Chiefs’ long history of domestic violence
Since 2000, Kansas City 3rd in NFL in such cases
No other franchise in the NFL has compiled a record of domestic violence quite as brutal as the Chiefs.
❚ In 2012 alone, the organization had two domestic murder-suicides, one at the hands of a player, Jovan Belcher, and the other at the hands of another employee.
❚ Since November 2017, three players have been suspended for alleged violence against women or children during their time with the team. The latest is wide receiver Tyreek Hill, whose status in the NFL has been in limbo since an audio recording aired on local TV last month suggesting he broke the arm of his 3-year-old son.
❚ Since 2015, the team also acquired at least three players who were kicked off of college teams for alleged domestic violence, most recently in April with the trade for defensive end Frank Clark. The other two are Hill and defensive back Justin Cox, who then was arrested again for a similar offense.
With this many issues in recent years, questions about the franchise’s culture and its efforts to address domestic abuse issues have come to a head again.
“At some point, it’s going to be bad for the Kansas City Chiefs’ bottom line if they keep ignoring domestic violence and if they continue to select players with those kinds of histories,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
On Thursday, Chiefs president Mark Donovan met with domestic violence groups, including the family of Jamie Kimble, who was fatally shot in 2012 by her ex-boyfriend, a Chiefs’ stadium operations employee who then shot himself. In her memory, Kimble’s parents started a foundation that promotes building domestic violence policies in the workplace, among other endeavors.
Their goal is to stop the pattern. In the case of the Chiefs, it goes back decades, all under the ownership of Lamar and Clark Hunt.
The Kimble family didn’t return messages seeking comment. Chiefs spokesman Ted Crews confirmed the meeting but did not immediately address questions regarding the team’s domestic abuse policies.
However, the Chiefs’ record says plenty. Only two teams, Denver and Miami, have recorded more domestic violence arrests or charges since January 2000 than the Chiefs, who have seven with the Belcher murder included, according to USA TODAY’s NFL player arrest database. By comparison, Denver and Miami haven’t had nearly the same trouble as the Chiefs since the Belcher tragedy, which helped raised awareness of domestic problems in the league, along with the 2014 video footage of Ravens running back Ray Rice assaulting his then-fiancee.
The database includes more than 110 domestic citations and more than 930 citations overall but doesn’t count incidents that don’t result in charges or arrests, such as the recent cases involving Hill and running back Kareem Hunt, who was shown on video last year shoving and kicking a woman before the team released him.
Extended family
There has been a common denominator in all of the Chiefs’ successes and failures, on and off the field, through six head coaches over the past 20 years. Since its first year of existence in 1960, the franchise has been owned by the descendants of the former richest man in America, H.L. Hunt, a Texas oil wildcatter and bigamist who sired 15 children with three wives before his death in 1974.
One of those children, Lamar Hunt Sr., founded the franchise in Dallas, relocated it to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1963 and passed along ownership of the team to his children before his own death in 2006.
His son Clark Hunt, 54, is the team’s current controlling owner.
“It’s one of the most respected families in all of sports,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy told USA TODAY on Thursday. McCarthy also pointed out that Chiefs players have done exemplary work off the field and lead the league with five NFL “Man of the Year” recipients since 1970.
The extended Hunt family still has its own complicated history with domestic abuse, which has claimed about one in four women in the U.S. as victims, according to research cited by the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
❚ In 1999, Chiefs co-owner Lamar Hunt Jr. was sued in civil court for allegedly sexually assaulting his mentally disabled sister-in-law two years earlier. The case was settled for about $2 million, according to The Dallas Morning News. Hunt Jr. didn’t return messages seeking comment.
❚ In 2002, Al Hill Jr., H.L. Hunt’s eldest grandson, pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault. Hill, a former business partner of his uncle Lamar Hunt Sr., was required to attend 24 weeks of batterer intervention counseling, the Morning News reported. He died in 2017.
❚ Another offspring of H.L. Hunt, daughter June Hunt, has made the issue a personal cause as a Christian counselor who teaches about recovery from abuse. She has written books called “How to Rise Above Abuse and How to Deal with Difficult Relationships.” A representative said she wanted to talk to her family before commenting.
In Kansas City, Clark Hunt has taken a more corporate approach to the problem, similar to other NFL owners who have faced varying degrees of domestic cases. The difference with the Chiefs is the severity of recent incidents and their number of domestic cases, which is double the league average, according to the database.
The list includes former running back Larry Johnson, who faced two domestic cases and two others involving alleged abuse against women during his time with the team from 2003 to 2009.
“They were more upset about the image it cast,” Johnson told USA TODAY this month about Chiefs’ ownership’s response to his incidents. Regarding Clark Hunt, Johnson said, “He’s always been business, business, business, and he only cares about the guys he cares about.”
The first time he was arrested with the Chiefs, in 2003, Johnson was accused of slapping his girlfriend and threatening her with a gun. That case led him into anger-management classes and a diversion program, his first test of tolerance with the franchise. At the time of his arrest, head coach Dick Vermeil said in the Kansas City Star that “I’ve been told his side of it, and I believe him. ... (I) always believe the player. You know him so well. I always go on that side.”
Johnson, now 39 and retired, since has watched how the team has dealt with the cases of Kareem Hunt and Hill.
“I don’t think they’re really equipped to handle these kids,” Johnson said. “You have old men who don’t hang around young black kids the majority of their lives. They only look at us as far as stock or employees. That’s all they know of us.”
That dynamic is not exclusive to the Chiefs. It also wasn’t the first time the Chiefs gave multiple chances to a talented young player, as shown in a sequence in 1994 that would be shocking by today’s standards.
On Jan. 4 of that year, wide receiver Tim Barnett was sentenced in court to 10 days in jail after pleading guilty to assault and battery against his wife the previous year, his second domestic charge in about 15 months.
Four days later, the Chiefs played the Steelers in a playoff game at home. The team — and a judge — allowed Barnett to play despite his jail sentence, and he ended up catching a dramatic touchdown pass from quarterback Joe Montana in the fourth quarter to help force overtime and eventually win. It was the last time the Chiefs won a playoff game at home until this year, but it wasn’t a happy ending for Barnett.
About five months later, he was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-yearold hotel maid in Milwaukee. The Chiefs finally released him afterward. He later was sentenced to three years in prison for the incident and never played in the NFL again.
“It’s not that they gave me chances,” Barnett told USA TODAY recently. “They made me go through the things I had to go through. It wasn’t like they just turned their heads and said, ‘OK, no problem.’ That’s not the case. You have to go through the counseling and all the procedures.”
McCarthy said the Chiefs were one of the first teams to have a full-time licensed clinician on hand to address mental health issues.
Domestic violence experts still are alarmed by the recent history.
‘Scares the hell out of me’
Gandy, the domestic violence expert, is particularly worried about two aspects in the case involving Tyreek Hill.
In 2015, he pleaded guilty to assaulting and choking his girlfriend at Oklahoma State. He was kicked off the team, put on probation and required to complete a batterer’s intervention program.
“It was a strangulation case, which is a significant predictor for lethal violence in the future and homicide,” Gandy noted, citing research that shows that if domestic violence victims have been strangled in the past by a domestic partner, their risk of being killed by them is 10 times higher.
Gandy also referenced the audio recording that aired last month in which his fiancee — the same women he assaulted in college — is heard talking about how their young son is terrified of him.
“You need to be terrified of me, too, (expletive),” Hill replies on the audio.
Combined with his prior strangulation case, “that scares the hell out of me,” Gandy said.
Two murder-suicides already haunt the franchise: the one that cost 31-yearold Jamie Kimble her life in September 2012 and the one that overshadowed it three months later. That’s when Belcher fatally shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, before driving to the team training facility and killing himself. Police said then the team had been aware of the couple’s problems and provided counseling.
At the time, it seemed like a seminal moment for the team and the NFL. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t until the rise of social media and easy video sharing that the NFL got significantly tougher on punishing domestic offenders — in direct response to public outrage over seeing what domestic violence actually looked like.
Before 2014, such offenders often got no more than two-game suspensions from the NFL, which largely deferred to the judicial system, where such crimes can be difficult to prosecute because of uncooperative witnesses.
That all changed in 2014, when Rice was arrested for hitting his then-fiancee at an Atlantic City casino. The NFL initially gave him a two-game suspension after he entered a pretrial intervention program through the court. Then came the video. TMZ aired it later that year, showing Rice knocking the woman unconscious in an elevator. Rice never played again after that. The NFL since has issued longer suspensions even in cases without charges or arrests, such as with Kareem Hunt, now with the Browns and suspended for eight games.
He likewise might never have been released by the Chiefs without TMZ airing the video of him at a hotel in February 2018.
After that aired in November, Clark Hunt (no relation to Kareem Hunt) told reporters, “Our scouting staff does a really good job of vetting players, and part of that analysis is their character. Obviously, it’s very hard to learn everything about somebody. … We’re certainly going to try to get better, but I don’t think you can ever be perfect in that regard.”
The child abuse investigation soon followed with Hill, a Pro Bowl player who also appeared to have escaped trouble until the audio recording aired last month. An attorney for Hill has disputed the claims in the recording, but Hill since has been suspended indefinitely as the team and the league decide what to do next.
Ruth Glenn, president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said the public visibility of NFL teams should make them wary of acquiring or keeping players with domestic histories, and not just because domestic assailants often re-offend. It’s also because putting up with it sends a public message that it’s not a big deal. This is why the NFL has tougher standards than the regular judicial system for alleged perpetrators, even though data show that NFL players are arrested with less frequency than the general population.
“It may hurt the bottom line, which is money … but if you really care about this culture and this nation, you will listen to your values and say, ‘He’s a great player, but do we really want him representing our team, to really put that message out there that it’s OK?’ ” Glenn said.
Like other teams, the Chiefs consider background checks on player prospects and weigh personnel decisions on a sliding scale of risk versus investment and talent. The better the player, the harder the decision can be to cut ties with him, unless there’s powerful video of the incident. There was no video of Larry Johnson’s incidents, for example.
“I was a first-round pick,” Johnson told USA TODAY. “They weren’t going to just release me, because you’re just not going to release me — almost the same as Tyreek Hill situation. It’d hit newspaper, go to court, case would drop, I’d plead no contest, never do jail time.”
The decision wasn’t as hard for the Chiefs in November 2017, when Roy Miller, a backup defensive lineman, was arrested after a domestic incident with his wife, who had marks on her face and neck, according to the police report in Jacksonville, Florida. The Chiefs cut him two days later. He later entered a diversion program and was suspended by the NFL for six games.
He never played in the league again but was back in the news last month when he was arrested on a child abuse charge.
He has pleaded not guilty. His exwife didn’t return a message seeking comment.