A journey toward forgiveness: Davin Vann has finally found himself years after his sister's death

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussions of suicidal ideation.

THERE ARE FORCES at work in the universe that, for most of his life, Davin Vann believed were malevolent. This is what occupied the thoughts of NC State‘s star defensive lineman when he slid into the driver’s seat of his car on Feb. 4, 2024, intent on surrendering to his fate.

Vann has always liked to drive at night. Football had long been an outlet for his anger and isolation, but when he finished practice and film study, a drive calmed him and allowed him to be alone with his thoughts. He’d crank some country music, pull his Mustang onto the highway, watch the road unspool past Raleigh, Apex and Cary — the North Carolina towns where he grew up — and think of all the things that kept him here. He’d think of Kayla.

He was 11 when he watched his 13-year-old sister drown in a neighborhood pool, and for much of the past decade, he had fixated on how it was possible that she was gone while he had been spared.

“For a long time, it felt like God took the wrong kid,” he said. “It felt wrong for me to have the ability to live life and be happy when such a beautiful person was taken.”

Some nights he asked for forgiveness, for some penance he could pay that would ease the guilt that overwhelmed him. Some nights he’d ask for solace, an explanation for how his coaches and teammates at NC State could laud him as a leader while he still felt utterly broken.

On this night, however, he asked for nothing.

“I was just tired of being tired,” he said.

Vann wasn’t planning to die, exactly. That would imply some agency in his life, a feeling he’d long abandoned. Instead, he figured he’d just ease his car onto I-40, inch the accelerator to the floor, then let go.

“Just f— the brakes, see how fast I can go,” Vann said. “I was thinking that if somebody hit me, I wouldn’t care.”

He slumped into his seat, shoved his key into the ignition and twisted.

Nothing.

He twisted again and again, screaming into the ether with righteous indignation, but the engine stayed silent.

For nearly a half-hour, he sat in his car sobbing, begging for mercy as music blared and his windows fogged over. Finally, Vann relented. He went inside his house, still crying, and crawled into bed. When he awoke the next morning, he looked at his phone and found a text from his head coach, Dave Doeren, who’d been on something of a spiritual journey of his own.

“Got something I want to share with you,” the message read. “Can you come see me tomorrow?”

Looking back, Vann said, it’s like something out of a movie — a story he wouldn’t believe if he hadn’t lived it. Vann is the Wolfpack’s senior leader, a fan favorite with 5.5 sacks and 12 tackles for loss, but as he gets set to take the field Thursday night against Georgia Tech (7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN), he’s not doing it alone. That meeting with Doeren would set him on a path toward forgiveness, clarity and family.

There are forces at work in the universe, but they’re not like Vann imagined them.

“I see that night as such a gift,” Vann said. “It was God or the universe or Allah or whatever you want to call it telling me I couldn’t go yet.”

Or maybe, he thinks now, it was Kayla.

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DAVIN VANN WAS born Feb. 8, 2002, the fourth of nine children. Kayla, Davin and Rylan, each about two years apart, were the closest. Davin called them “the trio.”

Kayla loved basketball, baking and church. She was bubbly and outgoing. She taught Rylan to cook on her kitchen set. She’d let Davin braid her hair, even though he wasn’t very good at it. They all played sports — an escape from the crowded living room before Kayla’s death and an avenue for some sense of normalcy afterward. They were each members of the swim team, and they spent countless summer afternoons at the Scottish Hills Recreation Club, the neighborhood pool just a quarter-mile walk down a greenway behind their house in Cary, North Carolina.

That’s where they planned to spend the evening of June 8, 2013. Usually, their mother, Joy Hall, or their grandparents, Dave and Joan, would accompany them, but Joy was busy with work, and the grandparents were babysitting the younger kids. Dave offered to drive the trio, dropping them off at the front entrance a little after 5 p.m.

The call to 911 came at 6:36 p.m. A child had been pulled from the water. She was unresponsive. An ambulance arrived four minutes later.

It was an 11-year old Davin who called his mother, who was in Raleigh for work.

“Mom,” he said, “Kayla’s hurt.”

If she had it to do over, Joy wishes she’d understood the weight Davin would carry in the years to come. Kayla was older, but Davin viewed himself as her and Rylan’s protector. Maybe Joy had, too.

Joy met Davin’s father when she was 16. The relationship was fraught from the outset. He was a drug addict, Joy said. He’d disappear for weeks. He spent time in prison. He fought with Joy routinely, and the arguments often turned violent.

“It was volatile,” Joy said. “It was scary sometimes. And heartbreaking.”

Joy had her oldest daughter, Brittany, when she was 17. Deanna, Kayla, Davin and Rylan followed over the next 10 years. Rylan was just 6 weeks old, Joy said, when she came home from an errand one afternoon to find the kids’ father smoking crack in the living room, the baby asleep on the couch next to him. She told him to leave. He beat her, and he took her car, and, after a handful of visits, he eventually disappeared from their lives.

Things weren’t easy after that, but they were better. Joy met Donald Haley, and they had four more kids together — Lola, Duckie, Rose and Vinnie. Donald had grown up in the foster care system, so he was eager to adopt the older kids, too. Family, for him, didn’t have to be blood. They weren’t poor, Davin said, but with nine kids to feed, there was never quite enough to go around. What they did have, Joy said, were the scars of those early years of abuse and fear.

“We didn’t grow up saying ‘I love you’ all the time,” Davin said. “Nobody liked talking about their emotions.”

Perhaps, Davin said, they just weren’t equipped to process their feelings back then. He understands now that, when Joy was confronted with the loss of her daughter, she didn’t appreciate the fragility of the 11-year-old boy on the other end of the phone. She couldn’t console. She wanted answers. How did this happen? Where was he when she was under water? Why hadn’t he noticed?

What Davin heard was a question that has hung with him like a weight around his neck ever since. Why hadn’t he saved her?

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THE KIDS SCATTERED in different directions when they arrived at the pool that night, each to their own clique of friends. Kayla had asked Rylan to play with her, but he had scurried off with his own crowd instead.

“If I’d said yes, that might’ve changed everything,” Rylan said. “That’s something I held deeply for my whole life.”

The Scottish Hills pool is not large. It’s zigzag-shaped with a deeper side, close to 9 feet, and a shallow side around 4 feet deep. At the time, there was a diving board at one end next to the lifeguard tower, and that’s where Davin had been playing. Joy learned later that Kayla had been underwater for somewhere between five and 10 minutes before anyone noticed. A neighborhood girl whom Kayla would sometimes babysit was the one who first realized something was wrong. The girl’s grandfather dove into the pool and pulled Kayla to the side.

The lifeguard blew a whistle, and a crowd scrambled out of the pool. That’s when Rylan first saw his sister splayed on the concrete. He screamed for Davin, who raced to Kayla’s side. Someone was doing chest compressions. She coughed up a mixture of blood and water.

“I tried to convince myself it wasn’t as bad as it looked,” Davin said.

In the moments after the 911 call, Rylan sat astride a ball machine on the nearby tennis courts as medics worked on his sister, convincing himself she would be fine. He’d see her in the hospital. She’d be awake. She’d hug him and laugh like she always had, and they’d bake a treat on her kitchen set when she got home.

After calling his mother and grandmother, Davin stumbled in a daze to a bench in the courtyard adjacent to the pool where he sat alone, crying and praying.

“The ambulance came and took her away,” Davin said. “I said goodbye to my friends. I don’t really remember the rest of that day. Or, really, that whole time in my life.”

Joy sped from Raleigh to Cary and beat the ambulance to the hospital. Kayla was alive, but her responses were “combative,” suggesting severe brain damage.

At 4 a.m. on Sunday, June 9, Joy and Donald were called back to Kayla’s room. She’d taken a turn, and things looked bleak. Joy called her parents and begged them to return to the hospital.

“I’m a Christian,” Joy said, “but they’re Christians far beyond what I am. And I thought, maybe if they pray for her, she’ll be saved.”

An autopsy showed no trauma to Kayla’s head or neck, no damage to her heart that would suggest a medical event had preceded her drowning. Fluid was found in her lungs. Her official cause of death was heart failure brought on by oxygen deprivation.

No one can explain how a tall girl with dark skin and long, dark hair could stay unnoticed under the water of a crowded community pool with a lifeguard on duty for as long as 10 minutes.

Joy begged the town of Cary to investigate, but officials insisted it was an accident. ESPN filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any documents pertaining to a police investigation and was told no such reports exist. At the time, Joy didn’t have the resources or the willpower to push back. She eventually filed a lawsuit, but without a police investigation, she had little evidence of wrongdoing. The sides eventually settled.

“They just said, ‘This is what we think your kid’s life was worth,’ and that was it,” she said.

It fell to Joy to explain to the other kids that Kayla died. What has stayed with her is the sound Rylan made when she told him — an anguished howl that still haunts her now.

So much of what happened after that is a blur.

That day, Joy walked the trail behind their house that led down to the pool, and she thought of the future Kayla would never enjoy.

“So many things get taken when a kid is just 13,” Joy said. “It just seems so terribly unfair.”

Brittany graduated from high school two days after Kayla died. The family was there, but it was just a formality. There was no celebration. There are pictures but not memories.

The funeral was held the next day. Seeing his sister in the coffin is the one clear memory Davin has of that week.

“I didn’t know when you die,” Davin said, “the body you see in the coffin, it doesn’t look like the person you knew.”

Davin retreated inward. That has always been his defense mechanism when times are hard. Joy has seen it happen on the football field after a bad play, but back then, she was too mired in her own grief to understand the implications of Davin’s silence.

What she remembers instead is a night soon after the funeral. She was lying in her bed, sobbing, and Davin came in to console her. He didn’t know what to say, so he just reached out and rubbed her foot.

“And I just thought, ‘What a sweet boy,'” Joy said.

For the next 10 years, though, Davin did not see a sweet boy. He saw a mistake.

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DAVIN WEARS NO. 1 at NC State, which is intended as an honor. Each year, Doeren awards the jersey number to the player who best embodies the leadership skills he wants the team to emulate. Doeren met with Davin before his freshman season and predicted he’d one day be a team captain. Now it was reality.

“There’s this lion inside him,” Doeren said.

Davin wanted no part of it.

There was a sentimental reason, he said. He wore No. 45 — two digits that, summed, equal nine. Nine for the number of kids in his family. Nine was Kayla’s basketball jersey. Nine had meaning.

But that was an excuse. Davin really wanted to hide from a spotlight he didn’t think he deserved. He saw leadership as a burden, and he’d spent years carrying so many already.

The darkness that followed Kayla’s death festered and metastasized inside him. As a boy, he acted out, then drew further inward. He remembers little from Kayla’s death until high school, years lost in a fog. He got in trouble. Not real trouble, Joy said, just kid stuff, but Davin is not so sure. He can laugh now about the time he and Rylan acted out their favorite wrestling moves, only for Rylan’s tooth to end up stuck in Davin’s hand — one brother needing a root canal and the other needing hand surgery. But there were worse things, too, Davin said. Things he’s ashamed of in retrospect, such as bringing a knife to school; decisions born from hanging out with the wrong crowd and a simmering fury he held inside.

“I felt like the world was against me,” Davin said. “I didn’t want to listen to anybody about anything.”

Sports allowed Davin a chance to vent his anger without drawing attention. He blossomed in wrestling and football, recording 17 sacks and earning a Shrine Bowl invitation as a senior at Cary High School. He had dozens of scholarship offers, but he chose NC State to remain close to home. Davin never looked at his memories of Kayla straight on, but he couldn’t leave her behind, either.

Davin’s college career progressed just as Doeren had envisioned. By his third season, he was a full-time starter at defensive end. The next year, he was one of the most productive pass rushers in the ACC. He considered the NFL draft, and when he announced he would return for one final season with the Wolfpack, the fan base celebrated.

Davin couldn’t understand any of it.

“A lot of guys talk about how they go through hardships and injuries and stuff like that, but for me it was the opposite,” he said. “My hardship came from the success I was having. It felt like no matter what I did or how hard I worked for it, I didn’t deserve any of the accolades or success or publicity. It felt wrong.”

The people around him inevitably called him humble. Joy won’t argue with the characterization, but she knows there is more to it.

“Sometimes he really didn’t know why anyone wanted him to play college football,” Joy said. “He’d say, ‘I’m not very good.’ He’s just really hard on himself.”

Davin minored in psychology at NC State, and in those courses he learned terms such as suicidal ideation and survivor’s guilt and imposter syndrome. He had them all. But he also believed something more profound about himself: that the universe saw past his success to something deeper, something ugly and unfixable. It’s what led him to the front seat of his Mustang that night.

At almost that same moment, Doeren was on a Zoom with a Canadian performance coach he’d found on social media, deep in meditation. And he’d just had a revelation.

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DOEREN WAS IN his office in late October 2023, lamenting his team’s blowout loss to rival Duke. NC State had begun the season with high expectations, but the Wolfpack were instead 4-3, and their starting quarterback had just quit the team to pursue a transfer. Criticism had been mounting, and Doeren was at a breaking point. To clear his head, he pulled out his phone and began thumbing through his Instagram feed, where he found Dan de Luis.

The video that caught Doeren’s attention was titled “Five Rules to Provide More Peace of Mind.” In it, de Luis strolls through a leafy field in Mallorytown, Ontario, and he implores his followers to ignore external critics and look inward for a path to betterment.

Doeren is an old-school, blue-collar football coach who’s not inclined to buy into a motivational pitch from a social media influencer, but he watched this “hippy-dippy life coach” with rapt attention.

“It was like he was talking to me,” Doeren said.

Doeren was so inspired by the message, he picked up his phone and called his friend, artist John Bukaty, to share the moment. He urged Bukaty to watch the video, too, and it sparked an idea.

“There’s a reason you saw that,” Bukaty told Doeren. “I’m going to call him.”

Doeren shrugged it off, but within the hour, his phone rang.

De Luis sports a chest-length beard, scraggly and streaked with gray, and he’s almost always wearing a ski cap and a T-shirt, often emblazoned with the logo of a favorite rock band. He has worked with hundreds of “high-performance” clients, from NHL stars to Olympians to Fortune 500 CEOs. On Instagram, he has 410,000 followers. He offers reassuring self-help mantras with practiced empathy.

The centerpiece of his practice is a method of intentional, deep breathing designed to “flex” the circulatory system, which can create physiological and psychological responses that de Luis calls a “flow state,” in which clients often report an ability to confront long-held trauma or discover life-altering realizations — a “cathartic release,” de Luis calls it.

On that first call, de Luis taught Doeren some basic breathing techniques designed to calm his mind and center his focus. They kept at it, and by week’s end, the lessons helped Doeren shed the noise and distractions that had clouded his thinking, allowing him to focus on the steps he needed to remedy a spiraling season. He gave an emphatic speech to his team later that week in which he told players to either buy in or get out. He named a new starting QB, whom the players rallied behind. It was a turning point, and the Wolfpack would win their next five games.

Doeren and de Luis stayed in touch in the months that followed. During one of those “flow states” in a session in February, Doeren had an epiphany: “Davin needs this.”

Doeren believes one of his best assets as a coach is an ability to connect with his players, and for weeks, he’d seen Davin retreat from interactions with teammates, keep quiet during meetings, slouch in his seat and shuffle through the locker room. Doeren saw a player who needed help.

Doeren hedged the introduction as a favor Davin could do for the team. He thought de Luis’ sessions could be useful for the players, and he wanted Davin to give it a try and provide feedback. (De Luis now accompanies the team before games and works with as many as 40 players.)

Davin worked with de Luis via Zoom for a few months — “Beginning to crack the door open,” de Luis said — but in April, de Luis flew to Raleigh for a three-day retreat at Doeren’s lake house. De Luis hoped he could push the door fully open.

“This works if you’re ready,” de Luis told him.

“I’m ready,” Davin said.

They practiced breathing in the morning, did yoga in the afternoon, and finished the day with meditative breathing aimed at relaxing the body before sleep.

Davin was amazed with the results. He could exhale and hold his breath for five, 10 minutes. At one point, he reeled off 100 push-ups while taking just a single breath. He felt relaxed, open, free from the weight he’d carried for so long.

In between sessions, Davin and de Luis talked about what had led them here. De Luis calls this “set and setting” — creating an atmosphere where people reluctant to share emotions feel more comfortable being vulnerable.

“What you’re holding inside,” de Luis told him, “that demon, that animal — the strongest thing a man can do is say he needs help.”

Growing up, Davin and Rylan had shared a bedroom, and in all those years, they’d never once talked about the day Kayla died. It was only after Davin left for NC State, when Rylan would make regular weekend trips to stay with his brother, that the veil finally lifted. It was Davin’s sophomore year, and the brothers were up late, playing video games and watching TV, and somehow they started talking about Kayla. They were surprised how often their perceptions of what happened diverged. They talked about the guilt they felt, and they were surprised at how much of that they shared. It was cathartic, Davin says now, but it wasn’t a wholesale change. He still wasn’t ready to truly face what happened, he said. Acceptance meant Kayla was really gone.

De Luis had endured trauma, too, and he shared his story willingly — about the “intense” father, the bouts of severe anxiety and depression, about the back injury that left him virtually bedridden for nearly two years in his 20s, and about finding salvation in yoga and breathing exercises at precisely the moment he hit rock bottom.

Davin listened, and his defenses began to crumble. Eventually, his whole story came out — the guilt and the anger and the grief. It was a moment he had run from for more than half his life, and now that he had faced it, he felt relief.

That was the lesson, de Luis told him. Davin had used his anger over his sister’s death as his motivation for so long, but it had only led him deeper into despair. It was time to focus on his love for Kayla instead.

“Dan had told me I can’t hold on to my past,” Davin said. “It’s a stepping stone I need to learn to live with, but it’s not me.”

On the last morning of the retreat, de Luis had Davin wade into Lake Gaston. It was 40 degrees and the water was freezing, but as Davin inhaled and exhaled with measured precision, the discomfort disappeared, and his thoughts turned to Kayla.

He could see her now. She was not angry with him. She loved him, and she wanted him to be happy.

“Kayla’s death changed the mindset of an 11-year-old boy. It put me in a victim mentality,” Davin said. “I’ve changed my mindset. I’m doing it for her now. She can’t be here, but I’m trying to let her live vicariously through me by being the best I can be.”

Davin and de Luis drove back to Raleigh blaring Zach Bryan and Luke Combs, and when they arrived on campus, Davin rushed to see Doeren. He grabbed his coach and hugged him — “Like I’ve never been hugged before,” Doeren said — and when he let go, his eyes welled with tears, and he smiled.

“Thank you, Coach,” he said. “You saved my life.”

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THERE IS NOT a clean denouement to Davin’s story. He’s in a better place, but he still fights the battles, he said. On Oct. 5, in a game against Wake Forest, NC State quarterback Grayson McCall was hit by a defender, who buried his helmet under McCall’s chin. The QB crumbled to the ground and laid there, motionless. Vann ambled to the sidelines in a daze, sobbing. The scene — the unconscious body, the terrified onlookers, the scrambling trainers and doctors — it was too familiar. After games, Rylan always brings his mom a Gatorade, and Davin delivers hugs and recounts his plays. This time, the brothers were quiet, said their goodbyes and went straight home. Old habits, Davin said. But he could still breathe and refocus and find his way back.

“I’m in a lot better spot,” Davin said. “I won’t say I don’t deal with mental health issues, but I’m better at dealing with them.”

Davin and his mother talk often of Kayla now — and about what her loss meant to their family. Davin now understands that the weight he carried, Joy carried, too. Joy has found enough distance to understand that her pain kept her from seeing all the hurt her boys held for so long.

“We’ve talked about it a lot,” Joy said. “He’s told me he’s been…”

She can’t say it, but she knows. She was there, too.

“Dark moments,” she said. “Scary.”

She has regrets. They all do. But they don’t dwell on them.

“Did Kayla know that I loved her that much? That’s a regret I have,” Joy said. “Because of all the things I had going on, I didn’t say ‘I love you’ all the time to my kids. Now we do say it. The boys always tell me, every time I hang up the phone.”

That’s a gift. A gift from Kayla.

“We’ll never understand why things happen,” Joy said. “Not just with Kayla. We don’t understand the plan. We just have to appreciate that she was here for the 13 years we got to hang out with her and appreciate the things that make us tougher than where we started.”

Maybe this is how the universe works.

A girl went into a pool and stopped breathing. Her brother found football as an outlet for his grief, went to a college where his coach introduced him to a healer who taught comfort through breathing. The breathing saved his life.

There are forces at work in the universe that Davin will never understand, but he sees them more clearly now.

“It’s hard to think about, but how would life have turned out if none of that happened?” Davin said. “Of course I wish it didn’t, but how close would our family be? Would we still be in those bad habits we were back then? It’s crazy to think about.”

In August, Davin stood at the head of NC State’s team meeting room to deliver his senior speech. In front of him were more than 120 coaches and teammates. Aside from Doeren and Rylan, no one knew his whole story, but he was finally ready to share.

“I wanted to show people that I’m human, too,” Davin said. “I wanted to be as honest as I could be.”

He hadn’t written the speech down, but he’d practiced what he wanted to say a dozen times at least. At lunch before the team meeting, Davin and Rylan sat together, going over the introduction again and again to get it just right.

How do you start to talk about something so big?

Breathe, Davin thought. Take the first step. Breathe again, and trust that the universe has put you here for a reason, that there are people here who need to hear your story.

And so he told them about Kayla and Joy and Rylan and the pain and the anger and the guilt and the hopelessness and, at last, the refuge, forgiveness and love he found in his family and his team and, yes, the sister who’d been there all along.

“Growing up, it didn’t feel like she was with me. It felt like she was gone,” Davin said. “I wasn’t ready to let her be with me. I wasn’t ready for the truth. Now, I pray before every game. It sounds crazy, but I talk to her — ‘I hope you’re up there watching.’ I tell her what I want to do, and that I do it for her.

“I ask her to protect me.”

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or is in emotional distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or at 988lifeline.org.