The N&O has an article up about the Cota-Newby settlement which
has a few key details which weren't reported yesterday. Among them is
the interesting fact that both are required to apologize for their part in the
brawl. Since they continue to maintain that they were trying to break the fight
up, we presume that their "apology" contains something like this:
We are really sorry for trying to break up the fight on Halloween and
apologize for being peacemakers.
Actual wording: ""I regret that the incident on the morning of Nov. 1 occurred. I'm sorry for any injuries that anyone involved in the incident may have suffered."
Another interesting fact, which seems to have eluded the News & Observer,
the Herald-Sun, and all the local TV stations for five months, is that Cota and
Newby's friends were not exactly saints: the fellow known as "Young
God" has a record for "unauthorized use" of a car, and Edward
Franklin Capel has one for "maintaining a dwelling for drugs." Those are both
kind of murky charges, but roughly (and kindly) speaking one took a car which
didn't belong to him and one allowed drug dealing in his home. Apparently
not a single local reporter bothered to look at prior records of these
characters, or if they did, they decided that it wasn't newsworthy that Ed Cota
and Terrence Newby were hanging out with such unsavory characters. If there
weren't criminal charges it might not be newsworthy, but there were criminal
charges, and prior records in a criminal case, we would think, are newsworthy (as in the Piggie case, for instance),
but apparently no one bothered, just as no one was curious about why Phil Ford
was either given or allowed to retain a car after an unpublicized DWI in
Michigan, and whether or not the taxpayers were being asked to put a convicted
drunk driver back on the road - in other words, who was paying for the car Phil
Ford was driving when he got his second DWI.
No comment from the athletic department on any of this, needless to say, but
having to write an apology, to pay almost 3,500 dollars in medical bills,Â
and perform community service is hardly vindication. We'd be interested to hear
if Bill Guthridge still accepts their version of events, but so far, of course, he's not on record.
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