A man associated with shooting and killing previous National Football League player Joe McKnight in a conceivable instance of street fury in a suburb of New Orleans was discharged from guardianship Friday without charge, police said.
The suspect, 54-year-old Ronald Gasser, was arrested after Thursday’s shooting around 3 p.m. nearby time in Terrytown.
McKnight, 28, was claimed dead at the scene, experiencing “different discharge wounds,” Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department said in an announcement on Thursday.
McKnight played for the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs. After 2014, his last NFL season, he had played as a running back in the Canadian Football League.
Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said at a news meeting on Friday that it was untimely to make determinations about the shooting and that the examination would proceed.
The Jefferson Parish District Attorney declined to remark.
Normand said his office had been freely reprimanded for discharging Gasser, who is white, in the shooting of McKnight, a dark football player who had a five-year profession in the NFL.
“I’ve been blamed for failing and doing this and doing that since we discharged Gasser last night,” Normand said. “We will investigate every possibility.”
Normand included that “everyone needs to make this about race. This isn’t about race.”
The hashtag #JoeMcKnight was among the top-slanting subjects on Twitter in the United States the same number of online networking clients voiced stun and shock.
“I don’t get it,” composed Antonio Cromartie, McKnight’s colleague amid his time with the Jets. “How in damnation do you discharge somebody who executed my sibling.”
Rex Ryan, who instructed McKnight for three seasons with the Jets, said in a composed articulation discharged by the Buffalo Bills, the group he now mentors, that the running back’s death was “unfortunate.”
“He was constantly resolved to show signs of improvement – better as a football player and as a man – and I thought he did that.”
(Reporting by Amy Tennery in New York; Editing by James Dalgleish and Grant McCool)