From The NBA Locker Room To A Murder Charge: The Fall Of Javaris Crittenton – HT

 

On the night of August 19th, 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Julian Jones stepped outside her home on Macon Drive in South Atlanta. She had just put her four children to bed. Her fiance had dropped her off half an hour earlier, and he had an engagement ring in his pocket he planned to give her. She walked toward a neighbor’s barbecue.

A black Chevy Tahoe rolled up the street, made a U-turn, and pulled alongside her. Someone in the backseat raised a rifle and fired at least four rounds. One bullet tore through her upper right thigh and severed her femoral artery. >>>> She died at Grady Memorial Hospital 90 minutes later. She [snorts] was not the target.

 She was not in a gang. >>>> She was not in the game. She was walking to a barbecue. The man in the backseat of that Tahoe was a former NBA lottery pick, a McDonald’s All-American, a kid who once shared a high school court with DwightHoward and broke his scoring record two years after Howard left for the league.

 His name was Javaris Crittenton. >>>> He was the 19th pick in the 2007 draft, a teammate of Kobe Bryant with $4.1 million in career earnings. >>>> He had a 3.5 GPA in high school. He was Mr. Georgia Basketball, three-time All-State, the point guard that scouts called the most talented in the country. All of it, every accolade, >>>> every dollar, every future that the word upside ever promised collapsed into a single trigger pull on a warm Friday night in Atlanta.

The story most people know about Javaris Crittenton, if they know it at all, is the Gilbert Arenas gun incident. The locker room standoff that became a punchline. But that moment was not the beginning or the end. It was the hinge. I have spent a long time with this story, and what I keep coming back to is what happened on both sides of that hinge,what built him, what broke him, and why a young mother named Julian Jones paid for all of it with her life.

Crittenton grew up in Southwest Atlanta’s housing projects, raised by his mother Sonya Dickson and a village of women, his grandmother, his aunts, who pulled their resources and expectations to push him toward something bigger. His father was mostly absent. The neighborhood around Cleveland Avenue >>>> was what you would expect, high crime, gang activity, >>>> the kind of economic hardship that makes the NBA look less like a dream >>>> and more like the only exit door in a burning building.

But Crittenton did not just have talent. He had discipline. He carried a 3.5 grade point average at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy, joined the Future Business Leaders of America, and made the Senior Beta Club. His coach, Courtney Brooks, built a program around him. 113 wins against 19 losses over four years, state championship game appearances every season, titles in 2004 >>>> and 2006.

As a junior, Crittenton averaged 28.4 points per game, 7.5 assists, 8.2 rebounds, and 3.6 steals per game. As a senior, he put up 29 and nine, and led the team to another title. Here’s the part that makes this storyache. Crittenton was not just athletic, he was a student of the game >>>> in a way that suggested a mind built for systems, for pattern recognition, >>>> for the kind of thinking that builds careers far beyond a basketball court.

He kept a personal video library of elite point guards, hours of footage >>>> he would study the way a film student breaks down a director’s catalog. Scouts said he had the biggest upside of any point guard in the country. At 6’5, he could see over defenses, read rotations two passes ahead, and had the size and court vision that NBA front offices spend decades searching for.

In a different timeline, with the right mentorship, the right organization, the right infrastructure around him, Javaris Crittenton could have been a franchise cornerstone. The tools were all there, every single one. Consider the parallel. Dwight Howard played at the same school, in the same gym, under the same coach.

 Howard left Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy in 2004 as the first overall pick in the NBA draft, and went on to become aneight-time All-Star who earned $260 million. Crittenton broke Howard’s scoring record at that same school two years later. Same soil, different roots took hold. Crittenton played one season at Georgia Tech and wasbrilliant, averaging 14.4 points and 5.

75 assists, leading the ACC in assists during conference play, and scoring a career-high 29 points against Florida State.On June 28th, 2007, the Los Angeles Lakers selected him 19th overall in a draft headlined by Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. He signed a rookie-scale dealworth roughly $2.5 million guaranteed, and then the thing that was supposed to save him started to break him.

In Los Angeles, Crittenton was buried on Kobe Bryant’s depth chart, appearing in 22 games and averaging 7.8 minutesand 3.3 points per game. He was 19 years old, 2,000 miles from home, isolated in a citythat did not care about a backup point guard’s growing despair. Within months of signing that guaranteed contract, according to prosecutors, he joined the Mansfield GangsterCrips, a West Los Angeles street gang.

He got a tattoo on his midsection, a hand gripping a blue bandana. The kid who used to study point guard tape for fun was now carrying gang affiliations >>>> into NBA locker rooms. He walked into the league as a basketball prodigy. He came out as something the league did not know how to handle and did not try to.

Crittenton bounced from the Lakers to Memphisin the Pau Gasol trade, shipped out with Kwame Brown and draftpicks in February 2008. In Memphis, he flashed 28 games, 7.4 points per game, a career-high 23 against the Knicks. A three-team trade sent him to Washington in December 2008, where he played 56 games and averaged 5.

3 points and 2.6 assists in 20 minutes a night. His most substantial NBA role, and hislast. On December 19th, 2009, the Wizards were on a charter flight home from Phoenix after a loss. Players were gambling, playing a card game called Bourré. The pot was $1,100. Gilbert Arenas, the team’s $111 million franchise player, woke from a nap, joined mid-hand, doubled the pot to $2,200, and started trash-talking Crittenton hard.

Antawn Jamison had to physically separate them. The threatsescalated on the airport shuttle. Crittenton told Arenas he would shoot him. Arenas told Crittenton he would burn his car with him in it. Crittenton repeated the threat. Arenas laughed and said hewould bring him the guns himself. The tension around the Bourré game did not subside.

Two days later, he did. On Monday, December 21st, 2009, Arenas arrived early at the Verizon Center and placed four unloaded handguns on a chair in front of Crittenton’s locker. A .50-caliber gold-plated Desert Eagle, a .500 Magnum Smith & Wesson, a .45-caliber Kimber Eclipse, a 9-mm Browning. None were loaded.

A handwritten note on top read, “Pick one.” When Crittenton walked in and saw the display, accounts diverge on exactly what happened next. Teammate Caron Butler, who wrote about it in his 2015 memoir, says Crittenton turned slowly, pulled out his own gun, a loaded 9-mm Taurus, cocked it, and leveled it at Arenas.

Brendan Haywood said he walked in to find a Desert Eagle sliding across the floor and the team trainer running out yelling about guns. Two anonymous eyewitnesses told the Washington Post that Crittenton chambered a round but held the weapon low, singing softly to himself.Arenas reportedly laughed and said, “Look at that little shiny gun.

” Within minutes, both men were in the jacuzzi together, joking. The incident went publicon Christmas Eve. On January 5th, 2010, Arenas pantomimed shooting his teammates during pregame warm-ups in Philadelphia, using finger guns and laughing, while Commissioner David Stern watched the footage and decided someone had to pay.

Arenas pleaded guilty to a felony carrying a pistol without a license in DC. He received 30 days in a halfway house, 2 years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $5,000. Adidas terminated his endorsement deal worth $40 million. The NBA suspended him for the rest of the season, roughly 50 games, costing him about $7.5 million in salary.

After the suspension, Arenas returned. He was allowed to rejoin the team,  and his career continued. Crittenton pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor, possession of an unregistered firearm, a lesser charge, a lighter sentence, 1 year of unsupervised probation,and the Wizards released him.

 Arenas brought four guns and kept his job. Crittenton brought one and lost his career. The math tells you everything you need to know about how the system works.Arenas had a contract worth $111 million. Crittenton’s salary that season was $1.48 million. Arenas had an endorsement portfolio worth $40 million withAdidas alone.

Crittenton’s endorsement deals were zero. The NBA did not weigh the incident equally  because the players were not valued equally. The institution protected its asset and discarded the expendable part. Arenas himself acknowledged it years later. He said they did not get suspended for actual guns in the locker room, and that Crittenton deserved a different penalty than he did.

He added that the locker room situation put Crittenton on a road he was not expecting to be on. Quavo later premiered a song called Gilbert Arenas, and the incident became hip-hop shorthand for pulling weapons in unexpected places. The culture absorbed the moment as comedy. For Crittenton, it was the end of everything.

And here’s the detail that stays with me. Arenas and Crittenton still talk once a week, according to Arenas, just like when they were teammates. Two men whose lives split apart from the exact same moment, connected by a phone call every 7 days, and the shared memory of a locker room where everything changed. After Washington released him, Crittenton’s basketball career entered its death spiral.

Charlotte signed him in September 2010, then cut him 3 weeks later. He played five games in China, averaging 25.8 points. The talent was still screaming. Then the D League, 21 games with the Dakota Wizards, averaging 14.5 points and 6.7 assists per game. His former college coach, Paul Hewitt, stayed in touch and still believed in him.

A pathway back to the NBA existed, however narrow. Then Crittenton went home to Atlanta, and that’s when everything that was going to happen became inevitable. What comes next is the part of this story that never gets told in sports documentaries. The part that cost a woman her life. On April 21, 2011, Crittenton and his cousin, Douglas Gamble, were ambushed at gunpoint outside a barbershop on Cleveland Avenue, a shop Crittenton had visited since childhood.

Four armed men took a $30,000 black diamond watch, a $25,000 necklace, an iPhone, and cash. More than $55,000 were gone in minutes. Crittenton recognized one of the robbers, a man named Trontavious Stephens, known on the streets as Slug. He reported the robbery to police. The investigation stalled.

 Then Crittenton told the lead detective that he would just handle the situation himself. That statement sealed his fate and Julian Jones’s. In the weeks that followed, witnesses reported seeing Crittenton driving his Porsche Panamera through Stephens’s neighborhood with a .40 caliber handgun in his lap. On August 14th, 5 days before Jones’s death, shots were fired at the home of one of Stephens’sbrothers.

Prosecutors say Crittenton fired from the back of a Porsche. Nobody was hit. Then came August 19th. At 9:50 p.m., Julian Jones was standing outside her home at 2911 Macon Drive.She had just tucked her four children into bed. Her fiance, Harrell Butler Sr., had dropped her off half an hour earlier with that engagement ring still in his pocket.

 She stepped outside to talk with neighbors. One of those neighbors was Trontavious Stephens, the man Crittenton had been hunting for 4 months. A black Chevy Tahoe Hybrid rented by Crittenton came up Macon Drive with Gamble behind the wheel. It passed the group, made a U-turn, and pulled alongside Stephens and Jones. Crittenton, sitting in the backseat, lowered his window, raised an assault rifle, and fired at least four rounds.

One bullet struck Julian Jones in her upper right thigh and severed her femoral artery. Stephens was not hit. Jones was rushed to Grady Memorial Hospital. She died in surgery 90 minutes later. She was never the target. She was walking to a barbecue. Her four children were asleep inside thehouse. Five days later, Crittenton bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

On August 29th, FBI agents arrested him at John Wayne Airport in Orange County as he checked in for a red-eye flight. He was taken without incident. A Fulton County grand jury returned a 12-count indictment in April 2013, charging murder, felony murder, attempted murder, aggravated assault, and gang activity.

Then, in January 2014, while out on bond, a pre-dawn DEA raid at his homein Fayetteville, Georgia, added federal drug trafficking charges, conspiracy to move multi-kilo quantities of cocaine and hundreds of pounds of marijuana. On April 29th, 2015, the morning opening arguments for his murder trial were supposed to begin.

Crittenton stood up in a Fulton County courtroom and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault with a firearm. The murder, felony murder, and gang charges were dropped. He admitted in open court to being a member of the MansfieldGangster Crips, and he said he had joined for protection.

Then he turned toward Julian Jones’s family and wept. He called the shooting a horrible accident. >>>> He apologized through tears, not the polished apology of a man performing remorse for a lighter sentence, but the fractured words of someone confronting, for the first time in open air, what he had done to people who would never recover from it.

 The court sentenced him to 23years in prison plus 17 years of probation. There is one moredetail from that period that reveals something about who Crittenton was before all of this consumed him. When he was first arrested and held on murder charges, >>>> his former college coach, Paul Hewitt, by then the head coach atGeorge Mason, hundreds of miles from Atlanta, flew down to testify at the bond hearing.

 Hewitt co-signed the $230,000 bond with his own money. He told the court he had always told Crittenton that he was fortunate,that he had the ability to be a great basketball player, but he was not a young man who needed basketball to be successful. A coach who still saw the kid with the 3.5 grade point average and the video library even after everything.

The prosecutor said he had handled 500 murder cases in that courtroom and had never seen anything like it. Crittenton was released from Wilcox State Prison on April 21st, 2023, after serving roughly 10 years. His sentencehad been modified under a clause negotiated with Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard Jr.

, the same Paul Howard who happens to be Dwight Howard’s uncle, the same Dwight Howard whose scoring record Crittentonbroke at Southwest Atlanta Christian Academy. The connections in this story don’t stop intersecting. Trontavious Stephens, the man who robbed Crittenton, the man Crittenton was trying to kill when he shot Julian Jones, turned out to be a co-founder of Young Slime Life alongside rapper Young Thug.

 He testified in the YSL RICO trial, one of the largest gang prosecution cases in American history. Crittenton’s own defense attorney, Steel,later became nationally known as Young Thug’s lawyer in that same case. The threads connecting Atlanta’s basketball, hip-hop, and criminal worlds run through this story like wiring through a wall, invisible until something catches fire.

Crittenton now coaches youth basketball and mentors at-risk kids. He wears an ankle monitor. He has a 7:00 p.m. curfew. He has 30 years of probation ahead of him. His net worth is estimated at roughly $10,000, down from $4.1 million dollars in NBA earnings. He is being sued by Julian Jones’ four children in a wrongful death lawsuit.

Those four children are teenagers now. Two of them live with their grandmother, June Woods, the woman who raised Julian after adopting her as a girl. Woods told reporters it was not fair, not to the family, not to the children. Jones’ fiance never got to give her the engagement ring. The cost of what happened on Macon Drive was not measured in years served.

 It was measured in a family that will never be whole. Javaris Crittenton broke Dwight Howard’s scoring record, earned 4.1 million dollars in the NBA, and once had scouts calling him the point guard with the most upside in the country. On August 19th, 2011, all of that became a footnote because a bullet meant for a man who robbed him found a 22-year-old mother walking to a barbecue instead.

The talent was never the question. The question was always whether anyone was going to catch him before he fell. Nobody did.