Out of the pan and into the fire

This comes to us from the Houston Chronicle and the AP…

DALLAS — A 22-year-old man accused of posing as a high school basketball star in West Texas was charged with sexual assault Friday after an underage girl reported having sex with him last summer when she thought he was a teenager, police said.

Guerdwich Montimer was arrested for the third time in four days, this time after a 16-year-old girl in Odessa told police and school district officials she had sex with him at a home in August when she thought he was 15-year-old Jerry Joseph, said Odessa police Cpl. Sherrie Carruth.

Officials said Montimer enrolled at a junior high school and later at Permian High School last year with a fake birth certificate from Haiti. Suspicions were raised recently after coaches at an amateur basketball tournament said they recognized Joseph as Montimer, a 2007 graduate of a Florida high school and a naturalized U.S. citizen from Haiti.

Montimer was being held in jail Friday on a $50,000 bond, according to a court affidavit released Friday.

Montimer was originally arrested Tuesday on a misdemeanor charge of failure to identify himself to a police officer, and school officials said he admitted that he wasn’t Joseph. He was arrested again Thursday on a third-degree felony charge of tampering with a government document.

A jail official said Friday there was no information about whether Montimer had an attorney. The sexual assault charge, a second-degree felony, carries a sentence of two to 20 years in prison and a fine up to $10,000.

Based on information provided by the girl, investigators determined Montimer “intentionally and knowingly engaged in a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old juvenile and portrayed himself to be 15 years old when he was actually 21 years of age,” Carruth, the Odessa police official, said in a statement.

Permian High School made the state basketball playoffs with Joseph helping lead the way as a sophomore star. Questions arose after the season, and Joseph was initially cleared by immigration authorities and allowed to return to the school.

The investigation continued, and a fingerprint from a passport found in his room matched one taken by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents after the allegations surfaced, according to an affidavit. School officials said Montimer confessed after he was confronted with the new evidence.

His last name has been widely reported as Montimere, including by The Associated Press, but an affidavit released Thursday had several references to official documentation with Montimer, the spelling used by Odessa police.

What’s my name?

Sports news from the Houston Chronicle…

Faced with the reality that Permian basketball player Jerry Joseph is actually Guerdwich Montimere, the Ector County Independent School District has submitted the results of its internal investigation to the District Executive Committee for review.

ECISD athletic director Leon Fuller and executive director of athletics Todd Vesely self-reported a violation of UIL rules after Montimere’s arrest on Tuesday afternoon, Vesely said.

Because Montimere is actually a 22-year-old naturalized citizen who graduated from Dillard High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the Permian boys basketball team used an ineligible player in its fourth-place District 2-5A finish last season.

Under the circumstances, UIL assistant athletic director Peter Contreras — who was administering the Class 2A State Golf Championships in Austin on Tuesday — said he believes Permian will have to forfeit its 16 wins during the 2009-10 season.

“Every game he played, they’re going to have to forfeit,” Contreras said. “That’s the minimum penalty for playing an ineligible player.”

Contreras has not seen the case.

In his opinion, though, Montimere’s scam may not result in further penalties for Permian or Panthers boys basketball coach Danny Wright.

“Usually, there are ramifications for both the school and the coach,” Contreras said. “But it’s pretty obvious that this guy falsified all kinds of documents. I think, in the end, it will be very easy to prove that the school did their due diligence.”

When Montimere arrived at Permian in the spring of 2009, he presented a Haitian birth certificate for Jerry Joseph with a birthdate of Jan. 1, 1994.

Permian officials checked the birth certificate — Vesely said the birth certificate was compared with other Haitian birth certificates to verify its authenticity — and enrolled Joseph as a homeless student.

To qualify as homeless, a prospective student must pass an examination by Student Assistance Services, Permian principal Roy Garcia said.

“Normally, an SAS officer goes out, physically checks where they are living, and then they pass the information on to us,” Garcia said.

Living as Joseph, Montimere was taken in by Wright and his family.

Using the information presented to them by the school, ECISD athletic officials submitted Joseph’s case to the District Executive Committee, which cleared Joseph to appeal and submit a waiver request to the UIL to play basketball last season.

The UIL granted the request.

“Our hope is that the UIL is going to recognize our due diligence in presenting this case, because the school based all of this on a false document,” Vesely said.

When a pair of AAU basketball coaches from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., tipped off Permian officials Joseph might actually be Montimere two weeks ago, Permian principal Roy Garcia notified both the District 2-5A executive committee and the District 3-5A executive committee, which will be the Panthers’ district next year.

And after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials originally cleared Joseph of being Montimere, Garcia turned over the investigation to the ECISD athletic department.

“Todd and Leon kept in touch with the UIL the whole way,” ECISD spokesman Mike Adkins said.

Before they could submit the case to the UIL, Fuller and Vesely needed concrete evidence, Vesely said.

Montimere’s arrest provided that evidence.

“We turned in the self-report when we had accurate evidence that he was not Jerry Joseph, that he was not 16 years old,” Vesely said.

None of the school officials contacted could put a timetable on the UIL’s official decision.

“I had no reason to believe that he was none other than another ninth grader from one of my feeder schools,” Wright said. “I treated him like any other kid.”

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Montimere has been released from jail.

Ector County sheriff’s Sgt. Debbie Bruce said Montimere posted $500 bond Wednesday on a charge of failure to identify himself to a peace officer.

If convicted of the misdemeanor, Montimere could face up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. Bruce said there was no record of an attorney for Montimere.

The player known as Jerry Joseph, who was 6-foot-5, was named newcomer of the year.

Former Rocket convicted of burglary

This comes to us from the Houston Chronicle…

LEBANON, Ohio — Former NBA player Kirk Snyder was convicted Thursday of breaking into a neighbor’s home in the middle of the night and beating him up in his bedroom.

A Warren County jury found the 26-year-old former University of Nevada star guilty of aggravated burglary, felonious assault and assault. The jury had deliberated for less than a day following testimony in the trial, which began Monday.

Snyder broke into the home of dentists Brad and Eugenia Roberts in Deerfield Township, north of Cincinnati, on March 30, 2009. He smashed their rear French doors with a landscape rock and charged through the house to the master bedroom, shoving Eugenia Roberts aside before pummeling Brad Roberts with his fists and then with an alarm clock, prosecutors said. He could receive up to 18 years in prison at his sentencing next month.

Snyder was the 16th player taken in the 2004 NBA draft. He played for the Utah Jazz, New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets, Houston Rockets and Minnesota Timberwolves between 2004 and 2008 and then played a season in China.

Snyder has been treated for mental illness and had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

On Wednesday, Dr. Mel Nizny, who saw Snyder in jail a week after the attack, testified that Snyder, who suffers from bipolar disorder, psychosis and paranoia, is not legally responsible for his actions.

“He starts hitting Dr. Roberts, for what reason? He has no clue,” Nizny testified for the defense. “He doesn’t know why. There was no provocation.”

Nizny said that in his first meeting with Snyder the former pro basketball player didn’t want to talk to him.

“He was not in touch with reality,” Nizny said. “He barely knew he was in the jail or why he was there.”

The prosecution’s expert, Dr. Kim Stookey, testified that she found Snyder was not insane when he attacked his neighbor. Stookey said he went in by the back door away from view, cinched his hooded sweat shirt over his face to disguise his identity and fled the scene to avoid detection. Those actions, she said, prove he knew what he was doing was wrong.

Snyder moved to his posh town house in Deerfield Township in September 2008 after his wife kicked him out of their farm house in Bethel and just before he went to play basketball in China. He returned from China last March, meeting the Robertses a couple of days before the break-in.

Was he playing “high post?”

Sports news comes to us from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune…

Minnesota Timberwolves basketball player Al Jefferson was arrested and booked into jail early this morning for allegedly driving drunk, according to jail records.

Jefferson, a center-forward, was arrested by the State Patrol and was brought to the Hennepin County Jail at 2:12 a.m., the jail records show. He was arrested on a charge of fourth degree driving while impaired, according to the log.

He was released at 3:19 a.m.

He is scheduled for a court appearance on April 23.

The arrest came after the Timberwolves lost to the Portland Trail Blazers at Target Center, 110-91. Jefferson, a 6-10 center-forward, led the Wolves in scoring with 19 points, and in playing time, with 30 minutes. (The jail log listed him at 6-9.)

Hey! Down in front!

This comes to us from Reuters…

BEIJING (Reuters) - A bizarre row over a player’s height caused a Chinese basketball game to be abandoned and sparked violent scenes that left several cars destroyed in Guangdong earlier this week, local media reported Thursday.

The Dream Basketball League was set up to allow players of “shorter” stature to compete on a level playing field, with a height limit of 6ft 2in (1.88m) imposed.

Basketball players are some of the tallest athletes in sport and China’s own Yao Ming measures 7ft 6in.

However, trouble was brewing when Huizhou Qiaoxing signed Chinese Basketball Association player and three-times national ‘slam dunk’ champion Hu Guang, even though his official CBA profile lists him as 1.95m.

Huizhou’s opponents in a game scheduled for Monday, Shenzhen Kuruite, refused to take to the court unless he was measured but league organizers refused.

Shenzhen forfeited the game but kept up their complaints the following day and the league finally agreed to take the tape to the 27-year-old forward.

“Hu bowed his shoulders and bent his neck back,” Shenzhen player Wang Tiecheng told local newspaper the Daily Sunshine.

“The first result was 186.5cm, the second time was 187cm.”

League officials, who admitted they had “limited ability and technique in measuring,” nevertheless declared Hu eligible for Tuesday’s “monthly final” against Zheshang Bank.

Furious Shenzhen fans disrupted the final by continually chanting: “Unfair, Too tall!” and the game, which was being broadcast live on television, was abandoned at halftime.

Other spectators, upset that the game had been stopped, then smashed up five cars with Shenzhen number plates outside the Dongguan’s Huangyong Arena, the Guangzhou Daily reported.