Junior Seau's family will not be invited to speak when the linebacker is inducted into the NFL's Professional Football Hall of Fame in August, according to several published reports.
Seau, considered by many to be the greatest linebacker in NFL history, will enter the HOF August 8 with Jerome Bettis, Tim Brown, Charles Haley, Bill Polian, Will Shields, Mick Tingelhoff and Ron Wolf.
Unlike the others, Seau will be honored with only a video presentation, according to a report published Friday in the New York Times.
On May 2, 2012, Seau was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound in his Oceanside home right along the shore. His death occurred less than three years after his retirement from football.
Seau's family filed a wrongful death suit claiming his death was the result of brain disease caused by violent hits during football.
Then, his relatives opted out of a settlement in a federal class-action lawsuit and are still fighting with the NFL in court over what they say was a decades-long deception about concussions and brain injuries.
His former wife, Gina, and his four children want more information to emerge about the debilitating effects of head injuries, according to their lawyer, Steven M. Strauss, a partner with the Cooley law firm in San Diego.
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Before his death, Seau told family members that if he ever made it into the HOF, he wanted his daughter Sydney to to introduce him, the NY Times reports.
“I just want to give the speech he would have given. It wasn’t going to be about this mess. My speech was solely about him,” she told the paper.
