Shortly before the start of the 2015 season, Rutgers announced that five football players, arrested a couple of days earlier in connection to an assault, had been dismissed from the football program. Nine months later, one of those five have returned to RU athletics, albeit in an entirely different sport.
According to the Asbury Park Press, Razohnn Gross is now a member of the Scarlet Knights wrestling team. Gross won’t be on scholarship, though, coming to the grappling squad initially as a walk-on heavyweight.
It’s unclear if wrestling coach Scott Goodale spoke to his former counterpart with the football program, Kyle Flood.
“We’ve done our background with him and we’ve talked to all the right people, all the important people inside the university,” Goodale told the Park Press.
“We feel good about it. He’s been in our room working really, really hard. Nothing is guaranteed. He’ll have an opportunity to make our team. That’s as far as we’ll go for now.”
The arrests of Gross and the others early last September was the result of what had been an ongoing investigation by the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office and the New Brunswick Police Department. The investigation initially kicked off in the spring following a reported home invasion in New Brunswick. Per reports, three men wearing masks forced their way into the home and left with an undisclosed amount of cash and marijuana as five students were held at gunpoint.
That was followed by the five football players allegedly attacking a group of individuals that left one of them, a student, with a broken jaw. That attack, reportedly (ahem) unprovoked, was directly connected to the incident mentioned above.
The Park Press writes that Gross was “accepted into a pretrial intervention probationary program last month” and, if he “stays out of trouble for the necessary time, his record will be cleared.”
