Ed Sheffey's promising basketball career was ended in two unrelated auto incidents, and played one season at Georgetown.

Sheffey, grew up in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington DC, where he was an honorable mention All-Met selection in 1994-95. He opted for a fifth year at Oak Hill Academy, averaging 13 points a game and attracting scholarship interest from California, Georgia, Clemson, and Minnesota. Instead, he enrolled at Georgetown, where as a freshman in the fall of 1996 he replaced Allen Iverson in the starting backcourt alongside returning sophomore Victor Page. Sheffey started 29 of 30 games as a Georgetown freshman, with the only non-start being a game where coach John Thompson started senior walk-on guard Brendan Gaughan in Gaughan's home town of Las Vegas. Despite a dominant season by Page, Sheffey finished second on the team in scoring (8.7 ppg), with eight games in double figures and a team high 104 assists. Sheffey's best game that season was an 18 point effort at St. John's.

With the ill-advised move by Victor Page to pursue a pro basketball career, Sheffey appeared to be the Hoyas' rising backcourt star. In the morning of Aug. 21, 1997, a week before the return of students to campus, Sheffey was observed by police driving 97 mpg in a 40 mpg zone of Landover Road. Sheffey was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, resisting arrest, fleeing and eluding a police officer, driving without a license, reckless and negligent driving, and speeding. The misdemeanor charges were later dropped to reckless driving and speeding, and Sheffey completed 100 hours of community service.

At the time of the arrest, Sheffey was promptly suspended and later dismissed from the team. It was the first arrest of a Georgetown basketball player in the Thompson era, and a visible stumble for the program--four days earlier, a front page article in the Washington Post publicly questioned the academic direction of the University's flagship program. Sheffey was one of 11 players between 1994 and 1998 that transferred or left Georgetown early, eight of whom were guards.

Following Georgetown, Sheffey did not transfer to a Division I school, suggesting academics may have been an issue. Instead, he found himself at New Mexico Junior College, an open admissions school in Hobbs, NM, that was seen as a stepping stone to attending New Mexico State. Again, an auto incident played a tragic role. On Jan. 16, 1998, one day after his first class at the college, Sheffey was in a pickup truck driven by a fellow teammate, Cory Reed, when Reed's truck failed to negotiate a curve in a road east of El Paso, TX. Sheffey was thrown from the truck, rendering him comatose for more than a week in an El Paso hospital.

"Mr. Sheffey has what we call a closed-head injury," a nurse told Barker Davis of the Washington Times. "In a closed-head injury, there isn't an actual laceration on the head, but blunt-force impact causes the brain to take quite a beating. Neurologically, you come back very slowly from such an injury. We're getting some responses from Eddie, and his vital signs are stable, but he still hasn't spoken."

Sheffey recovered from his injuries and eventually transferred to Norfolk State in 1999, where head coach Wil Jones offered him a scholarship.

"We're very excited about Ed Sheffey joining our program," Jones told the 1999 Blue Ribbon Yearbook. "He's been away from the game for a while, but the doctors have given him the green light to play and I think he's really going to help us. He's a point guard who knows how to play the game." Norfolk State played Georgetown four times from 2001 to 2004, but Sheffey was nowhere to be found. He never made the Norfolk State roster that fall, and dropped off the sports radar thereafter.

Sheffey moved back to Washington, where he took a job in the procurement division of the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2012, according to his Facebook page, Sheffey underwent four sessions of chemotherapy for cancer, and doctors declared him in remission in late 2013. By 2014, Sheffey was readmitted to the hospital and died that summer.

In a Father's Day post that was among his last entries to the site, he wrote: "I implore all fathers who aren't living up to their responsibility to reevaluate yourselves and begin to treasure the precious gift that has been bestowed upon you. Being the best Dad I can can possibly be is the single most important aspect of my life."