I just found out yesterday that Plaxico shot himself in an accident on Saturday, and now it looks like he is going to try to take a bunch of people down with him:
The New York police said on Monday that a hospital failed to notify them when Giants receiver Plaxico Burress arrived there early Saturday morning with a gunshot wound to his thigh, despite a state law requiring a doctor or hospital to report such violence to the authorities “at once.”
As a result, it took police detectives more than 13 hours to learn that Burress had been taken to the hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, after he accidentally shot himself in the right leg in a Manhattan nightclub.
“We are investigating the hospital’s failure to notify us, as required by law,” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said Monday evening.
From what I understand, Bloomberg is grandstanding on the issue (and really, if there is an issue that doesn’t bother me when pols grandstand, it is gun violence), but Plaxico does face some very serious charges for having an unlicensed gun. If I heard correctly, he could face a mandatory minimum of three and a half years, which would effectively end his career in the NFL.
For the record- I detest mandatory minimums, think they should be abolished, and that we should let judges be judges again, but really am going to have a hard time crying for Plaxico. When will these guys learn to get bodyguards, and when will they learn that the law applies to them too? On top of everything else, he now appears to be sullying the name of the hospital that treated him, because you can almost guarantee that someone there did not report the incident because of who Buress is.