A night on the town, and the end of Kareem Hunt's Chiefs career
Outside the Lines interviewed witnesses and current and former league officials and reviewed police documents and nearly four hours of officer body camera video to build the most complete account to date of events leading up to Hunt's physical altercation with Abby Ottinger, a 19-year-old Kent State student from Middleburg Heights, Ohio, early on the morning of Feb. 10. Also reviewed were a hotel incident report and contemporaneous social media posts to support witness recollections of events at The Metropolitan at the 9, where Hunt leases a 23rd-floor residential apartment.
What's clear from available evidence is that a hotel security staffer and Cleveland police officers appeared skeptical of Ottinger's account, and that police did not ask to see surveillance video that morning -- even though witnesses on both sides of the altercation implored officers to do so. At one point, an officer is heard expressing his belief that a detective would have to get a subpoena to review surveillance tape. Officers also waited hours to question Hunt, deferring to the hotel's insistence that officers couldn't knock on his door without a warrant or permission from the hotel's owner. When they did question him, police asked Hunt if he wanted them to turn off their body cameras -- an offer they made to at least one other witness -- and he requested that they do so.
No charges were filed, and what happened in the hall outside Hunt's luxury residence remained largely unknown until Nov. 30, when TMZ published a portion of the video showing Ottinger being knocked down in a hallway and then kicked by Hunt.
As a result, the NFL is scrambling to explain how its hand was forced by TMZ once again, just four years after the media outlet published video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punching out his then-fiancée, Janay, in a casino elevator, an infraction that initially earned him only a two-game suspension and led to a battle in federal court. Rice never returned to the field after the video emerged. One source with knowledge of the inner workings of the NFL disciplinary process told Outside the Lines the Hunt incident is actually "a bigger mess up than Ray Rice" because of the infrastructure that was put in place after Rice, including the hiring of Lisa Friel, a former Manhattan prosecutor, as senior vice president and special counsel for investigations.
https://www.google.com/amp/www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/25471824/how-kareem-hunt-nfl-career-was-put-hold-night-town%3fplatform=amp (ESPN OTL)
It looks like the police screwed up as well. They arrest one guy that came to her assistance who refused to turn over his cell phone.
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