ANN ARBOR >> When Jaedan Brown arrived at Michigan her freshman year, she heard story after story about her father, Corwin, the hard-hitting defensive back and popular tri-captain of the Wolverines in 1992.

Everyone had something positive to say about “Flakes,” his nickname back in the day. He was deeply respected for his leadership and work ethic, his smarts and effervescence and aggressive, hard-hitting play. Funny, that’s how Jaedan, who also was voted a captain, played tennis for the Wolverines — with a big serve and aggressiveness at the net and always a team-first attitude.

The more she heard, the more she wondered.

“When I got here, everyone knew him, everyone talked about him in a way that I didn’t know,” Jaedan said during an interview with The Detroit News. “That was so upsetting for me. I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ That just led to even more questions.”

That man described to her is nothing like the one she and her older siblings, Corwin and Tayla, know, the man they now believe suffers from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head like those suffered playing football. CTE can be confirmed only after death, but research is ongoing at the CTE Center at Boston University, and families are hopeful of a breakthrough that would provide a diagnosis while the patient is alive.

Jaedan wanted to focus on college and playing tennis, so she compartmentalized.

Now, Jaedan, 22, who graduated in 2024 and spent last year working on a master’s degree in social work, is asking questions and finally getting answers. Some explain so much, others are difficult to comprehend, and for others, there are no concrete answers. The bonus is she’s beginning to unravel her life journey while getting a deeper understanding of what her father is going through. Since reaching out to the Concussion Legacy Foundation, she has shared their story, hoping to make a difference for her father and other families who believe CTE has robbed them of their loved ones by raising awareness and research funds for CTE. (She held a fundraiser in April, and donations can be made here.)

No one in her family had spoken publicly about Corwin’s mental decline, his paranoia and reclusiveness. When she shared her story with individuals from the Concussion Legacy Foundation, their response surprised and empowered her. They had heard a version of it before. Many times.

The symptoms of CTE they have come to know well. They include those things the Browns fear they see in Corwin: memory loss, impaired judgment, impulse control problems. They can also include aggression, depression, suicidality and progressive dementia. They’re symptoms that can all appear well after an athlete’s playing days.Jaedan was not alone. Still, she worried, even after getting her father’s blessing, how much she should reveal.

“But my mom was like, ‘Jaeden, the things that you wouldn’t want to say are the things that people need to hear,’” Jaedan said. “For so long, I was embarrassed about some of the stuff that I experienced with my dad, and she said those are the things that people need to know, especially the people who knew him.”

Her mother graciously declined to be interviewed, instead wanting Jaedan to tell her story.

Learning more about Dad

Jaedan is a third-generation Michigan athlete. Her maternal grandparents are Michigan graduates and Billy Harris, her grandfather, played football for the Wolverines, was part of the legendary 1969 team and later became an assistant coach and was Corwin’s position coach. Her mother, Melissa, was a swimmer at Michigan.

“Corwin was a go-getter,” Harris said of his son-in-law. “Whatever you would tell the players, he’d say, ‘Coach, how can I get better? What do I need to do?’ Whatever you would give to him, he was going to put 100% in trying to make it happen.”

His teammates recognized that and elected him one of three captains, along with Chris Hutchinson and Elvis Grbac, for the 1992 season.

“Corwin is my favorite captain of my entire time at Michigan,” said former UM offensive lineman Doug Skene (1989-92), who was in Brown’s class. “He’s the greatest that I was ever around, just everything we ever wanted, everything I ever wanted in a captain. He cared so much about the team and winning. He was the guy that, every run, he was at the point of physical exhaustion, passing out because he just worked so hard. He was the model of how hard to work. When Corwin would speak, it just felt like the team was really dialed in as to what Corwin had to say. He was just a great captain.”

After Michigan, Brown, 55, was a fourth-round draft pick of the New England Patriots, and played eight seasons in the NFL (including 1999-2000 with the Detroit Lions), coached at Virginia, the New York Jets, was named defensive coordinator at Notre Dame in 2007, and then coached defensive backs with the Patriots in 2010. Harris said that’s when Corwin started forgetting the defense he was coaching. He was let go the next year.

It was then, after returning to the family home near South Bend, Indiana, that the changes in Brown were becoming obvious. He accused his wife and son of working for the FBI. He believed people were following him. On Aug. 12, 2011, he held Melissa hostage with a handgun in their home for nearly seven hours. The kids were there. Young Corwin hid in his room, the girls went outside, and after hearing a gunshot, fled to their neighbor’s basement.

“My brother was still in the house, and I didn’t know what was happening in there,” Jaedan said. “I was in the basement crying because I thought my mom was dead. I thought my brother was probably next. I was freaking out about my dog. It was crazy.”

Jaedan was 8 years old.

Her father was taken to the hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot to his stomach. He would reach a plea agreement to charges of striking his wife and holding her hostage, but also pled mentally ill to the confinement and domestic battery charges. She said her father sought help for mental illness after that and seemed to contain his aggression. The last time Jaedan witnessed him being violent was when she was 17. She and her sister were fighting, and their parents woke up.

“I think he didn’t have time to regulate his emotions,” Jaedan said. “He just stormed to my room and got on top of me and started choking me until my mom screamed at him to stop, and then he stopped and just went back to bed. Obviously, I was really upset about it, so my mom made him come talk to me, and he was laughing, like he thought it was funny. He didn’t get what he just did.”

During her freshman year at Michigan, Jaedan, whose mother never said anything negative about their father to the kids, decided to do an internet search on her father. A friend, when they were in high school, told her to not Google her father because what she’d find was “bad.”

Jaedan worked up the courage and typed her father’s name into the search bar.

“I had no idea what people knew, because we didn’t talk about it,” she said. “And so one night, I was like, I want to know what people who look him up see. That just opened up this new world. Anytime I would get upset, or anytime I wanted to feel close to my dad, I would look it up, and read about it, and like, almost try to reconnect with him.”

She always has adored her father, and Jaedan acknowledges her relationship with him is different than that of her siblings. The youngest child had been shielded. She describes herself as an empath and it shows when she speaks about him. The internet search led her to start asking people about her father. She talked to Greg Harden, Michigan’s longtime counselor for athletes who died last September. Harden had been close to Brown, and helped police communicate with him during that day in 2011 when he barricaded himself.

“A couple months before Greg died, I had a Zoom with him and I looked at him and said, ‘I want to get to know my dad. Tell me stories,’” Jaedan said. “It was just gradual, four years of me trying to open it up without actually asking (her father) about what happened.”

Helping others

This past year has been revealing to Jaedan on so many levels. Her grandparents, uncle and Melissa were always at her tennis matches. Sometimes, Corwin would attend. But it’s her mother who has always been there for her, for all of them. Jaedan said she feels more empathy for her mother and admires the caregivers for those struggling with suspected CTE.

“Throughout that whole thing, it shows how special my mom is,” Jaedan said. “She never once told me any of this, because she didn’t want me to think differently about my dad. And let me tell you, in high school, there were so many times where I got so mad at her because I felt like she wasn’t trying as hard as she could with my dad, and she so easily could have been like, your dad did this and this and this. She never said, ‘Your dad literally thinks I’m in the FBI.’ I had no idea. She was trying to protect me in the best way she knew how. Can you imagine actually being her?”

Melissa will lay out her husband’s clothes every day and reminds him to shower.

“He’s a shell of himself,” Billy Harris said of his son-in-law. “But he’s in there somewhere.”

Harris believes Corwin is aware of what Jaedan is trying to do to raise funds for CTE research.

“But putting the whole thing together, I don’t know if he understands why she’s doing it,” Harris said. “She went through a lot, she’s going through a lot, and she’s trying to see if she can help somebody else who’s going through the same things that she might be experiencing. But Corwin is on a different level. He might understand that she’s doing this but understanding, ‘Hey, this is a great cause, this is going to help a lot of people,’ I don’t know that he knows that.”

Jaedan has moved home to Indiana and is preparing to launch her professional tennis career after a year away from competition and also will work with the Notre Dame women’s tennis team. She describes her conversations with her dad as “surface level.” She’s working toward getting more questions answered.

“I literally love him so much,” she said.

“I feel so safe with him and in my house, but I’m really scared of having serious conversations with him, because I don’t want to upset him.

“There have been so many times we’re just sitting watching TV, and I want to ask him a million questions, and I literally cannot work up the courage to do it. I feel frozen in my own body.”

The good news is Corwin has agreed to be part of a “Diagnose CTE” Research Project at Boston University.

The goal of the study, open to men 50 and older who played in the NFL for four years and have 12 years of tackle football experience, is eventually finding a way to diagnose CTE during life.

Jaedan would like to work with athletes who have suffered traumatic brain injuries and help their families. She can see herself more involved with the Concussion Legacy Foundation, for which she already has held one fundraiser, as well. And now that she has opened her conversation, she wants to build on that. So many of her fellow Michigan athletes reached out, as did several daughters of NFL players who understand what she has experienced.

“We all would like to be a game-changer, and some of us just don’t have the time or have the gumption to go do it,” her grandfather said. “When the thing is personal, that gives you the drive that you need. To be able to say, OK, I’m going to do it, and then follow through, that’s pretty good stuff.”

While Jaedan contemplates how best to advance her work to help accelerate CTE research, she also is focused on her tennis career. She coached with Blue Chip Tennis Academy in Ann Arbor and gained a new perspective on the game from working with younger players.

“All this has really helped me,” she said of sharing her story. “It’s taken a huge load off my shoulders. I feel so much more clear about life.

Tennis is such a mental sport, that I think I always needed that. I coached this past year (at Michigan), and seeing the other side of it, your perspective changes so much.

“And as I’m training, I’m reminding myself it’s so easy to fall into this, ‘Oh, I played so bad today. I suck. I don’t want to do this right now.’ But when you’re a coach, you see all that, and it’s not that deep. Just relax.

“People have bad days. I was able to see that side and find that passion again, that I, honestly, lost my senior year.

“I feel like a whole new person, I really do.”

And now she has found purpose to help her father and those with suspected CTE.