A warrant is being issued for the arrest of a star Florida State football player who allegedly punched a woman outside a bar on June 23—one night before another violent bar incident, of which video was released this week, involving a Florida State player striking a woman. The player involved in the new case, Dalvin Cook, was the team’s leading rusher in 2014. From ESPN:
The woman, who lives in Tallahassee, told ESPN.com that she was approached by a man who was not Cook outside of Clyde’s and Costello’s shortly after the bar closed on June 23. The woman said the man asked for her phone number, which she refused to give him.
“I told him I had a boyfriend and wasn’t interested,” said the woman, who spoke to ESPN.com on the condition she not be identified. The woman said the argument became heated, and then Cook punched her in the face several times.
In the previously reported incident, incoming freshman quarterback De’Andre Johnson punched a woman in the face after a brief argument that appeared to start after he bumped into her at a different Tallahassee bar. Johnson was suspended indefinitely on June 25 and dismissed from the Florida State team after video of the incident became public on Monday.
Dalvin Cook was mentioned in a lengthy October 2014 New York Times piece about the Tallahasse police department’s treatment of Florida State players. The paper’s investigation, which followed what the local district attorney has described as a botched investigation into rape allegations against former quarterback Jameis Winston, found that many officers have ties to the FSU football program and that some seemingly failed to pursue cases of serious criminal behavior by players. One of the threads the Times piece tracked was a series of public BB and pellet gun fights between players that destroyed “thousands of dollars in property” and had triggered the deployment of a police helicopter on one occasion. Police reopened their investigation into the BB-gun incidents after receiving inquiries about tye matter from the Times, ultimately filing charges against Cook and two other players. Cook completed pre-trial intervention in the case.
