… when you live near the University of Southern Mississippi football team.
Southern Miss’ all-time rushing leader Damion Fletcher was arrested outside the apartment complex that houses the football team late Sunday night on charges of discharging a firearm inside the city limits.
… Malachi Martin, an adjunct professor who lives on nearby Mable Street, said he heard about 15 gunshots late Sunday night. Martin said he looked out his window to see an unidentified male firing four or five rounds from a handgun into the air.
“I was working on a lesson plan when I heard the first few gunshots,” Martin said. “When I looked out the window I saw a guy standing over there holding something up, then I saw flashes and heard shots that coincided with the flashes.
“The police pulled up and talked to me for a minute or so, then they saw someone moving outside the apartments and flipped on their lights and flew into the parking lot.”
A Hattiesburg Police Department release corroborated Martin’s observation, and said that a small-caliber hand gun was found at the scene.
Fletcher was the team’s leading rusher for the 2008 season with 1,313 rushing yards, and his 4,287 total career rushing yards make him Southern Miss’ all-time leader in that category. He was also named Conference USA Offensive Player of the Year following the 2007 season.
… The incident is just the latest of several involving football players that has taken place since the athletic department approved a measure to move the football team to the off-campus apartment complex on 38th Avenue.
In early October, police responded to gunshots and a report of fighting at the complex, but no arrests were made. Two weeks later, a student’s residence across the street from the apartments was burglarized during a Halloween party, and former Southern Miss running back Torris Magee was arrested and charged with burglary after leading police on a foot-chase….
Not really that big a deal. If you’re a USM professor working on a lesson plan after a certain hour during the weekend, you should probably go someplace else, like the library, or a Starbucks.
February 20th, 2009 at 7:03AM
You can tell the adjunct prof in the story lives near Southern Miss, and not, say, in Chicago, because when he heard gunshots he went TO the window.
Going to the window is the best way to make sure you don’t live to see tenure. (Or, at least live get on tenure track, so you’ll be able to afford to work in Starbucks.)
February 20th, 2009 at 8:13AM
Young Damion was enrolled in physics class, and he was simply doing an experiment on the motion of objects in a gravitational field.
February 21st, 2009 at 11:45AM
I came across this story before, in which Martin was just called an "adjunct" (one who had also been a witness in an earlier story on athlete arrests), and I wound up concluding that USM has something called an adjunct student.
February 21st, 2009 at 11:48AM
But, I checked again and my conclusion was wrong. In that case, take away the idea that this man has been the newspaper witness to this type of thing at least twice.
November 29th, 2012 at 1:36AM
[…] … when a University of Southern Mississippi professor working on a lesson plan learned real quick that living near football players meant fights and gun play in the neighborhood. […]