Rico Omarr Harris (born May 19, 1977 – disappeared October 10, 2014) is an American former professional basketball player. A high school standout in his native Southern California, he later led Los Angeles City College (LACC) to its first state junior college title in 1997. After his college career, he played for some International Basketball League teams, and later with the Harlem Globetrotters.
The eldest of four children born to a former Idaho State star and his young wife, he had given up basketball before returning to it for his last two years at Temple City High School. He soon became a star player himself as well as a top college prospect, likened by those who saw him play to Lamar Odom. He had the opportunity to play for several NCAA Division I basketball programs, but never did due to a combination of academic and personal difficulties. He then chose to attend Cal-State Northridge despite interest from much higher-profile colleges and the NBA, a decision for which he was sharply criticized since it was seen as limiting his chances of reaching the NBA.
Harris ended his season at Northridge after being suspended twice for violations of team rules. He eventually made his way to the Globetrotters, but injuries from a 2000 assault forced him to quit after one month. After leaving basketball, the alcoholism that had begun to manifest itself during his college career intensified, and Harris became addicted to illegal drugs as well. He was arrested many times before he was able to recover from his addictions in 2007.
By October 2014, Harris had relocated to Seattle with a longtime girlfriend and had applied for a job there. He never arrived back there while returning from a trip to his mother's home in Alhambra to complete the move; he was last heard from when he left a message for his girlfriend. The call was traced to the Sacramento area, and his abandoned car was found in a Yolo County park several days later. There were some possible sightings up to a week afterwards, but none have been confirmed beyond a cell phone video the night of his disappearance, and extensive searches since have failed to find any trace of him in the area. His disappearance has been featured on an episode of the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared.
Early life
Harris was the first born son of Henry Harris, a former star forward for Idaho State who, after his college years in the mid-1970s, was playing in a semiprofessional league in Los Angeles when he met 17 year old Margaret Fernandez. She eventually gave birth to Rico, the first of the couple's four children, in 1977. Afterwards they moved to Oregon, where Henry had been offered a job.
Most of the time Henry was a loving husband, but occasionally he became violent and abusive. The couple moved back to the Los Angeles area where they had three more children. Henry would often verbally and physically abuse his children, especially Rico. Despite that, Rico craved his father's affection and approval well into his adulthood.
Eventually Margaret left her husband, taking their children with her when she moved to Alhambra, the suburb where she'd grown up. Rico often held the family together while Margaret worked full-time. Although she later said she felt her oldest son was "born to play basketball", by the age of 15 he had given it up despite his size, and was considering becoming an actor. To that end, he and a friend attended Hollywood High School, a long trip from their homes.
After a year, Rico changed his mind about basketball and returned to the court. Despite the minimal contact he had had with his father since his parents' divorce, he used his father's Temple City address to enroll in high school there for his junior year.
Basketball career
For most of his teens and 20s, Harris was praised for his NBA-level potential. The pinnacle of his playing career, however, would be the 1996–97 season, when he was the MVP of the state community college tournament and led his team to the state championship. He only played one season for a Division I team, however, and despite considerable interest from NBA teams, never signed with them.
High school
Rico, then and , was an immediate sensation on the basketball court. His presence on the team transformed the previously undistinguished Temple City program into a contender, and drew college scouts. "Other teams would double- and triple-team him," recalled one of his coaches. "But you could just watch him for a couple plays and you could see the player he could be." Harris had been a fan of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers teams, and in particular emulated Magic Johnson's style of play.
Off the court, Rico was initially shy and a poor student. However, after meeting a girlfriend whose academically inclined family helped him with his studying, he improved both socially and academically, achieving a 3.0 grade point average. On the court at that time, he became an even more dominant player, averaging 28 points and 15 rebounds a game during his senior season. The Long Beach Press-Telegram recognized him as one of the best high school players in the Western United States during the 1994–95 season, along with Chauncey Billups, Paul Pierce and Jason Terry, all of whom went on to long careers in the NBA.
Jim Harrick, who had just left the head-coaching position at UCLA to take over the University of Rhode Island program, had his eye on Harris, who he had recruited at his former position. He believed Rico could be part of a powerful team at Rhode Island, with Zach Marbury and Lamar Odom, who he was expecting to sign for the next season. However, Harris's newfound academic success did not extend to the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), where he did not do well. UCLA had to withdraw its scholarship offer as a result.
College
Harris went to Arizona State under Proposition 48, which limited him to taking classes during his freshman year in order to regain his eligibility. Without his family and friends close by, he struggled academically and socially, as he originally had at Temple City. In March 1996 he was arrested on a charge of unlawful imprisonment along with two teammates after two women said the players had forced them to perform sex acts against their will. The charges were dropped after investigators uncovered inconsistencies in the women's stories, but the university asked Harris to sit out another year nonetheless.
Los Angeles City College
Instead, Harris returned to California and enrolled in Los Angeles City College (LACC), a two-year junior college, in the hope of improving his grades and playing for Harrick at Rhode Island. On the court, Cubs' coach Mike Miller let Harris play the game his way—shooting three-pointers, leading the fast break with no-look passes and faking out other big men under the basket as it suited him. "He could do it all," a teammate recalled in 2014. "He was Lamar Odom before Lamar Odom."
Harris was the team's biggest star, frequently regarded as the best player on the court from either team in every game he played. He averaged 16.5 points and 14 rebounds a game. NBA scouts began attending games, hoping that Harris might consider foregoing his college career entirely once he was old enough to do so.
LACC posted a 30–6 record that season. It culminated in the school's first-ever California Community College Athletic Association state title, secured with an upset win over San Jose City College. Harris was named the championship tournament's most valuable player.
A few weeks after that triumph, early in 1996, Harris signed his letter of intent to attend Rhode Island and play for Harrick there. However, he stopped attending a psychology class he needed to pass midway through the semester, and failed it as a result, leaving him still ineligible under National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules to transfer to a four-year college and play there. At the time there was speculation that he had deliberately failed the class to avoid having to relocate to the East Coast, far away from his hometown.
That speculation notwithstanding, Harris made his first-ever trip east of Chicago later that year to visit UConn, where an assistant coach who had seen him play likened him to Donyell Marshall, a former Huskies' star who had left school early for an NBA career. He told the Hartford Courant that he had learned from his Arizona State experience. "This time around, I know exactly what I want," he said. In addition to a Division I program, he was still considering declaring for the NBA draft or playing in a professional league overseas. "I'm in no rush."
Harris ultimately returned to LACC for his second season, which he would later say was a mistake. He became less focused, partying heavily with his brother in the apartment they shared near campus, and drinking beer during the day to take the edge off his hangovers. It did not affect his game, however. A teammate recalls Harris showing up for a game once wearing heavy sunglasses to mask the effects of the alcohol. "He probably didn't get no sleep and [was] up all night—then dropped like 35 [points] that game".
The team did not repeat as state champions, and Harris was later described as "a disruptive influence" during that season. Miller at one point suspended him for six games; Harris in turn faulted him for not controlling the team adequately. As the only returning player on that team, he explained, many of his teammates would not give him the ball. "I have no excuses," he told the Los Angeles Times. "I was playing against my own teammates and coaching staff."
Harris's drinking increased as the season wore on, leading to social isolation and costing him his relationship with the girlfriend who he had benefited from in high school. Recruiters from other four-year college programs continued to call and write, but Harris did not respond, believing many of them to be interested in him only for his athletic ability and not his personal development. Instead he declared himself for the 1998 NBA draft.
NBA scouts still saw lots of potential in Harris, and invited him to a pre-draft camp in Chicago for the most highly regarded prospects. But as he had the year before, he would not take the opportunity. Shortly before the camp, he not only decided he would not attend but withdrew from the draft, believing that he was not ready for the challenge on a personal level.
Cal State Northridge
The opportunity to play for Harrick at Rhode Island was still available to Harris, and many friends and observers believed he would take it. In September 1998, he called Bobby Braswell, then the head coach at Cal State Northridge, whom Harris had come to know three years earlier when Braswell had recruited him while an assistant at Oregon. Braswell later recalled that he thought Harris was calling for guidance.
Braswell congratulated Harris on signing with Harrick at Rhode Island. "That's not happening", Harris told him. He did not want to move that far away, and believed LACC coach Miller was trying to get him to go there strictly out of his friendship with Harrick and not out of any consideration for Harris's best interests. Instead, he asked if he could he play for Braswell, whom he trusted, at Northridge, closer to his family, where he could transfer his credits from Arizona State and LACC to become eligible immediately.
Since another local high school player that Northridge had offered a scholarship to had lost it after purposely failing a class, there was space for Harris at the small state school, which had not posted a winning record the seven seasons it had been in Division I. Braswell immediately told Harris the opening was his. Harris believed Braswell's reputation for strict discipline was what he needed most to develop as a person and a player.