The 20-year-old player who collapsed Saturday night during a charity basketball game at Monticello High School was pronounced dead at the University of Virginia Medical Center.
Martell Brooks, a 2007 graduate of Charlottesville High School, collapsed and went into cardiac arrest shortly before 9 p.m. while sitting on the bench during the New Legends of Streetball Celebrity Basketball Game to Fight Heart Disease.
Paramedics performed CPR on Brooks for several minutes before rushing him to UVa hospital. He did not recover.
“I can confirm that he passed,” Abena Foreman-Trice, a UVa hospital spokeswoman, said Sunday.
A cause of death has not yet been announced.
Brooks was remembered as a hard-working student-athlete during his time at Charlottesville High.
“I knew him and was a fan,” said Rick Lilly, athletics director of CHS. “He was a hard worker. Mild mannered. Laid back. He was a great young man.”
Brooks played varsity basketball while at Charlottesville. On several high school sports Web sites, Brooks talked about his love of the sport. On one site, he had listed that his basketball ambition was to “become a legend.”
At Saturday night’s game, Brooks was playing for the Black Stars, a team of local players. The Black Stars were facing the New Legends of Streetball, a traveling team that plays exhibition games of streetball, a flashy, informal style of basketball.
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