What Actually Happened and What are the Implications?
by Jeff Jones
Around 3:45 Sunday morning, one of college football’s all-time
most prolific wide receivers was pulled over and cited with an aggravated
DUI. Police officials in Stillwater, OK
arrested former Oklahoma State wideout Justin Blackmon after the fifth overall
pick in this year’s NFL draft recorded a BAC of .24 – three times the legal
limit. In the state of Oklahoma any
person whose BAC eclipses .15 receives the elevated charge of “aggravated DUI”
instead of the lesser, more common, driving under the influence citation.
This incident occurred just two days after Blackmon sat down
for an interview with ESPN telling them many things, including his main
offseason goal – “to control the things that [he] can control.”
Unfortunately this is not Blackmon’s first run in with the
law. In the fall of 2010, while in Dallas
preparing for a Big 12 neutral-road matchup with Kansas State, Blackmon was pulled over
and arrested on a DUI complaint. At this
time, Blackmon was driving a Chevy pickup 92 MPH in a 60 MPH zone.
Blackmon’s punishment for this 2010 infraction was a
one-game suspension. We have yet to see
what the Jacksonville Jaguars, or the NFL, will do to punish the star player
this time around.
Adding insult to injury, it has been brought to light that
Blackmon was scheduled to make an autograph-signing appearance in Houston on Saturday afternoon
(just hours before his arrest), but called in a late cancellation due to an “unspecified
illness.”
As we have all grown to learn – humans are flawed – and admittedly
star athletes are no exception to this rule.
Sadly, it looks as though Justin Blackmon has just added his name to a long
list of athletes including Jason Kidd, Donte Stallworth, Jamal Lewis, and others
who we paint in our minds as faultless role models before they prove themselves
to be normal, flawed, and human.
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