Now it’s time for the Steven Walker update.
Not much on the actual plea front. In fact, it seems not to have been reported what he pleaded. He does have an attorney, and there is some explanation as to why he got kicked off of the Pitt football team:
Walker, who was arraigned in Canton Municipal Court on Monday in connection with the shooting death of a Canton teenager in a gas station parking lot last weekend, won a football scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh and began preseason drills last August as a defensive back, a school official said.
Three months later, however, Walker was arrested by university police on seven counts of burglary and one count of unauthorized use of a credit card in connection with a series of break-ins at school residence halls, university spokesman John Fedele said.
The burglaries, Fedele said, occurred on Nov. 29 and 30, the week after the Thanksgiving Day holiday, but Fedele said he didn’t know how the charges were resolved.
The Akron Beacon Journal broke out one of their few remaining big guns (sorry, unprompted media criticism) to write a bit of a defense of Buchtel High School, Terry Pluto.
When a former high school football star is jailed and charged with murder, the temptation is to look at the school and the team’s coaches.
And somehow, to blame them.
Even Buchtel coach Claude Brown finds himself asking, “I wonder what else I could have done?”
In the case of Steve Walker, the answer is Buchtel did more than enough to give the former quarterback a chance at college and a promising future.
Walker is in Stark County jail charged with murder in the shooting of 17-year-old Michael Cheek at a Canton gas station Friday night. Walker is a former City Series Player of the Year at Buchtel, and he earned a football scholarship to Pittsburgh for the fall of 2004. He was dismissed from the Pitt team in December for an undisclosed violation of team rules.
“I just know that it was something that he had made restitution for,”Brown said. “I was talking to Butler Community College (in Kansas) trying to get him another chance. They were interested.”
Brown wanted to discuss what happened at Pitt with Walker, “but Stevie was sort of avoiding me. He kept the conversations short. I think he was embarrassed.”
Buchtel enabled Walker to be in position to receive a Division I football scholarship worth perhaps $100,000 over four years.
“Stevie had no parents, but he did have a guardian,” Brown said. “He was a street kid, but never violent. I was shocked by what happened.”
There are successes at Buchtel, and Pitt has and is benefitting from them. Believe me, no one is going to stay away from Buchtel kids because of what Steven Walker did.
Tim Murphy is another Buchtel player besides Walker who was at Pitt last season. He is scheduled to graduate in December with a communications degree. He was a red-shirt as a freshman and will start in the backfield this fall as a fifth-year senior. Like Walker, his background was less than ideal. But he’s made better choices.
“Tim is a quiet, humble kid,” said J.D. Brookhart, the former Pitt offensive coordinator who is now the coach at the University of Akron.
Brookhart praised Murphy’s willingness to carry the ball or do less glamorous work as a blocking fullback. He said there were no discipline issues with Murphy. “He’s just a good kid. Lots of the city kids are like that.”
Ramon Walker was a star player at Buchtel in the ’90s, attended Pitt and now plays for the NFL’s Houston Texans. Pitt recruited another Buchtel player for this fall — Bryan Williams.
Former Buchtel players now in college include Antonio Pittman (Ohio State), Antonio Reynolds (Tennessee) and Charlton Keith (Kansas). Anthony Lovelace just graduated from Bucknell with a degree in accounting, and Steve Reynolds just finished his criminal justice degree at Youngstown State.
There was a vigil held last night in honor of the murdered kid, Michael Cheeks, Jr.
