The first time anyone outside his family heard from former NBA player Quinton Ross on Monday he had called into hip-hop station K104 in his home town of Dallas.
He had called in to refute the reports he was dead.
“It’s been a crazy morning…” he said over the air. “I woke up and saw these text messages saying ‘say it ain’t so,’ so I called around to see what was going on.”
What was going on is that a man named Quinton Ross had been discovered dead in a shallow grave in Queens, New York — the New York Post ran with a story that originally said it was the former NBA player Ross. It wasn’t. After more than an hour the Post retracted the story and noted it was not the same Quinton Ross, but by that time the story was around the world at the speed of the Web. (While I had tweeted out a link to the Post story PBT never ran a post on this because the NYPD would not confirm the identity of the victim.)
The former NBA player Ross, who spent seven seasons bouncing around the NBA after making the Clippers despite not being drafted out of SMU, spoke to the Associated Press about his day.“My phone was going crazy,” he said. “I checked Facebook. Finally, I went on the Internet, and they were saying I was dead. I just couldn’t believe it….
The 32-year-old Ross called loved ones and posted on Facebook to “let everybody know I was OK.”
“A couple (relatives) already heard it,” he said. “They were crying. I mean, it was a tough day, man, mostly for my family and friends.”New York Police are still investigating the apparent murder of the other Ross.
