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No longer a player in the Raiders: Damon Arnette has been fired from his team
Photo:
Keith Srakocic / AP
The Las Vegas Raiders NFL team is not resting.
Just days after Star Pass recipient Henry Ruggs III allegedly drunk and caused a fatal car accident at high speed, there is now the next scandal involving a Raiders player.
As the franchise announced on Monday evening (CET), cornerback Damon Arnette was fired for uploading a video to TikTok in which he waved guns and made death threats.
The Raiders general manager Mike Mayock said Arnette had become untenable.
"We put a lot of time, effort, and resources into helping him in every area of his life," Mayock said.
The video was unacceptable, "the Raiders will not tolerate this kind of behavior."
Mayock has had to speak out for a general manager unusually often in the past few weeks - more often than he would have liked.
In October he announced the separation from trainer Jon Gruden after the "New York Times" published e-mails from Gruden's time before the Raiders in which he wrote racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments.
Gruden stepped back.
Then there is the tragic case of Ruggs, who now faces up to 46 years imprisonment.
Like Ruggs, Arnette was drawn in the first round in the 2020 draft, among the best of the best.
After the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas, Gruden wanted to start a new era with young, talented players, leading the two first-round picks together with quarterback Derek Carr.
Both have now been released within a week.
This season the Raiders have won five and lost three and are on their way to the play-offs.
In view of the cases off the field, it seems questionable how much the second participation in the past 19 seasons will be influenced by this.
High risk in the Arnette draft
The Raiders took a very high risk, especially with Arnette, as Mayock now admitted.
Already after Arnette's college career one had "serious concerns", but one considered his obligation to be an "acceptable risk".
A mistake, as it turned out: Arnette was repeatedly thrown back by injuries, and he played his last game at the beginning of October. And next to the square, he caused trouble: As NFL Network reports, Arnette is said to have had an accident with four rental cars within about a month. In addition, there were two legal proceedings against him. In October 2020, he is said to have fled an accident because he threatened to be late for a team meeting. According to a second lawsuit, Arnette allegedly berated and spat at an employee of a parking service at a casino in Las Vegas when he was about to pick up his car.
The TikTok video, in which Arnette showed himself, among other things, with allegedly semi-automatic weapons, was now apparently too much for the raiders.
"Obviously we failed," Mayock said.
"And that is 100 percent my responsibility."
hba / sid / AP / Reuters
