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On 11/16/14 4:41 PM, Wythe Holt jr. wrote:
Thanks for this good sense, Louis. Football -- which unfortunately I like to watch --
breeds violence and disregard of human health through its practices, through the devotion
of all connected with the sport to violence and to "hitting" (the euphemism
always used by football people for what they teach players to do to other players,
usually as violently as possible), through its macho pseudo-manliness mantras and
obedience systems. I hope that all of this about permanent injuries, concussions, and
the (often sexual) violence wreaked upon family members and the young coming into the
sport -- as you so rightly emphasize -- brings about the demise of this vicious and
hurtful sport. Wythe
The latest on all this.
NY Times, Nov. 14 2014
Florida State Player Fled Crash but Got Only Traffic Tickets
By MIKE McINTIRE and WALT BOGDANICH
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — In the early morning hours of Oct. 5, as this
college town was celebrating another big football victory by Florida
State University, a starting cornerback on the team drove his car into
the path of an oncoming vehicle driven by a teenager returning home from
a job at the Olive Garden.
Both cars were totaled. But rather than remain at the scene as the law
requires, the football player, P. J. Williams, left his wrecked vehicle
in the street and fled into the darkness along with his two passengers,
including Ronald Darby, the team’s other starting cornerback.
The Tallahassee police responded to the off-campus accident, eventually
reaching out to the Florida State University police and the university’s
athletic department.
By the next day, it was as if the hit and run had never happened.
The New York Times looked into how the police handled the case,
reviewing law enforcement records and interviewing witnesses, lawyers,
the police and a university representative. The examination found that
Mr. Williams, driving with a suspended license, had been given a break
by the Tallahassee police, who initially labeled the accident a hit and
run, a criminal act, but later decided to issue Mr. Williams only two
traffic tickets. Afterward, the case did not show up in the city’s
public online database of police calls — a technical error, the police said.
A starting cornerback for the Florida State University football team
left the scene of a collision on Oct. 5 but was not charged with a
hit-and-run, an examination by The New York Times found. That contrasts
with another case in the same area in the same month.
Mr. Williams eventually returned to the scene. But Tallahassee officers
did not test him for alcohol. Nor did their report indicate whether they
asked if he had been drinking or why he had fled — logical questions,
since the accident occurred at 2:37 a.m. The report also minimized the
impact of the crash on the driver of the other car, Ian Keith, by
failing to indicate that his airbag had deployed — an important detail,
because Mr. Keith said in an interview that the airbag had cut and
bruised his hands.
The university police, who lacked jurisdiction, nevertheless sent two
ranking officers — including the shift commander — to the scene. Yet
they wrote no report about their actions that night. Florida State
dismissed the role of its officers in the episode as too minor to
require a report or to be entered into their own online police log,
comparing it to an instance when campus officers responded to a baby
opossum falling from a tree.
The car accident, previously unreported by the news media, comes amid
heightened national scrutiny of preferential treatment given to
athletes, including articles by The Times examining how the authorities
have sometimes gone easy on Florida State football players accused of
wrongdoing. The Tallahassee police conducted virtually no investigation
of a 2012 rape accusation against quarterback Jameis Winston, the 2013
Heisman Trophy winner. Mr. Winston is scheduled for a student
disciplinary hearing Dec. 1, nearly two years after the accusation was
first made. He has denied sexually assaulting anyone.
Elijah Stiers, a lawyer from Miami who helped write a state law enacted
this year that toughened penalties for hit-and-run drivers, said the
basic facts of the Oct. 5 crash had warranted criminal charges and a
sobriety test.
“Two-thirty in the morning, people fleeing on foot — at the very least
you’ve got to charge them with hit and run,” he said, adding, “You don’t
get out of it just because you come back to the scene.”
The Times also showed its findings to the Tallahassee police chief,
Michael DeLeo, who said in an interview that the department would
“conduct an investigation to determine what happened and whether the
officers acted appropriately.” He added, “No one should be shown any
favoritism.”
Florida State declined to make anyone available for an interview. In a
series of written responses to questions, the university gave shifting
answers, at one point saying, incorrectly, that Mr. Williams had driven
his car home and that the Tallahassee police were required to call the
campus police under a “mutual aid agreement.” A Tallahassee police
spokesman said there was no policy requiring its officers to contact the
university when its students committed traffic violations.
Neither Mr. Williams, named the most valuable defensive player in last
season’s national championship game, nor Mr. Darby responded to a
request for comment.
In their report on the crash, the Tallahassee officers justified not
charging Mr. Williams because he returned “approximately” 20 minutes
later without being contacted by the police. That stands in sharp
contrast to how the police treated another driver who left the scene and
drove home after a minor, low-speed accident in the same area late last
month. That driver and his mother contacted the police about a half-hour
later to report the accident.
At five miles per hour, the collision inflicted far less damage than
that caused by Mr. Williams’s car — and caused no injuries. Even so, the
police charged the driver, who was not a Florida State football player,
with hit and run.
The Oct. 5 crash occurred shortly after 2:30 a.m., as Mr. Keith, 18, was
driving home on West Tharpe Street from his job at the restaurant. A
Buick Century heading the other way darted in front of him, attempting a
left turn onto High Road. Mr. Keith hit the brakes, but it was too late:
His Honda CR-V collided with the Buick, spinning it around. The Honda
lurched to a halt a short distance down Tharpe, its front end crumpled,
debris scattered around and fluid leaking onto the street.
Shaken, Mr. Keith got out and waited for the Tallahassee police, who
arrived within minutes. An officer approached him with an unexpected
question: Where were the occupants of the other car?
“That’s when I first realized they were gone,” Mr. Keith said.
More officers arrived, and tow trucks were called to remove the two
disabled cars. An officer at the scene, Derek Hawthorne, filled out a
form for the abandoned Buick, labeling the accident a “hit and run,” and
asked that the car be held for processing as evidence. Officers ran a
check on the license plate and found that it was registered to Mr.
Williams’s grandmother in Ocala, Fla.
About a half-hour after the accident, the investigation took an odd
turn. Another officer at the scene, Joseph Smith, discovered that the
glass front door of a closed Exxon station at the corner of Tharpe and
High was shattered, apparently from a break-in, according to his report.
The gas station manager was called, and she replayed security camera
video for the police showing a man breaking in and walking out with an
armload of merchandise.
The video, obtained by The Times, also captured a poor-quality image of
the accident. In it, the Buick containing the Florida State football
players could be seen attempting the left turn onto High Road, in the
direction of the Exxon station, just as the burglar was about to leave
and walk toward High Road.
“They happened within seconds of each other,” said Karen Southern, the
Exxon manager, adding that the police had mentioned the accident to her
but had not said whether they believed there was any connection to the
burglary. No evidence has surfaced to link the two, and the break-in
remains unsolved.
Mr. Keith said one of the officers had asked him about the Exxon’s
broken front door, and he replied that he had not noticed it. He said he
believed that when the break-in was discovered — at 3:06 a.m., according
to the police report — the football players had not yet returned,
indicating that they could have been gone for at least half an hour.
“She said to him, ‘Be quiet, you sound like you’ve been drinking,’ ” Mr.
Keith said. “I remember that very clearly, because it surprised me that
she would say it. But the way he was speaking, I definitely had
suspicions about drinking.”
In the crash report, Officer Hawthorne indicated there was no suspected
alcohol or drug use, and he issued Mr. Williams traffic tickets for an
improper left turn and for “unknowingly” driving with a suspended
license. On the form for the impounded Buick, the officer used a pen to
cross out earlier notations indicating the car would be held as
evidence, writing: “No hold no processing.”
Around 3:30 a.m., Mr. Williams, 21, called Mario Edwards Sr., director
of player development for the football team, for a ride home, according
to the university. The crash report said that both cars were disabled
with damage that exceeded their estimated value. Mr. Keith got a lift
home with a tow truck.
The Tallahassee police said officers had discretion in deciding when to
press charges and issue citations. They provided The Times with seven
other cases in which someone had hit a car and left the scene but had
not been charged with hit and run.
A review of those cases, however, found that none were comparable in
severity or circumstance to the Oct. 5 crash. Four of the accidents
involved cars bumping into each other in parking lots, one other caused
no damage, and the other two were very minor. In no case did a driver
abandon a wrecked vehicle in the middle of the night and flee the scene
after totaling someone else’s car. Notably, most of the seven crash
reports contained far more narrative detail about what had happened than
the report on the Oct. 5 accident did.
The role of the campus police in responding to the accident is
especially unclear. That agency’s call logs indicated that the
Tallahassee police had called at 3:38 a.m. seeking help in an
“investigation.” Yet, a university spokesman said all the city police
had wanted was an after-hours phone number for a football coach so they
could tell him that two of his athletes had been in an accident; the
campus police could not locate a phone number.
The two campus officers — Sgt. Roy Wiley, the shift commander, and Cpl.
Greg Washington — decided on their own to drive to the crash scene to
see whether they could help, but they were not needed, the university said.
University policy specifies that police reports “must be completed and
submitted regarding actions taken by officers” in response to an
“outside request for assistance.” Asked why the two officers had not
filed a report, the university said they “were not involved in the
investigation, didn’t make an arrest and their assist didn’t result in
an arrest, citation or summons.”
The campus police chief, David L. Perry, said in a statement that he had
reviewed the actions of his officers and had found that they behaved
appropriately. “This was a routine matter of our agency responding to a
simple request from T.P.D. and it was all together proper for our
officers to go the scene,” he said in the statement.
As for Mr. Williams, court records showed that two days after the
accident, he paid $296 in overdue fines, related to an earlier speeding
ticket, in order to have his license reinstated. But the $392 in fines
related to the Oct. 5 crash remained unpaid, and overdue, as of this
week. As a result, his license was suspended again.
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