Former NFL punter Kasey Redfern has died at 35 after a years-long battle with brain cancer, as South Carolina officials confirmed the loss and his wife described a final turn to hospice.
South Carolina officials reported that former NFL punter Kasey Redfern died at age 35, with details on the death not yet released.
Breitbart News reported that Jonathan Lawson, chief investigator for the Spartanburg County Coroner’s Office, said Redfern had passed away. The coroner’s office has not put out a cause or manner of death.
Redfern’s wife, Lauryl, had already told followers the fight was nearing its end. On Facebook, she called him “the love of my life” and described a “move toward hospice care” as his health collapsed.
She tied the final decline to years of hard treatment for a brain tumor later identified as CNS lymphoma, a cancer in the brain and central nervous system.
A GoFundMe campaign set up in 2023 first made public that Kasey had a brain tumor. That tumor was later found to be CNS lymphoma.
Lauryl wrote that the worst symptoms of recent weeks looked like damage from the medicine meant to save him.
She told followers:
“It seems that everything he’s been experiencing over the last couple of weeks, the falls, extreme decline in short-term memory, random throwing up, and some other things- is likely due to cognitive decline caused by neurotoxicity from all of the treatments he’s had over the last 3.5 years,”
She said the family wanted comfort, not more rounds of therapy that his body could no longer handle.
In her words:
“His poor brain has had all it can take treatment wise so we want to make sure that he can be as comfortable as possible,”
Her post also framed the end in open Christian hope, saying if he “makes it to Heaven soon, he will have it better than the rest of us and for that all I can do is be thankful and joyful and filled with peace (and a lot of jealousy) that He will be WHOLE and in glory with our Savior, the best place we could ask to be.”
Redfern reached the league the hard way. In 2014 he joined the Jacksonville Jaguars out of Wofford College, a small South Carolina school far from the usual football factories.
Over four seasons he also spent time with the Chargers, Panthers, Browns, Lions, Cowboys, and Falcons. Specialists live on short contracts and quick cuts. Making it onto that many rosters still marks a real pro career.
Puners rarely become household names. They work in the quiet spaces of a game, field position, hidden yardage, the difference between a stalled drive and a hidden win. Redfern did that work until the roster chances ran out, then faced a far harder fight off the field.
Lawson’s report from the Spartanburg County Coroner’s Office established the basic fact of Redfern’s death at 35. Officials have not released further medical findings.
What is known comes from the family’s own account of the illness: a 2023 public turn to fundraising after the tumor diagnosis, more than three years of treatment, a sharp slide in the final weeks, and a deliberate move to hospice so he could be kept comfortable.
No separate place of death has been named beyond the coroner’s South Carolina jurisdiction. No timeline more precise than the relative markers above has been issued by officials.
A young husband and former pro athlete is gone at 35. His wife’s public witness was plain about both the medical toll and her faith that he would be made whole. In a culture quick to look away from hard endings, that kind of clarity still matters.
