Florida State running back Karlos Williams is under investigation over an accusation of domestic battery, the Tallahassee Police Department announced Monday.
The Tallahassee police received the case against Williams on Saturday night. No other details of the claim were made public. Williams, 21, a senior and the Seminoles’ leading rusher with 378 yards and seven touchdowns, is the third Florida State starter to face an abuse claim in the past two years.
The new accusation emerged as the No. 2 Seminoles, the defending Football Bowl Subdivision champions, prepared for a Thursday game against Louisville with a chance to extend their 23-game winning streak. The Florida State athletic department said in a statement Monday that it was “aware of an investigation by the Tallahassee Police Department involving football student-athlete Karlos Williams,” adding that his status with the team was “under review.”
According to an article published online last month by the F.S.U. athletics department, Williams has a daughter and is expecting a second son with his girlfriend, Miranda Wilhelm, a fellow student. Wilhelm referred a request for comment to her lawyer, Nathan Prince, who was not immediately available for comment.
This month, The New York Times reported that a domestic dispute involving a player prompted a 911 call last January. The Tallahassee Police Department reclassified that episode as a “domestic disturbance” after the officers who responded to the call said the dispute was strictly verbal. But a local domestic violence expert who viewed the police report questioned that reclassification. That player is not Williams, but his name has not been reported because no charges were filed.
In December 2012, quarterback Jameis Winston, who last season became the youngest winner of the Heisman Trophy, was accused of rape. It took nearly a year for the case to reach the prosecutor’s office. Last December, the local prosecutor said there was not enough evidence to charge Winston. This season, Winston was suspended for a game after shouting lewd statements in the student union.
F.S.U. began a disciplinary inquiry into the 2012 accusation against Winston last month.
Questions about Williams’s status with the team emerged Friday when Rick Ballou, a Jacksonville sports talk radio host, posted online that Williams had violated “team rules.” Ballou apologized after Florida State officials contacted him to say that Williams was not going to be suspended.
Coach Jimbo Fisher responded to Ballou’s post during his weekly news conference Friday.
“No, there’s another false report,” Fisher told reporters. “And it’s amazing how things happen out here. And whoever’s got sources and whoever’s got rumors need to check who they’re talking to. ’Cause that’s about as far from the truth as it is. Amazing, isn’t it?”
Williams’s lawyer Tim Jansen, who has also represented Winston, said it was too soon to comment on Williams’s situation.
“It’s so premature,” Jansen said Monday.
The Tallahassee Police Department, which said the case was “immediately assigned” when it was received, has been criticized for its handling of accusations against Seminoles players.
It waited almost two weeks to contact Winston after learning of the rape claim against him, as The Times reported in April. And it neglected to forward a police report of the January episode to the designated domestic violence crisis center.
The director of that center, Meg Baldwin of Refuge House, said Monday that she met with the department last week to discuss the case, which she believed should have been referred to her under state law. That meeting was first reported by The Tallahassee Democrat.
“It was to work on areas of collaboration between the Tallahassee Police Department and Refuge House, particularly on sexual battery, and also to review the issue related to this report,” Baldwin said, referring to the January case.
She declined to comment on the Williams case.
“One allegation is enough to, I think, start to do some strong intervention from the university, from the coaching staff, the football program, the athletics program,” said Nina Zollo, legal counsel to the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
“If we can intervene with families early, that’s when you can hopefully make a difference,” she added.
Zollo flagged the tone of the Tallahassee Police Department’s statement, which it posted to its Facebook page Monday. It said it “received the case on Saturday night, Oct. 25th, 2014, and it was immediately assigned to the criminal investigation division.”
Earlier reports, Zollo said, “may have made a difference there.”
“It sounds like as soon as they received information about it, they did start the investigation,” she added.