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The following is an excerpt from the first episode, “Just About Superman,” in which Len’s mother, Lonise, describes the premonition that weighed on her before her son’s death.
 

“I just had this premonition,” Lonise Bias says, “this intuitiveness that something was going to happen.”

In 1985, Dr. Lonise Bias and her husband James were content. Their sons Jay and Eric and their daughter Michelle were all healthy and living at home.

And then there was their oldest son, Len.

“He,” Lonise says, “was on top of the world.”

Len was thriving. A 6-foot-8 senior forward at the University of Maryland, he was perhaps the best college basketball player in the country, a powerful athlete with a perfect jumper, poised for NBA superstardom. His athleticism drew frequent comparisons to another young star already in the league: Michael Jordan.

And for Lonise, her son’s rise was incredible to watch—seeing him as a player, and as a person, on the brink of fulfilling his dream.

“It was so exciting to go out to Cole Field House and to see him play, and then just to see him mature in his game, until the end when he was a powerhouse,” she says. “It was actually unbelievable. I could not believe it. It was like a dream. It really was.”

But still. Throughout her son’s senior season, in the back of her mind, Lonise held that sense of unease. Her son had entered a world of infinite possibility. He had fame. He was near riches. And more importantly, whether on the basketball court or off it, he exuded joy.

“People would say, ‘Oh, I know you’re so excited about your son.’ And I can remember telling someone, ‘It’s like you can see a gold ring, but you don’t think you’re going to be able to touch it.’ It just didn’t feel like it was going to happen to me,” Lonise explains. “And it wasn’t that it was too good to be true. It was something weightier down in me that was a truth, that what looks like is going to happen is not going to take place.”

So while she experienced these moments of pride watching her son do what few people on Earth could do on a basketball court, she also felt this weight.

“I knew something was going to happen,” Lonise says, “and I—I was just so sad. It was something in me telling me something is coming. Something is coming.

“I knew death was coming.”