Shadows Over Brevard
The news of Tim Wakefield’s passing fell like a shadow across Brevard County. A beloved native son, he had risen from Eau Gallie High School’s baseball fields to the shining lights of Major League Baseball, his knuckleball a marvel of its own. Yet, after a long fight with cancer, his life was cut short. Just five months later, tragedy deepened: his wife, Stacy, succumbed to the same illness. For their community, the grief was not only personal, it was a reflection of a wider unease, a reminder of the invisible dangers many suspect have lingered in Brevard’s air, soil, and water for decades.
In neighborhoods scattered across the Space Coast, families speak in hushed tones of diagnoses repeating from house to house, even pet to pet. It has become an unsettling refrain: cancers that strike too often, too close, leaving residents to wonder if something far larger is at play.
The concerns are not unfounded. Brevard has been here before, cast into the spotlight of environmental scrutiny. When the U.S. government revealed in 2022 that water contamination at Camp Lejeune contributed to alarming cancer rates, Brevard drew comparisons of its own. With three major military installations—NASA, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and Patrick Space Force Base—residents and advocates point to groundwater tainted by toxic substances like Trichloroethylene (TCE). Some argue Brevard’s plight may rival or even surpass Camp Lejeune’s.
The region’s history is riddled with troubling patterns. Clusters of childhood illnesses. An unusual rise in ALS cases. Young adults, barely into their futures, are confronting rare cancers. Since the 1980s, reports have surfaced of dangerous chemicals disposed of in open burn pits at Cape Canaveral: arsenic, lead, cadmium, and a cocktail of metals and compounds known to warp ecosystems and endanger lives. More recently, PFAS—“forever chemicals”—have emerged as Brevard’s most insidious specter. In 2018, the Department of Defense disclosed PFAS contamination in groundwater around Patrick Space Force Base, in nearby schools, parks, and even residential neighborhoods. Parents began to fear that irrigation water, once a symbol of life, was slowly poisoning their children.
Stories began stacking into painful testimony. Alumni from Satellite High School revealed rare cancer diagnoses, more than fifty cases in all. Many were athletes, their youth once spent on fields now suspected of contamination. In 2019, military veteran Jim Holmes stood before Congress, grieving his daughter, who had died of brain cancer, having once been a student at that same high school. His words echoed a bitter truth: disease here was no longer anecdote but a recurring pattern.
The issue stretched far beyond Brevard. In Philadelphia, six Phillies ballplayers were lost to glioblastoma, igniting investigations into the synthetic turf they had played upon, material laced with PFAS, heavy metals, and carcinogens. Back home, families in South Patrick Shores discovered that their homes had been built over an unremediated military landfill, where toxic vapors might still creep upward through the soil. Official reassurances felt hollow; when dozens of young adults were diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in the 1990s, the Florida Department of Health had dismissed the pattern as a “virus.” Decades later, residents continue to ask: what if it was the ground beneath their feet all along?
Despite mounting evidence, investigations often arrive late and end incomplete. The Brevard County Cancer Assessment of 2019 confirmed elevated cancer rates in two zip codes, yet experts criticized it for excluding illnesses most often linked to PFAS and other contaminants. The report offered numbers, but no clarity for families already devastated by loss.
Against this backdrop, the Wakefield tragedy is not an isolated grief but a symbol of collective unease. A gifted athlete who brought pride to his hometown, gone too soon. A wife, a partner, following him in a cruel symmetry. Their story crystallizes the fears of a community where too many households carry similar burdens, where parents bury children and survivors shoulder the weight of questions without answers.
Yet in sorrow, Brevard has also found resolve. Residents band together, pressing for research, for accountability, for prevention. Their fight is not only for memory but for the living, for the children playing on fields, for the families drinking from taps, for a community that deserves the safety it has too long been denied.
The loss of Tim and Stacy Wakefield is immeasurable. But within the grief lies a call: to confront the unseen poisons of the past, to demand vigilance in the present, and to carve out a healthier future for Brevard County’s generations yet to come.- Artificial turf potentially linked to cancer deaths of six Phillies ball players: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/10/phillies-ball-players-cancer-artifical-turf
- Brevard County Cancer Assessment: https://brevard.floridahealth.gov/_files/_documents/press-release/2019/05/050219-brevardcounty-cancerassessment.pdf
- Curt Schilling Reveals Tim Wakefield's Cancer Diagnoses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr_qAt5upGs
- Hazardous waste produced by the Department of Defense in Cape Canaveral: https://www.advocatesvoice.com/2020/09/cape-canaverals-hazardous-waste.html
- Jim Holmes Testimony: https://www.advocatesvoice.com/2021/04/no%20defense.html
- NASA's Health Plans for the Indian River Lagoon: https://www.advocatesvoice.com/2021/10/nasalagoonplan.html
- Toxic Triangle: https://www.advocatesvoice.com/2024/03/blog-post.html
- US government set to release Camp Lejeune cancer study: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-government-set-release-camp-lejeune-cancer-study-2024-01-18/