Tennessee Titans star Adam “Pacman” Jones could face felony and misdemeanor charges stemming from a triple shooting at a strip club in February.
Police are seeking a felony charge of coercion and misdemeanor threat and battery charges against the cornerback in the 5 a.m. shooting at Minxx, Lt. George Castro said Monday.
Castro said detectives haven’t determined who fired the shots that wounded three people, one critically, outside the Las Vegas club during the NBA All-Star game weekend.
Castro said the request for charges will be submitted to Clark County district attorney David Roger no later than the end of the week. Roger will be asked to consider charges against 23-year-old Jones; Robert Reid, 37, of Carson, Calif.; and Sadia Morrison, 24, of New York. Castro described Reid and Morrison as friends of Jones.
Castro said the coercion charge stemmed from allegations that Jones, Reid and Morrison used force “to prevent security officers from protecting the public, employees and property” inside the club.
Roger said he has reviewed some of the police investigation but it was “premature to comment on the merits of the case until I read all their reports.”
“Was he an inciter? Yes, he was,” Castro said.
Lawyers for Jones have denied Minxx club co-owner Robert Susnar’s account that Jones arrived and left the club with the shooter. After 500 hours of reviewing videotapes and interviewing witnesses from the club, Castro said police were unable to establish a relationship between Jones and the shooter.
Jones was questioned by Las Vegas police and released.
Two club security guards and an unidentified woman were wounded in the shooting. Guard Tom Urbanski, who was paralyzed from the waist down, was transferred last week to a rehabilitation hospital in Englewood, Colo. The other guard and the woman were not seriously wounded.
The pre-dawn shooting followed a scuffle that broke out in the club when dancers on stage were showered with thousands of dollar bills, according to a police search warrant.
Susnar has said the shooting happened after Jones threatened to kill a bouncer, who the club owner said intervened when Jones allegedly attacked a dancer who grabbed money on the stage.
Police later reported confiscating $81,000 in cash belonging to Jones. The money was recovered from a safe in the hotel room of Houston-based promoter Chris Mitchell, whose “Harlem Knights” dancers were brought in for the weekend at Minxx, a club several blocks west of the Las Vegas Strip.
Jones was not welcome to take part in the team’s offseason conditioning program, which began last week.
The Titans are trying to decide whether to keep Jones, the sixth pick overall in 2005. The cornerback did not tell team officials about being arrested twice in Georgia in 2006 — a potential violation of the personal conduct policy.
In a statement Monday, Titans officials said they were “deeply disturbed that the alleged conduct of one of its players has resulted in felony charges in one state and accusations of felony charges in another state.”
