In the days after someone put a bullet into the leg of Quanis Phillips, Virginia Beach police said that they have no interest in Eagles quarterback Mike Vick.
That has since changed.
“Right now, we don’t really have a title for him,” Virginia Beach police spokesman Adam Bernstein told Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Daily News.
Initially, witnesses would not cooperate, mimicking Sgt. Schulz. (Some of the younger members of the audience are scratching their heads; our slightly older friends wonder what a pro wrestler has to do with any of this.)
“Since then, we have viewed this video. And more people have come forward, giving information,” Bernstein told Hayes.
Bernstein also confirmed that surveillance video shows Vick leaving the club only minutes before the shooting, contrary to accounts from men like Falcons receiver Roddy White and, reportedly, Vick himself.
The information contained in that video sharply conflicts with the public, chest-thumping declarations of Vick’s lawyer, Larry Woodward. “I stand by what I said, that Michael was long gone before the shooting, does not know who did the shooting and had nothing to do with the shooting,” Woodward recently told the Philadelphia Daily News. “Anyone who says any different better be very careful.”
Maybe Woodward should have been very careful to know the facts before apparently letting his client tell police a version of the events that conflicts with them. (In the event they didn’t teach you this in law school, Larry, the cops don’t like being lied to.) And maybe Woodward should have been very careful not to give the timing of Vick’s departure so much significance to the shooting, in lieu of simply saying, “It doesn’t matter when he left; he had nothing to do with it.”
By hinging his client’s credibility and his own credibility to an objective fact on which they’ve been proven wrong, reasonable people will be more likely to conclude that perhaps Vick had something to do with the shooting.