Ex-football star pleads guilty




Mike Seidman

Mike Seidman

A former Westlake High football star who went on to play professionally is going to prison for killing a Cal Lutheran University professor in a drunk-driving crash in 2020.

Mike Seidman, 41, pleaded guilty Nov. 15 to felony gross-vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated in the Oct. 16, 2020, head-on collision that killed 88-year-old Fred Rosenberg.

In return for the plea, the district attorney’s office agreed to a four-year sentence, DA spokesperson Joey Buttitta said.

Seidman was facing as many as 10 years.

Seidman, a Thousand Oaks resident who remains on the field as a local youth sports coach, has been free on $250,000 bail since shortly after the crash.

The district attorney said Seidman had alcohol and marijuana in his system the night he lost control of his silver pickup truck on Erbes Road and veered into the path of Rosenberg, a longtime CLU professor who was still teaching classes and volunteering with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Seidman was driving on a suspended license. A year earlier, on Aug. 4, 2019, he’d been arrested on suspicion of DUI after he crashed a car near Avenida de Los Arboles and Westlake Boulevard and left the scene.

Seidman, who was working for the commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield at the time of his arrest, remains free on bail, court records show.

After a successful career at Westlake High School and UCLA, Seidman was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the third round of the 2003 NFL draft. He played four seasons in Carolina, making one Super Bowl appearance, followed by a season with the Indianapolis Colts.

His career was cut short by knee injuries.

In 2018, Seidman was inducted into the Southern California Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.