The case involving the shooting of a man outside of Michael Vick's(notes) 30th birthday party has a few new wrinkles in it, one of them possibly involving Marcus Vick(notes), Michael's little brother, himself a former backup quarterback for the Miami Dolphins.
The bigger story Wednesday, though, was the discrepancy in the timelines of events given by Vick's attorney, and what's shown on security tapes. The AP saw the video Wednesday, and said Michael Vick's car doesn't leave the scene until 2:07 a.m. The shooting happened about four minutes later.
That's at odds with what Vick's lawyer had previously said, which is that his client had been gone for 10 or 20 minutes when the shooting took place.
This "discrepancy" was all over ESPN on Wednesday, but myself, I'm not putting a ton of stock into it. Yes, if you choose to, you can look at it as Vick's lawyer being caught in a fib, which would look bad. But he said 10 or 20 minutes, and it was actually four. That's a difference of six or 16 minutes. Can you accurately recall the exact events of your Saturday night, in six or 16-minute intervals? I can't recall the last 30 minutes of my life in accurate six-minute intervals.
So the timeline problem, really, isn't something I care about at the moment. As for Marcus, the mention of his name appears to stem from a Virginia Beach radio report in which a gentleman named "Bartley Barefoot" said his "sources" were "sure" that Marcus Vick was "involved."
Gregg Rosenthal of Pro Football Talk was being interviewed by Mr. Barefoot and his co-host Johnny D., when Barefoot broke in and dropped Marcus Vick's name. Sports by Brooks took it a step further, noting reports that the shooter may have been driving a white Cadillac Escalade, and then connecting that with previous reports that Marcus Vick does indeed own a white Cadillac Escalade.
What to make of that? Again, for me, not much. If it turns out that I'm wrong, I'll apologize, but for the moment, I'm choosing not to put much faith in the sources of Bartley Barefoot. I'm sure Bartley's a wonderful man, but I'm going to choose not to view him with a sense of Cronkite-like integrity. And the fact that Marcus Vick and a potential shooter might drive the same (or similar) cars ... I don't find that terribly compelling, either.
We'll see what happens, and according to ESPN's Adam Schefter, we might not have to wait long. He said on "NFL Live" that we could expect the shooter to turn himself in to authorities "sometime soon."
Originally, I didn't expect this thing to turn into much of a story. I thought — and I'm willing to consider the possibility that I gave him too much credit with this — that Michael Vick, with all the image-rehabbing he's done, the fine line he knows he's walking with the commissioner, and everything he's got to lose, would absolutely not, in any way, let himself actually get involved with a shooting.
I still believe that, and I haven't seen enough yet to even consider changing my mind. It's true that Michael Vick doesn't have the best track record in decision-making, and maybe there were some poor decisions made on this night, too. Anything terribly nefarious, though, I'm just having a hard time believing. There's still some unfolding left to happen here, though.
Yahoo
No comments:
Post a Comment