Police chief: Brady jersey not top priority
The search by Houston police for Tom Brady’s stolen jersey sounds about as formidable as the Falcons’ second-half defense.
Police chief Art Acevedo, in a radio interview with 104.3-FM in Austin on Tuesday, made it clear there are more important things on his department’s priority list.
“I told those guys, ‘Hey guys, we’ll give it a run, but let’s keep things in perspective, it’s a jersey,’” Acevedo told the station.
This came one day after Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said finding the stolen memento was “important.”
“It might be the highest priority for [the] lieutenant governor, I can tell you we had three homicides the night of the Super Bowl in the city of Houston, and we’d like to find [the jersey], but I don’t think we’re burning the midnight oil worrying about a jersey.” Acevedo told the Austin-American Statesman. “It’s just not the biggest, greatest importance in the big scheme of things.”
Ken Goldin of New Jersey’s Goldin Auctions told Bloomberg the jersey of the Super Bowl MVP could be worth up to $500,000.
The NFL is narrowing down a list of suspects who could have been in the Patriots’ locker room at the time the jersey was stolen.
Yahoo Sports reports the league has narrowed it down to a 15-minute time frame — 10:05-10:20 p.m. Central time — during which the jersey likely was taken from Brady’s duffel bag inside his locker.
The report stated the following categories of people had access to the locker room during that period: Patriots players, team officials and employees, family of Patriots executives, NFL employees (*cough* Roger Goodell *cough*) and security. Media was allowed in for the final few minutes of that window. Yahoo described the investigation as “inching along.” The current hope is security video of the walkways outside the locker room will provide potential suspects, though it is unclear if that video exists and how helpful it might be. (There is no surveillance footage from inside the locker room for the obvious reason: People get undressed there.)
“Whoever took it has to be scared as [expletive],” an NFL source involved with the investigation said. “They had no idea what they were getting into. Now it’s everywhere. If that thing is worth $500,000 like some people are saying, that’s prison time. It might not even be easy to give it back at this point.”
The Texas Rangers and the Houston Police Department are both using significant resources to track down the stolen jersey.
“We deem this a pretty important case. We want our top investigators on this case,” police department executive assistant chief G.T. Buenik said at a press conference Tuesday. “Hopefully we’ll make an arrest, but more importantly, recover that jersey for Tom Brady. There’s really no leads at this point. We are piecing together different sets of information.”