Diantha Stensrud already sensed something was wrong before the call from police that her husband was being detained for his own safety.

They had found Rod Stensrud running on busy Sand Hill Road next to the Stanford Shopping Mall that day in 2005. The former Bay Area football star didn’t realize what he had been doing, telling authorities, “Something is wrong with my brain.”

The situation highlighted a long, soul-sapping mental decline that physicians diagnosed a year later as early onset Alzheimer’s, a disease the family attributes to the years Stensrud played high school and college football. The game does not discriminate. It’s an equal-opportunity terror for big names and no-names alike.

As Monday night’s national championship at Levi’s Stadium looms, the Stensruds are one of four families suing the NCAA in wrongful death complaints that underscore the potentially high costs of the game.

“I only got to see my dad growing up as a kid,” son Reid Stensrud said. “Later in life, that wasn’t him. He turned into a vegetable — like someone you would see in an old-folks home who had to be guided around.”

The suits follow in the wake of the highly publicized death of Tyler Hilinski, a Washington State junior quarterback who committed suicide last January. The player from Irvine was found to have suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease neurologists attribute to repeated blows to the head. A medical examiner said Hilinski, 21, had the brain of a 65-year-old.

Diantha Strensrud filed a suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court in August while similar legal claims were made at the same time for the families of former USC fullback Douglas MacKenzie, San Diego State and Chargers linebacker Jeffrey Staggs and Grand Valley State (Michigan) quarterback Cullen Finnerty.

The suits allege NCAA officials failed to protect football players from head injuries for decades despite knowing the potential consequences. They seek compensation for the untimely deaths, including medical expenses.

LIFE AFTER FOOTBALL

This is the latest in a continuing series of stories by Elliott Almond that examines the post-career struggles of players — from Super Bowl MVPs like Jim Plunkett to little-knowns like Rod Stensrud who never even got their NFL shot.

NCAA officials did not respond to a request made last week for comment. But they have responded to similar lawsuits in the past by saying they work with schools to create a healthy and safe environment for college athletes.

Jeff Raizner, one of the lawyers handling the Stensruds’ complaint, expects more such suits to be filed in an era when evidence is mounting about the long-term hazards of playing football. A National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health study seven years ago found that NFL players were four times more likely to have died from Alzheimer’s disease than the general population.

The families taking legal action hope their cases resonate with those who can make football safer even though the public has become numb to the increasing number of tearful accounts of players who have dealt with Alzheimer’s, ALS, Parkinson’s and other neurological disorders. (Though the rapid decline of 49ers legend Dwight Clark certainly is hard to brush aside.)

Stensrud, a role player at UCLA and Cal State Long Beach, suffered through a debilitating final five years before dying in 2011 at age 60. A biopsy of his brain revealed evidence of CTE.

For all the Junior Seaus and Mike Websters who struggled with the aftereffects of playing the game with a savagery that helped fuel their fame, how many more bit players also are suffering?

“This is not just a phenomenon that happens to the stars, the guys who play in every game,” said Raizner, a Houston-based lawyer. “It happens to the guys you never heard of. Guys you won’t even see on an active roster.”

Guys like Rod Stensrud.

* * *

Stensrud starred in an era when high school football was an important piece of the Bay Area’s sports tapestry. He graduated from St. Francis High in 1969 as an All-Mercury News rusher who played against Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Fouts at St. Ignatius and Hall of Fame receiver Lynn Swann at Serra High.

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Long before Dwight Clark, three forgotten 49ers perished from ALS Stensrud mostly played on scout and special teams at UCLA from 1969-71 because of injuries and run-ins with disciplined-minded coach Tommy Prothro.

“In practices, there was not a better running back,” recalled roommate Marv Kendricks, who played in the Canadian Football League. “Rod could have done wonders at UCLA given the chance.”

Stensrud’s low-rung status left him on practice squads where first-team players gave him a beating. The suit alleges he suffered multiple major concussions: “Just a collision like a truck, a Mack truck,” Stensrud told KPIX in 2008 while participating in an Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk on Treasure Island.

Stensrud transferred to Cal State Long Beach for the 1972 and ‘73 seasons but also didn’t play much according to limited statistical information from the time.

After college, he played rugby with a Long Beach-based team, tried to latch on with the San Diego Chargers before briefly teaching at Union City High and working as an assistant football coach at James Logan.

Stensrud eventually built a lucrative career in sales at a printing and graphics company. He and best friend Bob Klatt also appeared as extras in the 1979 sports-comedy film North Dallas Forty.

But signs of cognitive impairment surfaced in Stensrud’s mid-40s — years before concussions in football became a national conversation.

There was the time in the early 1990s at a Stanford-UCLA basketball game when Stensrud got lost heading to the bathroom. Klatt found his former St. Francis teammate by a concession stand tearing up, unsure where to go.

Reid Stensrud, now a Tesla technician living in Sausalito, began noticing changes while in high school. Sometimes, “he was just babbling,” the only child said. “It made me really frustrated. What is going on with my dad?”

Klatt and Stensrud had a tradition of lunching at MacArthur Park in Palo Alto for years. By 2004, Stensrud struggled to walk to Klatt’s car from his house. Stensrud already had stopped working because he no longer could keep track of the paperwork.

After one of those outings, Stensrud burst out sobbing because he couldn’t remember how to unlock the front door, recalled Klatt, a former San Diego State quarterback now living in Pleasant Hill.

No one experienced the decline the way Diantha and Reid did. At a Christmas party, Stensrud once grabbed an entire wedge of cheese from a buffet table and began eating it. Other guests thought he was a clumsy drunk. Such erratic behavior led some friends and family members to ask Diantha to not bring her husband when socializing.

By the time of the Stanford Shopping Mall incident, Stensrud was having hallucinations, seeing individuals hiding behind curtains.

In 2006, UC San Francisco Medical Center physicians returned a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. Stensrud, then 55, was younger than 95 percent of patients who first exhibit symptoms, the suit said.

Some of the symptoms plateaued after the diagnosis with the help of medication for memory and Monday meetings at Stanford with an Alzheimer’s group.

Those times were some of the best for the family. Stensrud could go for long walks again without getting lost. It was then he talked about the hits from football to therapist Angel Duncan, now clinical director of education at the Neuropsychiatrist Research Center of Southwest Florida.

Back then, neurologists were just beginning to understand the long-term damage caused by the hundreds of subconcussive hits that they now believe greatly contribute to cognitive disorders found in the players.

JIM PLUNKETT’S PAINFUL JOURNEY: ‘My life sucks’

Stensrud was angry about his outcome as the youngest member of the Alzheimer’s group. But he participated in the meetings with infectious good humor, Duncan recalled.

“It is hard when you are passionate about a sport that you know isn’t good for you,” she said.

The disease progressed to a point where Stensrud had to leave the group as most patients eventually do. By then, Diantha and Reid had adjusted their lives to care for him in shifts. Stensrud told his son to live his life and not “waste time trying to take care of me.”

Reid slept on a couch so his father could stay in his bed. It was the only way Diantha could get enough sleep to go to work at Stanford as an administrator in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department.

Soon Diantha had to take early retirement to provide full-time care. By then, she and her son kept the doors locked so Stensrud wouldn’t wander away.

The once-agile athlete suffered from severe headaches and could no longer bathe himself, put on clothes or shave without help. Stensrud defecated and urinated in various rooms because he couldn’t remember where the bathroom was.

Diantha once was so exhausted she told her husband he had to stand up to get dressed or she would have to put him in a home.

“I was just lost,” she said.

* * *

Near the end, Stensrud suffered seizures that made it too difficult to stay home. He moved from a San Jose hospital to Our Lady of Fatima Villa, a Saratoga nursing home.

On his final night, a nurse said he was not reacting when she checked his eyes.

“It is a matter of hours,” she announced.

Three years earlier, Stensrud had planned to donate his brain to Stanford pathologists to help advance emerging research into concussions and football. When agreeing to donate his organ, he asked a physician, “So you need my brain now?”

Diantha called an administrator at Stanford hospital as her husband was taking his final breaths.

“I’m going to fax over the paperwork,” she said into the phone. “It’s happening.”

Diantha raced back to her husband’s side.

She recalled seeing two blackbirds on a eucalyptus tree outside Stensrud’s room. They didn’t leave their perch until his body was removed the next day.

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NFL: League official admits link between CTE, football-related head trauma After the long ordeal, Diantha, 65, left the Bay Area where she spent most of her life to be closer to a brother in Sacramento. She soon will begin working as a hostess and waitress at her niece and nephew’s new Midtown restaurant.

The widow turned a spare bedroom in her apartment into a sanctum for her husband’s sports mementos. Those keepsakes help breathe life into the memories. For Reid, it’s the endless stream of games during the season that brings Stensrud back.

“Every time I see football it will remind me of my father,” he said.