA Hockey.

When reached by phone last week, Richardson’s defense attorney in Gove’s case, Michael Doolin, declined to say whether his client was still coaching, though over a dozen people interviewed for this story who are involved in Boston youth hockey say they have not seen Richardson around local rinks since the Globe story was published last August.

Some former associates of Richardson have said that he is now working from home, putting together CDs and emailing out a subscription service-type flier about coaching strategies, motivational tactics and inspirational quotes to coaches and players around the area.

He still lives in the same Dorchester condo where both Gove and Weiss told police they were assaulted. It is a nondescript dwelling, approximately 1,224 square feet, one of 15 brick-and-vinyl units built in the late 1980s and connected to each other on a tree-lined street in the Cedar Grove section of town. The neighborhood is predominantly Irish-Catholic and known for its strong youth sports programs. Less than a half-mile away from Richardson’s home is an elementary school, which recently hosted its annual father-daughter dance.

Also a short drive away is the prestigious Thayer Academy in Braintree. That is where Gove was playing when, at 16 years old, he first disclosed Richardson’s alleged abuse to his maternal uncle (who has since passed away). That uncle notified Gove’s mother, Donna, who told her son to inform his high school coach, Jack Foley. Gove told Foley, who no longer coaches at Thayer, that he was “not comfortable with Richardson’s involvement with the team,” but, according to court documents, “he did not tell the coach why.”

Donna, via her daughter, declined to comment. Foley confirmed that Gove told him that he was “uncomfortable” with Richardson, but he says Gove was vague about what it was that made him feel that way, even when pressed. Regardless, Foley says he ended Richardson’s work with the Thayer Academy hockey team.

Multiple officials at Thayer said Richardson was not an employee at the school and described his involvement as minimal, though others dispute that characterization. Jack Baker, a high school friend of Gove’s, played at Thayer and later at Boston University. He says that Richardson was not an official employee of the academy and operated on the periphery, but he says Richardson was an influential presence in a number of youth hockey programs and camps in the greater Boston area.

“He had power over people’s hockey careers. He had connections to all of the college coaches. He had connections to the USA Hockey stuff. People did respect him in the USA Hockey world,” says Baker, who previously coached at Thayer. “He helped me get to BU. If you had Bob’s good graces, that was (seen as) a really good thing.”

Upon his acquittal in 2005, several people in the hockey community supported Richardson. After the Globe article in August 2017, many of those people reconsidered.

“I’d known Bob, at that point, when the matter went to court (in 2005), I had known Bob 25-plus years and myself and everyone else never suspected that. But then for something like (the Globe article) to come forward, sometimes, if you’re really honest, you don’t know people all the time,” says Dan Esdale, a former USA Hockey vice president who still serves as a director at large with Massachusetts Hockey.

Esdale says he has not spoken to Richardson since the Globe article. But he has spoken to Weiss, with whom Baker and Ferreira have become friends. Through Baker, Esdale reached out to Weiss to apologize for the support he offered Richardson when Weiss first came forward. Does Esdale now believe Weiss and Gove?

“Be pretty hard not to.”

Gove’s two sisters remember the wild kid who ran around the house singing the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” who burned up the local bantam league in Barnstable, scoring upwards of nine goals a night. They remember the caring father he became, and how maniacal he was about his lawn and his Clark Griswold-esque Christmas lights. He was also fastidious about his health. He would run the sand hills in Hyannis and chatter about his BMI.

Kim Burnieika, Gove’s oldest sister, pulls up a video that shows Gove holding up a purple snowsuit-clad tangle of arms and legs, hoisting his niece from underneath her armpits as she glides across the ice, skates jutting out in slow semi-circles.

She shows the clip with the audio disabled so that Bauer, Gove’s dog who is in the next room, doesn’t hear Gove’s voice and get agitated.

“He was the rock of our family,” says Kristen Buttrick, Gove’s other sister, as she sits at the dinner table in her home in East Sandwich, just south of Cape Cod Bay. A plate of untouched muffins rests between Kim and Kristen.

It is hard to square all that they knew about Gove with what happened to him.

The two sisters didn’t know how dire the situation was until Gove took a leave of absence from his cherished ECHL coaching gig. But Gove was coy about his treatment even then.

Gove’s sisters had known about Richardson’s alleged abuse of their brother but only vaguely. They knew Gove had attended WMU and not one of the local schools that showed interest because he wanted to get away. Before he died, as his court case was proceeding, Gove asked his sisters and Gannon to not attend the trial; he didn’t want them to hear him what he said happened to him.

“It must have been so deep inside him, just weighing on him,” Kristen says. “It was just too much.”

Adds Kim: “He was drowning.”

Gannon knew that Gove was battling problems with pills and dealing with the stress of facing Richardson in court, but she too was shocked when she learned he had turned to heroin.

Gove and Gannon first met while the two were both vacationing at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, and reconnected at a softball game in her hometown of Clinton one year later. They began dating when she was just 18 years old; she spent 13 years of her life with him.

“He was very protective but always so sweet and respectful. And if you had something to say he would always hear you out…He was just amazing. I loved that quality about him,” Gannon says.

“And that smile, he just melted me with those big puppy eyes.”

There are times when Gannon sees so much of Gove in her son. Cullen has the same excitability and humor. Sometimes, he’ll crack a joke that Gannon knows would have prompted a “That’s my boy!” from Gove and she reaches for her phone as if to call him.

Cullen still remembers his father. Whenever he sees a Red Bull or a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, two of Gove’s weaknesses, he’ll shout: “Those are my daddy’s favorite!”

At Easter, as Cullen excitedly scoured the yard for colored eggs, Gannon felt a mix of joy and anger – happy for her son but upset that Gove hadn’t lived to see it.

“I wish he could watch Cully grow,” she says.

When he’s old enough, Gannon will explain to Cullen her father’s history. She will be honest about his death and about his struggles but also about the way he lived. She will tell her son why he came forward to tell of his alleged abuse.

“It was a battle of courage and strength,” she says.

Gannon and Gove agreed that when Cullen turned four they’d get him on skates. But when the time came this past year, Gannon couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Wiping away a tear, she nods and says:

“Maybe next year.”

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