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Photographer "Eyewitness to Hell" in Liberia; Owen Thomas Suicide Leads to NCAA Rule Changes; Uptick in Russian Military Jets Worries NATO; Michael Jordan Criticizes Obama's Golf

Aired October 30, 2014 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: You're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

A photographer on the front lines in a West African country led Kieran Kesner to an Ebola disaster zone. He was dispatched to Liberia this past August to document the Ebola-stricken villages, as what he called an eyewitness to hell. Kesner equipped himself with whatever protective gear he could research to pack. He captured heart- wrenching photos of body removal teams, health clinics, a local church mourning the loss of many of its members. Only after he returned did he say he was haunted by the memories of what he saw and realized the risks he took in order to snap these photos to share with the world.

Kieran Kesner joins me now.

Nice have you on. Thank you so much.

KIERAN KESNER, PHOTOGRAPHER: Thank you.

BALDWIN: You know, I think it's so important to focus much of our coverage on the plight of these Africans and what they are struggling with. You were so close to the victims, to the bodies as we look at some of your photos. Can you walk me through of what you saw?

KESNER: Sure.

BALDWIN: If we can put some pictures up, guys.

Go ahead and tell me generally what you saw.

KESNER: This was actually my first day in Liberia. And the first day was crazy because like any first day on the job, just an incredible amount of learning curves. In Liberia, these learning curves will kill you. I walked in this room, saw this woman from afar and photographed her. And gradually moved closer until I was three feet above her and I snapped a photo of her. And it wasn't until afterwards I realized kind of the severity of what I was doing and where I was. It was pretty scary.

BALDWIN: How did you function day-to-day even just yourself protecting yourself and also seeing just looking at some of your pictures, duct tape on some of the burial teams, the resources or lack thereof. Did you notice that almost immediately? KESNER: There was certainly a lack of resources. In one town the

whole health care facility had to close down because they didn't have rubber gloves but yet they were close to firestone which is one of the largest rubber plantations in the world. Like a typical African problem and just heartbreaking. Yeah, you suited up every day in protective gear. Can you only wear for 10 or 15 minutes at a time because 100 degrees. It's the rainy season. And you're stressed. I don't know. It's hard to see. Your goggles fog over so you're shooting blind. You often don't wear protective gear and then you're worried.

BALDWIN: It's obviously so much of this is about the photos you took but the stories behind some of the people we're looking at.

I want to play a little bit of sound and you can help me explain, when we come out of this, who this man is and what his message is.

But go ahead and play this.

I believe he's one of the men from one of the burial teams you shot.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No more in the family again. Because of sickness. (INAUDIBLE) -- more people would die. (INAUDIBLE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Talking about the stigma.

KESNER: Yes.

BALDWIN: Is that what he's facing?

KESNER: That's Matthew. He's a young guy. And essentially, when I first met him I asked him I said, how is your family been treating you. How is your community treating you? No problem. Not at all. After I spent day with him and they picked up a body and then we were burying the body in the pouring rain, he opened up to me and said, can I say something. I said, yeah, I can record it. He just opened up and said we're completely being outcast by our families and our communities. If it wasn't for the leader of the burial team, we wouldn't have a place to stay. It's an incredible stigma around these people who are literally saving people's lives.

BALDWIN: I had dinner last night with a bunch of Liberian refugees. They talked about the stigma. Here they are on edge. Every time they see a Liberia area code popping up they are fear of someone dying. Dealing with the stigma in the states as well. At the end of the day, you're back at the states. You're moving along to the next assignment. And I never covered something like Ebola in Africa, but there are images that haunt you for a long time.

What -- when you close your eyes, what has stayed with you the most

KESNER: Everything. It's not funny, but funny, because when you're there and shooting, you go out every day and you shoot and you do your job and then you go to bed at night and you fall asleep and it's no problem. It's not until you come home and you kind of fall asleep in your own bed for the first time that all of a sudden you have these dreams and start to remember and your brain just plays games with you, you know. But, I don't know.

BALDWIN: Thank you for taking the pictures. Thank you for coming on CNN and just sharing what is happening in what really is ground zero in this whole virus. Thank you so much.

KESNER: Thank you for having me.

BALDWIN: If you want to see more of his pictures, go to my Facebook, Facebook.com/brookebaldwinCNN.

Good luck to you, sir. Appreciate it.

Coming up, talking about the NCAA, do they do enough to keep their players safe their athletes safe? They say they have no obligation to do so. Critics say NCAA has ignored its own studies on concussions. That story next on CNN.

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BALDWIN: A University of Pennsylvania football player's suicide is raising new questions about the safety of college football. The investigation into why Owen Thomas killed himself led to a shock discovery. What neurologists found is calling for a change in NCAA rules.

Sara Ganim, with CNN Investigations, explains.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

SARA GANIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Owen Thomas had just been elected captain of his university of Pennsylvania football team when he killed himself. He was only 21.

(on camera): Sometimes with suicide there are warning signs and there are things that led up to it. Was that the case with Owen?

THOMAS NEIL THOMAS, FATHER OF OWEN THOMAS: No. In fact, he had the spring game about 10 days before he committed suicide. And we were all at the spring game.

KATHY BREARLEY, MOTHER OF OWEN THOMAS: I would never have thought Owen, of all people, would commit suicide. I thought something would turn up. Somebody would tell me something and I'm going to think, ah- ha, now I understand.

GANIM: That moment would soon come. Owen had played football since he was 9 years old. A dozen years of hard hits and tackles.

THOMAS NEIL THOMAS: We tried to put him off football as long as we possibly could but he wanted to play so badly and lived for that contact. He enjoyed that. GANIM: After his death, a team of doctors from Boston University

asked his parents if they could study his brain.

KATHY BREARLEY: I was 100 percent sure they wouldn't find anything. I was just amazed. Amazed when they said they found it.

GANIM: Doctors found Owen suffered from CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

DR. ROBERT STERN: That's real tell-tale evidence of CTE.

GANIM: It's a disease born from head trauma, liked to depression and diagnosed only after death.

STERN: It was really shocking and very scary.

GANIM: Dr. Robert Stern was part of the team that studied Owen Thomas' brain.

STERN: Number one, he was only 21 and, number two, he never had a single concussion.

GANIM: Instead, he believes Owen Thomas had sub-concussion.

STERN: A sub-concussion is the same thing as a concussion in terms of the brain cells being temporarily disturbed, not working right, but without the symptoms of concussion.

GANIM: No symptoms makes sub-concussions particularly dangerous. According to Dr. Stern, hits add up. The more practices with full contact, the bigger the risk.

STERN: These football hits are around 20g per hit. That's probably the simplistic equivalent of a car driving 30, 35 miles per hour into a brick wall. So imagine that 1,000, 1500 times a year. That repetitive force to the head, with the brain moving inside.

GANIM: After high-profile CTE cases were found in pro athletes, the NFL made a rule limiting the number of contact practices. But the NCAA only has guidelines. No rules. So over a year, a college athlete can get hit more times.

Here's a breakdown. During the season, NFL rules allow just 14 contact practices in an 18-week period. NCAA guidelines recommend no more than two per week during the 12-week season. That's twice as many as the pros. During spring practice, the NFL doesn't allow contact at all while the NCAA permits it.

RAMOGI HUMA, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL COLLEGE PLAYERS ASSOCIATION: They don't want to actually really back any reform. That's where we have an issue.

GANIM: Ramogi Huma is the president of the National College Players Association. He says the NCAA needs to have enforceable rules, not guidelines.

HUMA: It comes to players brains, it's optional to protect them and that's not OK.

GANIM: Owen Thomas' parents say they are worried who is looking out for the players. They knew nothing about sub-concussions or CTE before their son died.

KATHY BREARLEY: The decisions you make when you're 19, you're not thinking about your long-term future. And I think perhaps the NCAA has a big responsibility for these young people to at least have some thought about their long-term health issues.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

GANIM: There's a recent preliminary settlement between NCAA and several players, $75 million. But that does not address contact practices. So, there are many advocates who are very upset that say this is a very important issue. And Owen Thomas' parents told me if they hadn't been -- they hadn't been educate on the risk of having so much contact, their son would have acted differently on the field.

BALDWIN: 21 years of age. They talked to you and shared the story.

Thank you for doing that.

GANIM: Of course.

BALDWIN: Sara Ganim, it's an important story. Thank you.

Coming up here on CNN, a, quote-unquote, "unusual uptick" in the size and scale and size of Russian flights to parts of Europe, ringing alarm bells. What those flights could signal, next.

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BALDWIN: Some unusual activity from Russian military jets is triggering major concerns. NATO is worried about a sudden uptick in Russian military jets zooming over Europe. NATO tracked more than 19 incidences of Russian aircraft in the last 24 hours alone. More troubling, no flight plans were filed, pilots didn't make radio contact with civilian authorities, and no plane transponders were turned on.

Let's go to the Pentagon to our correspondent there, Barbara Starr.

Barbara, I don't know how much sense this makes to you. Is this military air exercises? What is this?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, this is, as many people will tell you here at the Pentagon, sort of old-style Soviet Cold War gamesmanship. No other way to put it. If you're flying in Europe and look at your commercial flight, and out your window you see one of these big Old Russian Bear bombers, you might be worried. Russians had done this in Soviet times. They flew a lot. In the last several days, they had some unusual flight patterns. What NATO has seen is large groups of Russian aircraft, eight at a time, flying as far south as Portugal, right up against the Mediterranean, in the Black Sea, in the North Atlantic, in the Baltic, all over the place. So it's the volume, the pace, and where they are flying.

It can be the beginning of a Russian military air exercise, but what U.S. officials and NATO officials think is the Russians are just doing a little bit of that thumbing their nose at NATO, thumbing their nose at the United States.

But as you say, Brooke, here's the real problem. They are not filing flight plans. They are not using their transponders. And they're not in radio contact with commercial air controllers, with flight air controllers across Europe, and that is a big problem. That's very dangerous. It's causing a lot of worry.

BALDWIN: Understandably, so.

Barbara Starr, thank you very much, at the Pentagon for us right now.

Coming up here in just a few minutes, at the top of the hour, we'll take you behind-the-scenes of one of the nation's largest airports. Rene Marsh scored exclusive access so we get to see what the Ebola screening procedures entail for passengers who are arriving from West African countries. We'll take you there and show you.

Stay right here.

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BALDWIN: Michael Jordan making news today. Basketball player. Tar Heel. Never shy about talking smack. Says he would like to hit the links with the president. In an interview that just went up online, he gave a critique of Barack Obama's golf game. Doesn't think much of it. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHAEL JORDAN, FORMER NBA BASKETBALL PLAYER: Never played with Obama but I would. But no, that's OK. I would take him out. He's a hack.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You really want to say that to the president of the United States.

JORDAN: Yeah. Don't worry about it. I never said he wasn't a great politician. I'm just saying he's not a (EXPLETIVE DELETED).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(LAUGHTER)

BALDWIN: So let the tripping begin. Michael Jordan, no stranger to smack talk. On the course one time, with Bill Clinton, he questioned Clinton's manhood for playing on those old-guy tees.

One man is proving that going blind is no reason to quit your career. Chris Downey found the courage to redesign his courage and reinvented himself. Dr. Sanjay Gupta has the story in today's "Human Factor."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) CHRIS DOWNEY, BLIND ARCHITECT: On a Friday, I was at work. On Saturday, I was out riding my bike. On Monday, I went in for surgery. On Wednesday, I was blind.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: After building a successful career as an architect, 40-year-old Chris Downey was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

DOWNEY: I was told it was a little bit more involved, more complicated than they anticipated but it went well. Next time I woke up, the next day, my sight was starting to fail. So I was rushed back to ICU, and the next time I woke up, my sight was all gone.

GUPTA: In fact, before doctors could tell him he was officially blind, a social worker had already stopped by.

DOWNEY: She noticed I was an architect and said, well, we can talk about career alternatives. I was like in shock. I immediately started thinking about the work that I do, and how much of it was sort of immediately possible.

GUPTA: A can-do attitude coupled with some new tools, including a special embossing printer and wax sticks --

DOWNEY: Especially as you work with it, it gets warm. It gets tacky and it sticks to paper.

GUPTA: -- has helped Downey become one of the world's few blind architects with a special sense for designing for the disabled.

DOWNEY: If I'm doing a project for people with disabilities, it's about ability. It's about keeping everybody moving. It's enabling as many people to function to their fullest capacity possible.

GUPTA: Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, reporting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)