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Eight months ago, Struby began her workday at the Rose Brooks shelter. Colleagues were talking about the player the Chiefs had drafted a night earlier, the things he could do on a football field being weighed against the things he had done in Oklahoma.

She thought about it, trying to balance these two powerful forces in her life. Eventually she realized that, no, it was not possible to a support a team with Hill on it. Anything else, she would say much later, would feel disloyal to those who confided in and relied on her.

That day she went home and braced for a complicated discussion with her son. Her husband, though, had reached the boy first, carefully explaining Hill’s background in contrast to the women Mommy helps.

When she reached her son’s bedroom door, Struby said, she saw his hand-drawn sign: a Chiefs logo with lines crossing it out.

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This was a 22-year-old athlete who, a little more than a year earlier, had pleaded guilty to putting his girlfriend in a headlock and compressing her airway, striking her in the face and slamming her head against a wall, punching her in the abdomen while she was eight weeks pregnant. Hill, who was sentenced to three years’ probation, would say he was sorry and that he understood why fans were angry. The Chiefs’ general manager, John Dorsey, asked for the trust of the organization and community, still wounded from the morning in 2012 when linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend and then committed suicide on team property in front of the former coach and general manager.

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“I think that’s part of the hard part: I fear people — and maybe this is cynical — I feel like people would’ve been more concerned about Tyreek Hill, in particular, if he wasn’t so good.”