Katie Stratman-Imagn Images
It’s not rare to see tempers flare during a high school basketball game, but things usually don’t escalate to the point where the police have to get involved. However, that was the case at a recent showdown between two teams in West Virginia that led to a player being charged with a felony over a foul that sent an opponent to the hospital.
You’ll usually see at least one police officer in attendance if you attend a high school basketball game, but they tend to be primarily tasked with crowd control as opposed to getting involved with a contest where the referees are charged with keeping order.
As is the case with any competitive sport, there’s always a chance things will get out of hand if a player has trouble controlling their temper, but those incidents will almost always result in them being sent to the locker room to cool off instead of getting hauled off to jail.
With that said, there are some exceptions—including the incident that transpired at a game in West Virginia earlier this month.
According to WBOY, Harman School faced off against the high school team hailing from the Union Educational Complex in Mt. Storm, West Virginia on February 26th in a lopsided loss that saw the former end up on the wrong side of a 72-31 blowout.
The game was marred by an ugly incident that led to an unidentified 17-year-old Union player being admitted to the hospital for a broken nose that caused him to bleed “profusely” for four hours and was allegedly the end result of an elbow delivered by Harman’s Gage Ketterman.
The outlet reports the victim’s mother contacted the West Virginia State Police the following day to report what she positioned as an assault, and the agency apparently agreed with that assessment after reviewing video that purportedly showed Ketterman purposefully elbowing his opponent in the face as well as multiple instances where he “struck Union players in the back of the head”
Ketterman was subsequently charged with one count of malicious assault over the elbow and two additional counts of attempted malicious assault over the aforementioned head strikes and was released after posting a $12,500 bond.
He is currently slated to appear in court on May 22nd.