Notre Dame's football player Manti Te'o played this season after facing two great personal tragedies: his girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, and his grandmother Annette Santiago died on the same day in September.

Kekua, 22, had been in a serious car accident in California and then had been diagnosed with leukemia. Te'o reportedly would call her and they would talk nightly. He appeared on ESPN's "College GameDay" and talked about letters Kekua wrote him while she was sick, and he was distraught when she died. The two were said to have met at a football game outside of Palo Alto in 2009, according to the South Bend Tribune.

He also said he sent flowers to her funeral.

A few days after she died Te'o's Notre Dame played against Michigan State. He told reporters at the game, "It was hard," regarding the week after Kekua's death. "But I had my family around me. At the end of the day, families are forever." 

With all this said, Te'o is now left only with the memory of his girlfriend - a girlfriend who never existed, new reports revealed. Deadspin broke the story Wednesday.

The girlfriend that Te'o was in love with was not a real person. There are Social Security Administration records that his grandmother died at the age of 72, but there are no SSA records of the death of Kekua in Nexis. Her death, mentioned numerous times in news reports, "produces no obituary or funeral announcement in Nexis, and no mention in the Stanford student newspaper," Deadspin noted. The Stanford registrar's office has no record that a woman by the name of Lennay Kekua ever enrolled.

Based on investigation by the news outlet, there is no news report in records of a car accident involving Kekua and background checks led to dead ends. There is no record of her birth in news. Perhaps more shocking than anything else are the photographs.

Online tributes and TV news reports used photographs that they identified as Kekua - but those pictures are from a social media account of a 22-year-old California woman who is not named Lennay Kekua - she is not a Stanford graduate, was not in a car accident and does not have leukemia. She never met Te'o, oh, and she is still alive. 

This week, the California woman, who chose to protect her identity, spoke to Deadspin and said she was confused and shocked to find out that she became the face of a dead woman. "That picture," she said, "is a picture of me from my Facebook account."

A Twitter conversation between Te'o and Kekua revealed that they did not meet at Stanford in 2009. On Oct. 10, 2011, the first made contact and Te'o wrote "nice to meet u too ma'am."

Forbes noted that Kekua and her attachment to Te'o was "a virtual caricature created by a friend...and that the beloved football star himself may very well have been apart of the elaborate hoax."

Te'o denied doing anything wrong but Forbes said "what remains certain" is that he and Notre Dame knew  about the hoax as early as Dec. 26 and kept it a secret to avoid a media frenzy before the Irish's BCS national title game appearance on Jan. 7. 

There were contradictory reports about Kekua starting in early 2012. Sports Illustrated said she was in a car accident that left her "on the brink of death..." but eight months before that, in September, ESPN said she died of cancer. In June 2012, doctors discover she has leukemia and she graduated that summer from Stanford, according to the South Bend Tribue, The New York Times identified her as a "Stanford alumnus."

Kekua died in California after Te'o's grandmother died in Hawaii on Sept. 11. But a different report says Kekua died first and Te'o's grandmother released a statement expressing her condolences. New York Post said Kekua died three days later; ESPN and CBS said she died four days later.

Brian Te'o told multiple reporters the family never met Kekua.

The list continues.

Check back for more details of the evolving story. 

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