Clockwise from top left: T.J. Franzese, Sam Cali, Leo Vagias, Dillon Romain, a Don Bosco helmet and Kurt Schmitz. (NJ Advance Media file photos)

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On Sept. 27, 2008, Dillon Romain and T.J. Franzese, running backs who shared the backfield at Don Bosco Prep, played the game of their lives.

Taking on six-time national champion De La Salle in a nationally televised game, Franzese led Don Bosco in receiving and hauled in a critical third-quarter touchdown, while Romain rushed for a game-high 150 yards and a score.

Their performances led the team to a 23-21 victory and launched the Don Bosco dynasty into the national spotlight.

A decade after that celebrated game, Franzese and Romain are dead.

Franzese died April 19, 2017.

Romain died two years later to the day.

Kurt Schmitz, an offensive lineman on the team, is dead, too. In all, nine former Don Bosco athletes have died in the past five years, seven of whom played for the school's national powerhouse football program.

All of the nine were 29 or younger.

“It’s a lot of kids,” said Kevin Roche, the father of Brian Roche, a former Don Bosco football player who died in 2016. “The first thing any normal person would do is say, ‘What’s going on here? There’s something odd. This is atypical.’ And it is. And I can’t explain it.”

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Dillon Romain, the 2008-09 Gatorade State Player of the Year, died April 19. (Mitsu Yasukawa | NJ Advance Media file photo)

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More than a dozen interviews with Don Bosco officials, family members of the deceased and former athletes from the school do little to explain the numbers. There is certainly no evidence of any relationship between Don Bosco and the tragedies. Still, the rash of deaths that has hit the close-knit, all-boys school of about 830 students in Bergen County is mysterious and alarming, parents said.

NJ Advance Media confirmed causes of death — a drug overdose, a car accident and a seizure that led to a heart attack — for four of the former student-athletes. Other causes have not been disclosed or explained and parents of three athletes declined interviews for this story. Kevin Roche said the cause of his son’s death never was determined after he passed away in his sleep.

“It’s just odd how this has all occurred,” said Alice Walsh, the mother of Connor Walsh, who died from a seizure and heart attack in 2017. “Even though the school has been around for so many years, this has occurred within a four- or five-year period.”

Parents, coaches and school officials connected to Don Bosco called the string of tragedies an awful coincidence.

“We know it’s not the natural progression of life,” Don Bosco principal Robert Fazio said. “We feel the pain. It’s deep, it’s hurtful, it’s sorrowful.”

Franzese's parents pointed to the opioid crisis as contributing to their son's death. But at least one parent, Yvonne Schmitz — whose son, Kurt, died in 2014 from a heart condition caused by high blood pressure — wondered what toll the intensity of playing football at Don Bosco had on her son and others.

“Our Don Bosco players played so hard trying to achieve something, but now I look back at it and say: At what cost?” Schmitz said. “What did we do to our boys? What did we cost them? We were all there cheering them on. And now, knowing, I’m like, ‘What did we do?’”

“I look at all the brokenness and say: Oh my God.”

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Dillon Romain leaps during the 2007 state title game at Giants Stadium. (Tim Farrell | NJ Advance Media file photo)

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'You have to follow the pattern'

Kurt Schmitz was the first to die.

Leading up to his death in November 2014, his life had been unraveling from brain injuries he suffered playing football, his mom said.

A 6-foot-4, 270-pound offensive lineman, Schmitz suffered a concussion in August of his freshman season at the University of Richmond, but he hid the injury from coaches to stay on the field, his mom said. He was treated for another concussion, then another, then a fourth in August the following season that sent him to the hospital.

Schmitz was redshirted as a sophomore and coped with the impact of the blows. He suffered blinding headaches, his stomach swirled with nausea and he constantly misplaced his keys, his mom said. The symptoms made it nearly impossible to focus on his studies.

One day, he texted his mom that he thought he would never be the same after his fourth concussion, adding “and God knows how many I got at Bosco on top of them.” (Fazio said the school strictly follows concussion protocol and employs a top training staff.)

The weekend he died, Kurt Schmitz was racing from New Jersey to Richmond after Thanksgiving break, chugging energy drinks to stay awake on the roads, his mom said. When he got to his apartment, he took the opioid OxyContin to help him sleep, his mom said. Yvonne Schmitz said her son did not have a prescription, and she has no idea where he got the pill.

Police found his lifeless body late the following morning.

Yvonne Schmitz said she donated his brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Boston, where researchers made a horrifying discovery. White matter was on his brain, indicative of brain trauma, and a split was found in his cerebral membrane, Yvonne Schmitz said.

Even more alarming: Kurt Schmitz started playing football in fifth grade and quit at age 20. He only played about 10 years, one of those full time in college.

“It’s not like these NFL guys, where you can say, ‘Oh, they’ve been playing forever,’” Yvonne Schmitz said.

Yvonne Schmitz said she doesn’t blame the Don Bosco coaches or the school for her son’s death or brain trauma. If anything, she blames the era: It was a time when the nation had only just started to learn about the dangerous effects of concussions.

“Those coaches loved our boys,” Yvonne Schmitz said. “They would never have wanted this.”

Still, she takes stock of the number of former Don Bosco football players who have died young — even one is one too many.

“You have to follow the pattern,” Yvonne Schmitz said. “When it all comes down to it: What did these boys all have in common?”

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Kurt Schmitz pictured at Richmond. (NJ Advance Media file photo)

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'A high you spend your life going after'

The sports culture at Don Bosco started changing in 1999, when Greg Toal was hired as the school's football coach. A former fullback who told The Star-Ledger in 2009 he took up boxing after college because he wanted to test his limits, Toal brought an unparalleled level of toughness to the program.

His practices were notoriously grueling and physical, often including ferocious one-on-one drills hardly unique to Don Bosco, where players smashed together to see which could move the other.

“The kids are physical, or they don’t play,” Mike Farrell, a leading national recruiting analyst, told The Star-Ledger in 2011. “And (Toal) is on them like crazy. When you see it in practice, you wonder, ‘Is he going too hard on these guys? Is he pushing them too far?’ But then you see the results on the field.”

The success under Toal was staggering: Between 2006 and 2011, Don Bosco won six straight state titles and went 70-1 playing against the top competition in New Jersey and nationally. As Don Bosco football took off, the baseball, cross-country and wrestling teams also became ranked among the best programs in New Jersey. (Toal left the school in 2017 and now is an assistant coach at Bergen Catholic.)

“The whole thing is terrible,” Toal said of the deaths. “The first people I feel for is the parents. I just can’t even imagine how difficult that would be.”

Toal added he doesn’t believe there’s any connection between the deaths and the school.

Meanwhile, Yvonne Schmitz said while her son was on the field at Don Bosco, she was always in the background, encouraging him to tough it through the practices.

“I was as much to blame because I taught him: If you want a scholarship, you better work hard,” she said.

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Don Bosco players stretch during practice in 2011. (Mark Dye | NJ Advance Media file photo)

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The post-high school experience of one of Schmitz’s teammates, T.J. Franzese, follows a different, but eerily similar, arc.

Franzese's parents, Lauren and Tom, said drugs led to their son's passing. Tom Franzese said T.J.'s addiction to opioids began when he injured his hamstring playing at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

“Just to get better and get the pain away, he took a few pills,” Tom Franzese said.

“The problem with that is it does more than take the pain away,” Lauren Franzese added. “It makes you feel invincible. It’s a high you spend your life going after it.”

T.J Franzese spent the next few years battling addiction and enrolling in treatment programs, his parents said. But he was never able to shake the disease. One day, his mother discovered him suffering from an overdose on the floor of his bathroom inside the family’s Allendale home. T.J. Franzese was 24.

Fazio, Don Bosco's principal, said drugs are not a problem specific to Don Bosco, but a topic the school administration stresses to the student body. Twelve percent of male athletes and 9 percent of female athletes were prescribed opioids for pain last season, according to data from the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association, the state's governing body for high school sports.

“I truly believe this is a societal problem,” Fazio said.

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Leo Vagias dons a Rhode Island hat at a 2015 signing day ceremony at Don Bosco. (Adya Beasley | NJ Advance Media file photo)

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'We're losing so many guys'

One after another, the deaths rocked Don Bosco. First Schmitz. Then Sam Cali and Leo Vagias were killed in June 2016 when both were ejected from their car in a crash on Interstate 287 in Mahwah. J.D. Krommenhoek died two months after that, and four days later, Brian Roche, his former teammate on the football team, passed away. Krommenhoek's cause of death was never revealed publicly, and his mother declined an interview request from NJ Advance Media. Roche's death was never explained, his father said.

Walsh and Franzese died in 2017. Ryan Vassallo in 2018. Romain on Good Friday this April. Vassallo and Romain’s deaths were never explained publicly, and their parents did not respond to interview requests.

So many electrifying athletes — all gone. Romain was the 2008-09 Gatorade State Player of the Year. Roche, an All-American lineman. Cali, a champion wrestler. Vassallo, a revered rower on the crew team.

(The waves of tragedy haven’t stopped crashing on the school. Just last month, Don Bosco’s longtime alumni director, Richard Wisniewski, died unexpectedly at age 60.)

“It’s an unfortunate situation that’s going on right now,” said Spencer Fox, a Don Bosco graduate and former athlete who now coaches at St. Joseph Regional. “It’s just super sad.”

Fazio said he’s wary of developing an unfair reputation from the tragedies, terrified the horrible circumstances will hurt the school more than it already aches. There have been so many funerals, so many memorials, so much weeping.

“It’s just so heart-wrenching,” Fazio said.

Kevin Roche, Brian’s father, said there’s no explanation for the string of deaths. He equates it to the worst kind of luck.

“This tragedy that’s happened to an unusual number of Don Bosco students was the roll of the dice,” Kevin Roche said. “It’s like rolling seven, seven times in a row. You could play craps for 20 years and that wouldn’t happen.

“But one night, one time, it happens.”

Five years after her son’s death, Yvonne Schmitz said, she still wrestles with guilt. Did she push him too hard? Did she not notice the warning signs that he was struggling even back in high school?

After her son died, Yvonne Schmitz started sending out sympathy cards to the families of young people who died unexpectedly. She knows even the smallest act of kindness can help.

The cards go out year after year, and often now to the same place:

The parents of former Don Bosco athletes.

“For such a small school, we’re losing so many guys,” Yvonne Schmitz said. “I’m tired of putting sympathy cards in the mail.”

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