Player From 1979 Final Four Stabbed To Death By Wife Who Says She Caught Him Looking At Porn

Matt White, the starting center on Penn's 1979 Final Four team, was found stabbed to death in his suburban Philly home yesterday. He was 53. Weirder still is that White's wife, Maria Rey Garcia-Pellon, has been charged with killing him by stabbing him in the neck while he slept, and she allegedly told police why she did it:

"I caught him looking at pornography, young girls, I love kids," Garcia-Pellon told investigators. "I had to do it."

Court papers say Garcia-Pellon grabbed two knives and a glass of water from the kitchen around midnight Monday morning. She returned to the bedroom and put the knives under the bed. While her husband was sleeping, she stabbed him with one of them.

White awoke and the two struggled briefly before he collapsed of his wounds.

"I'm dying, I'm dying," he said, according to the court filing.

Garcia-Pellon then changed her clothes and left the house. She went to the home of a friend and told her White had allegedly been viewing pornography on a computer and she killed him, the records state.

The friend called 911.

White's was not a household name, but college basketball fans of a certain age might remember him from that '79 Final Four, the year of the Magic-Bird final. His Penn team was the last Ivy League bunch to reach the national semifinals, knocking off Iona, North Carolina, Syracuse, and St. John's to get to Salt Lake City. The 6-foot-11 White shot 63.3 percent and averaged more than 11 points and seven rebounds per game during the Quakers' run. He wound up getting drafted that summer by the Trail Blazers before spending a dozen years playing professionally in Spain.

[ Daily Pennsylvanian/ Philadelphia Inquirer; photo via Daily Pennsylvanian]