Carruth had been the Carolina Panthers' first-round draft pick in 1997. From 1992 to 1996, he'd played for the University of Colorado, where he held the school record for touchdown receptions and was second all-time in receiving yards and career receptions. He's one of only two receivers with two seasons of fifty or more receptions and 1,000 or more receiving yards, and he'd been voted most valuable player twice by his teammates. In one all-too-prophetic statement, then-coach Rick Neuheisel said, "Rae Carruth is a bullet. He's as fast in pads as out. He'll go by you in a hurry."
He wasn't quick enough to outrun the law, however. Free on $3 million bail, Carruth failed to turn himself in when Adams died -- and the result was a nationwide manhunt. Agents finally discovered him outside a motel in Wildersville, Tennessee, hiding in the trunk of a female friend's car -- adding unsportsmanlike conduct to his litany of charges.
Related Content
More About
Dennis Britton
Passersby were startled by the thunderous roar that erupted from the Denver Post tower at the end of August, but anyone who worked there knew what all the excitement was about: "El Britto Grande" had been fired.
That sobriquet was one of the milder ones given former editor Dennis Britton by his own employees. During his three-year reign, the Post lost its daily circulation lead to the Rocky Mountain News, and with good reason: Britton was known for running mind-numbing feature stories on the front page, like the tedious "Snapshot of Colorado" statewide bus-tour project filled with photos of rural residents. While Britton made sure the Post would never offend anyone powerful -- even the mayor's office could get stories killed with a quick telephone call -- he didn't hesitate to insult his own employees. Some of the best left, and several ex-Posties took their revenge by launching the "Dennis Britton Go Home Page" on the Internet, which featured countless stories of stupidities foisted on the staff by their preening boss. It always made for better reading than the paper itself.
After his unceremonious dumping from Denver, Britton returned to Chicago to run an obscure Web site -- an odd career move for a man who once described the Internet as "the CB radio of the '90s." He left behind a broadsheet with about as much fizz as a flat can of Coke -- and the circulation numbers to prove it.
Anne Sulton, Reyniko Abram, Shellyann Allen, Aretha Moore and Turkesha Tillis
In February, two days after the Broncos' 1999 Super Bowl win, Denver attorney Anne Sulton and her four clients dragged Broncos safety Tyrone Braxton into court on charges that he'd sexually assaulted the women at I-Beam, a now-defunct club on Larimer Square, on the day of the 1998 Super Bowl celebration. Reyniko Abram, for starters, claimed Braxton took her by the neck and hair, told her, "If you all ain't fucking, I ain't talking to none of y'all," and then made a vulgar comment about his penis -- before he "swung it."
But the women's stories didn't hold up in court. Finding their claims "extreme and outrageous," the jury quickly acquitted Braxton. And in October, Denver District Judge Morris Hoffman ruled that Sulton and her clients had to pay Braxton's court costs. "This case boiled down to four women making serious but utterly false allegations against a prominent sports figure in a completely transparent attempt to extort a settlement from him and/or his employer," Hoffman wrote in his steaming decision. "Their individual stories varied so much over time, both before and during trial and both as between the Plaintiffs and even as to a single Plaintiff's version, that by the time they were done, I, and apparently the jury as well, didn't believe a word of their testimony." And not only were the plaintiffs lying, they were "doing a rather poor job of it."
As for Sulton, Hoffman concluded, lawyers "should be chilled from making serious allegations without undertaking serious investigation. They should be chilled from filing complaints that name two eyewitnesses to a public incident when neither witnessed anything. They should be chilled from hiding from the claims of an inadequate investigation by retaining bumbling investigators who don't keep notes and don't write reports, and by themselves compiling a litigation file that consists entirely of a few scraps of paper."
Over the summer, Sulton left Denver for the greener pastures of New Jersey, where she planned to "dust off" her doctoral degree in criminology to write a book about crime prevention. Swing it, sister.
