A USC commit, a cleat filled with peanuts, and the war for Gus Cordova’s reputation – Daily News

LOS ANGELES — Gus Cordova didn’t kill anybody. That is the inarguable truth.

A horde of faceless voices across the nation still claim attempted murder, the reputation he can’t escape.

Cordova announced Tuesday night that he had fully shut down his recruitment, a sworn loyalty to a USC program that has been nothing but kind, according to his mother Shane. And his future beckons, a 6-foot-5, 250-pound defensive end commit in USC’s class of 2025 with a mean burst off the edge. For now, though, he doesn’t much leave his house in Lake Travis, Texas. He didn’t go to prom this junior year. His Twitter comments are often restricted, filtering away the vitriol.

Everyone, these days, knows Gus Cordova as the Lake Travis football player who poured peanuts in his allergic teammate’s locker.

To some, this was an act of premeditated assault. To some, this was simply an ill-advised prank. Some are disgusted by him. Some advocate for him. There are two narratives that surround Cordova, polar-opposite prisms with which to view the USC commit, clouded by national outcry and a culture war in Texas.

Nearly a full year later, as family and friends work staunchly to clear his name, his future is still clouded by a million-dollar-plus lawsuit hanging over his school district.

“I just, I don’t know how it went so bad so fast,” Shane Cordova said.

In early October, members of the Lake Travis football team were discussing their Thursday night dinner plans. Someone suggested they swing by Texas Roadhouse, the chain famed for its free peanuts and the shells scattered across the floor.

Carter Mannon, a sophomore offensive lineman, spoke up. He couldn’t go. He had a serious peanut allergy, he explained.

Just a few minutes later, as alleged in that scathing April lawsuit from Mannon’s mother Shawna against the Lake Travis Independent School District (LTISD), Cordova and a teammate snuck back into the Lake Travis locker room and scattered peanuts in Mannon’s cleats. One of them, depending on who you ask – Cordova’s parents say it was him, but the lawsuit alleges it was his teammates – thought better of it the next day and emptied the shoes out into the trash.

Shawna’s lawsuit alleged there were still leftovers in Mannon’s cleats when he returned to his locker that Friday. In a conversation with the Southern California News Group, she said Mannon didn’t see any left in the cleats when he tucked them under his arm.

Either way, the peanuts seeped enough residue onto the soles to spread hives on Mannon’s arm.

“Whether the peanuts were actually still in the locker, and they took ’em out, and it was still residue – who cares?” one parent of a former Lake Travis player said. “The intent was still there.”

Teammates, according to now-graduated offensive lineman Legend Cabello, wiped off Mannon’s locker with water and soap and took his uniform to the coaches’ office. Mannon scrubbed his hands, and played the whole game that Friday night.

But if he’d touched his face earlier and didn’t have his EpiPen, he could have died, Shawna said.

That’s where the mess began.

A mother stricken

Carter Mannon was a big kid. Youth coaches loved that. But his mother held him out of football until he started the seventh grade. She didn’t want her son getting hurt.

In late August, with unblemished lives and their children’s futures blooming on Friday nights, Mannon’s parents sat behind Shane and Cordova’s stepdad, Rob Lilly, in the stands at Lake Travis’ first game of the season. Mannon was a 15-year-old sophomore offensive lineman in his first year on varsity, a pride for his family. Cordova was a nationally targeted recruit from coast to coast, a pride of Travis County.

They weren’t quite friends, perhaps. But they were friendly. During the game, Shawna Mannon patted Cordova’s mother on the back.

“We’re just so proud of him,” she told Shane.

On Oct. 6, less than two months later, Shawna Mannon got a call from one of Carter’s friend’s mothers before Lake Travis’ game against Del Valley.

Something happened with Carter. They put peanuts in his stuff. You need to figure out what’s going on. 

“That’s probably my worst nightmare,” Shawna Mannon said.

In the locker room before getting on the bus to Del Valley that Friday, Cabello swapped cleats with the 6-foot-5 Mannon and took his size-17s. Others took Mannon’s uniform to the coaches’ office and exchanged it for a clean jersey. Head coach Hank Carter quickly benched Cordova and the teammate who had accompanied him. Lake Travis steamrolled Del Valley 45-0.

Shawna didn’t learn the full story until after the game, when Carter came home.

He told her, Shawna said – and as is alleged in her lawsuit – that Cordova asked Carter in that Texas Roadhouse conversation if peanuts could kill him.

“He asked me first, Mom,” Carter Mannon told Shawna, she remembered.

Her stomach sank.

Two different stories

Shane Cordova called Shawna Mannon after the Del Valley game, asking frantically if her son was all right. She reached out repeatedly in the days to come. Later the next week, Gus Cordova delivered a handwritten letter of apology to Carter Mannon.

Shawna felt the letter was insincere, calling it a “toddler’s attempt.”

Shawna Mannon said Hank Carter told her that Cordova and his teammate would be properly punished. The football coach benched them for two weeks, sending them running every morning and every practice until Cordova’s knees howled.

“He didn’t gripe about it,” Shane Cordova said, “because he understood the gravity of the situation.”

Gus Cordova was banished to the JV locker room, kept separate from the team. His parents took away his phone, and his car.

To Shawna Mannon, it wasn’t nearly enough.

She thought Cordova should have been suspended, and she reported the incident to Lake Travis. But the school told her, she said, that the football program would handle it.

Weeks later, Shawna Mannon agreed to meet Shane Cordova at Maudie’s, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Austin. Cordova’s mother walked in with a smile on her face, sliding into her seat, hoping to put it behind them.

The first thing out of Shawna Mannon’s mouth, Shane Cordova said, was that she could get her son convicted of multiple felonies.

“I was like, I just don’t – I’m so worried right now,” Shane Cordova said.

Shawna Mannon, though, has an entirely different recollection of that conversation. She wanted to meet to assure her that everything was going to be OK. She explained that Cordova’s actions could reasonably be classified as assault under Texas penal codes. She stressed the importance of avoiding differences in details, that Cordova should be honest with his story, and left her with a hug.

The details, like their descriptions of that chat, haven’t remotely lined up since.

Shawna Mannon’s lawsuit painted Cordova as an unabashed bully, one who reveled in the district’s lack of punishment and only doubled down on his actions. At one point, the lawsuit alleges Cordova has “continued to boast about what he refers to as his ‘attempted murder’ of Mannon.” Shawna Mannon’s lawsuit accuses Cordova, in addition, of flicking peanuts out of a Planters can at Carter Mannon as the team was hanging out that same Friday.

Cabello, the offensive lineman, never saw Cordova tossing any peanuts, testifying as such in an LTISD board meeting in March. Cordova felt bad instantly after his actions were discovered that Friday, those who know him all emphasize, fessing up to coaches and apologizing to Mannon. All vehemently deny that Cordova picked on Mannon in the season to come.

“(Gus) committed to USC, and people are going to be watching,” said Cabello’s father Robert, who asserted Cordova hadn’t bullied Mannon at practice or elsewhere. “People are going to want to know who this kid is. And so, I just feel that the truth needs to be told.”

The only truth anymore: Neither Gus Cordova nor Carter Mannon meant for any of the storm that came.

A media explosion

To be clear, Shawna Mannon says she never wanted to ruin Gus Cordova’s life, or take away his future at USC.

“I just wanted something on his record that said he assaulted somebody,” Shawna Mannon said. “Because, in my eyes, he assaulted somebody.”

Unsatisfied with Cordova’s two-game suspension, Shawna Mannon turned to the LTISD Police Department, she said, who told her quickly they wouldn’t apply criminal charges.

In November, LTISD superintendent Paul Norton sent a district-wide email to the Lake Travis community, announcing the LTISD police had completed an investigation and had “submitted that report to the Assistant District Attorney’s Office for review,” Norton wrote. But when the Southern California News Group contacted the Travis County District Attorney’s office, no public record existed of a report being filed.

“No criminal case can proceed unless our office receives a referral from law enforcement,” the DA’s office wrote in a statement. “There is currently no pending case in the office of the District Attorney.”

When asked for clarification on whether the investigation was sent to the District Attorney’s office, the LTISD released a statement to the SCNG that the Assistant District Attorney’s Office and County Attorney’s Office were “consulted to review potential criminal charges.”

“While those agencies may advise on the elements of an offense, they do not make any final determinations,” the statement continued. “Working with those agencies, the Lake Travis ISD Police Department determined criminal charges were not warranted.”

In December, according to an email obtained by the Southern California News Group, Lake Travis assistant principal Sandra Surdy told Shawna Mannon she had questioned her son and concluded in an investigation that Cordova hadn’t bullied him. Carter Mannon told her, Surdy wrote, that he was frustrated but “was not afraid to go to school or football practice.”

Lake Travis changed Carter Mannon’s schedule so he would no longer be in Gus Cordova’s class, and Surdy wrote Shawna Mannon that Cordova “has been directed to stay away from Carter.”

“Was changing Gus’ schedule a consideration and was that attempt made first?” Shawna wrote in a later email.

Before long, Shawna Mannon was peppered with a stream of media requests. The “TODAY Show” reached out. So did “People” magazine. So did the “Dr. Phil” show. It was overwhelming. But it became important to Shawna Mannon, and her son, that their perspective be shared, and their story told, if the district and police department wouldn’t budge.

“This is a crazy story, that someone on a team would do this to a teammate,” Shawna Mannon said. “It’s a crazy story, and they’re interested to hear about it.”

“And our point of view was, you know what, if this spreads awareness for food allergies, if this saves one kid? Success.”

Within months, Gus Cordova had become a lightning rod, nationally and locally, center to a furious debate over the power of football in Texas and community members who felt the district was shielding the program.

“I mean, it just seems like the powers that be are extremely biased, and it’s just hard to imagine that an impartial decider would’ve decided to do nothing,” said one teacher at Lake Travis, referring to the district’s lack of disciplinary action.

And the backlash against Cordova, the story pinging across Facebook allergy advocacy groups and Reddit recruitment forums, has been vicious.

Cordova has grown up, for most of his life, with Lilly as his stepfather. Cordova’s father died when he was just months old.

A couple of months ago, a message hit Shane Cordova’s phone.

“I hope your son dies,” it read, according to Lilly, “like your first husband died of cancer.”

USC’s interest in Cordova

Nearly a full year later, Cordova still holds nearly 50 scholarship offers from schools across the country.

That included USC, which held deep, distant ties with the Cordovas. Ralph Rucker, Cordova’s cousin, was a backup quarterback for Lincoln Riley at Oklahoma. Sammy Ochoa, the son of Lake Travis defensive line coach Omar Ochoa, was recruited by USC defensive ends coach Shaun Nua when he was at Navy.

NCAA rules prohibit USC from making any kind of statement on a prospective recruit. But the family had been “lucky,” Shane Cordova said, for the program’s understanding of the situation.

“They were the first and only ones to ask us, ‘How are you guys doing?’” Shane Cordova said. “They were very kind, and cognizant that this issue is around, and it’s still kind of floating around.”

Gus Cordova remains in Lake Travis, he and his family living in the paranoia of anyone looking at him the wrong way, a year left before he’ll flee for USC.

Carter Mannon became an outcast in Lake Travis’ locker room, finding more peace this spring after transferring to Vandegrift High, roughly 20 miles to the north in Leander, Texas. It was never their intention to move, Shawna Mannon said. But it was necessary.

As with everything, the town is split on their reasons. The retaliation from Gus Cordova against her son had become “unbearable,” Shawna Mannon said, the lawsuit alleging that Cordova “constantly taunted” Mannon and “boasted about being untouchable.” Others who know Gus Cordova continue to deny he had needled Carter Mannon.

“They were painting Carter Mannon to be this little-bitty kid, he’s innocent, victim of bullying, Gus is walking around picking on him … that’s what they were telling everyone,” Robert Cabello said. “OK, none of that ever happened.”

Between the families themselves, a sort of tense peace has settled. Shane Cordova hopes for the best for the Mannons in Leander. Shawna Mannon sued the LTISD – not Cordova.

“We’re not going for his future NIL deals,” Shawna Mannon said. “We’re not going for his future NFL contracts. We’re not going for any of that, right? We very well could. But I have no desire.”