One-time Washington Wizards lockerroom gun-brandisher Javaris Crittenton, who hasn't played in the NBA since his 2010 arrest on murder charges, was arraigned Wednesday in Atlanta on drug charges.
According to ESPN's sources close to the DEA investigation, Crittenton "conspired to deal cocaine and marijuana in the months before he was indicted last year for his alleged role in an August 2011 Atlanta shooting death." That would be the death of a 22-year-old mother of four, Julian Jones, a bystander at a retaliatory drive-by shooting gone wrong, which you know must be altogether exceptionally wrong.
Now he's among 14 suspects the district attorney says sold, uh, "multi-kilo quantities of cocaine and several hundred pounds of marijuana" during a seven-month period. Got that amount? Just to be clear, it was several of those hundreds.
The Lakers picked Crittenton, now 26 years old, in the first round of the 2007 draft after a one-and-done turn at Georgia Tech. He was a high school teammate of Dwight Howard and the other party in the Wizards gun incident that forever tarred Gilbert Arenas's name, though it's likely Crittenton, rather than Agent Zero, deserved the brunt of the blame.
One imagines Arenas in a bathrobe and slippers somewhere, probably lighting up the scoreboard using himself in NBA 2K6, hearing of news stories such as these, wondering anew what in the hell possessed him to playfully offer Crittenton handguns with which to shoot him.
Ex-NBA player caught in drug probe [ESPN.com]
Photo credit of Crittenton in his Wizards days: Getty