Follow-Up - Draft Prospect Tony Washington Still Available

He's still working out, "waiting for a call that will likely never come".

This is the kid Simon profiled pre-draft as a good tackle prospect who made the mistake of having sexual relations with a relative as a teenager. No team will touch him as he is toxic to public image.

But with how bad our depth at tackle is looking, and with this kid still out there, I wish we would consider brining him in for a look. Heck, we could hook him up with a good therapist too.

Here's an ESPN write-up on Washington from August 31st, just a couple of weeks ago. It is a HUGE article and I posted a bunch of excerpts, but the article is about 10 times as long as this and I highly recommend reading it...

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=5497517

He was 9 years old. Too young, he says, to see what he saw. Too small to endure what he endured. Exposure to pornography. Unbidden touching. Sexual misconduct that he stops short of calling abuse. "It was nobody that matters now," he says. Then he adds flatly, "Close relatives."

When Washington was 12, his father left the family. "We moved to New Orleans, and he went someplace else," Tony says. No one ever said why. So he didn't ask. He was good at keeping quiet.

"Every day I left home, I realized I might have to fight," he says. "I spent most of my time making sure I didn't get killed."

With his gentle nature, Washington was a frequent target. Gangs of boys would circle, pound him senseless, steal his shoes. He never started fights, nor was he very good at finishing them. His strength was in taking it, picking himself up off the sidewalk, hobbling home, saying nothing. "There was no one to tell," he says.

His mother worked two restaurant jobs. He says his brother, older by three years, was a "street body," ...... "I WAS never taught how to be good."

His family moved to a rougher neighborhood, then moved again. "We couldn't make rent," Washington says. Four more times they moved, putting him in three different schools. His only constant was Caylen, younger by a year. He looked after her, helped her with homework, made sure she ate dinner. She gave him purpose, reminded him of the person he used to be, before.

Four of his fingers are recently tattooed, the skin still flaking from the scabs. Perseverance. Dedication. Resilience. Faith. The words trail knuckle to nail. "My life in a nutshell," he says.

Washington got the ink two weeks prior, in early July, when he heard that a Canadian Football League team was interested in signing him. "I was days from moving," he says. Then Canadian immigration officials intervened, forcing him and the CFL into a holding pattern because of his legal circumstances. "With my specific charge, it's harder to be let in. I get that. All I know is I am here, trying to make it right."

On May 9, 2003, Washington pleaded guilty to having consensual sex with his biological sister, Caylen. He was 16, she was 15.

"Incest," he says, looking straight ahead.

He says he didn't plan to do it. He was a teenager. Unstrung. Unsupervised. His world was at war. He was scared. Isolated. Except she was there, the two of them best friends, close as book pages. They loved each other, trusted each other. And one day that tipped into something more. Something neither one felt was wrong in the moment. "We were just sitting there, and it was like, 'Do you want to?'" he says. There was no discussion. "We did it. And it was like, 'OK, what's next?' We never talked about it after that."

Both say it happened only once more. The two never kissed. Never shared true intimacy. Just spontaneous, ill-conceived connections. Needs met when few others were.

A few months after they first had sex, Washington's sister went out one night to meet somebody. Her boyfriend, she says. Johns, the police suspected. Soon after, Washington's phone rang. His sister had been picked up by the cops. He needed to come get her, and he needed to come right away. "All I knew was my sister was in trouble," he says. "So when I showed up, and they asked me about the two of us, I said yes. I didn't know it was illegal."

Caylen denied she was a prostitute. So they asked her if there were issues at home. Was that why she ran off? Had anyone in her family touched her, abused her? For more than three hours, she stuck to her story: She left home to meet her boyfriend. She adored her brother. He was a good kid who took care of her. Their family wasn't like that.

More officers came into the interrogation room. Caylen was alone. She had no lawyer, just her and a passel of cops and detectives, and it got later and later into the night, and she was hungry and tired. It was then, four hours in, she says, that they started talking about jail.

Caylen did not want to go to jail. She wanted to leave. She says the cops promised her that if she confessed, everyone could go home, that she and her family would get free counseling and all this ugliness would end, and everyone could sleep in their own beds. They said it was her choice. Did she want to end up in prison? Her brother too?

Caylen folded. She said things that she insists now were "half-true" or "complete lies." She nodded her head yes to every question and said whatever she thought they wanted to hear.

"And then, like that, I was in jail," Tony says.

"I was required to put out fliers to a five-mile radius around my house. It was my name, my picture, what I was charged with. Incest."

His voice catches on the word.

"At first, people came around and talked to me. Then that stopped. I always knew when people found out."

His mind began to betray him. Maybe he was what they said. A pervert. Sick. Maybe he didn't deserve to live. He considered suicide. "The intense humiliation," he says. "I began to feel like I deserved it. Maybe I wasn't so different from those other guys."

ACCORDING TO THE National Center on Sexual Behavior of Youth, adolescent sex offenders have a low chance of recidivism -- 5 percent to 14 percent -- and are seen as highly treatable. Yet they are often prosecuted as adults and end up on the same state and federal sex-registration lists as violent predators....Clemency for sex offenders is as uncommon as unicorns. Politicians who pardon them aren't rewarded with re-election. Cops who are lenient on the accused aren't promoted. The public wants to believe that everything that can be done to protect their children is being done -- as well it should be.

"I hated myself for a long time. I hated that I couldn't make a better decision. I hated what I did. I hated who I was."
"What I went through as a kid. I wanted to find love so bad. But I had no idea what love even was."

Abilene, one of the most religious schools in the country, opened its doors. Washington started every game for two seasons, and was named a two-time Division II All-American. "One of the most gifted athletes I have ever been around," Thomsen says.

At this year's NFL combine, in March, Washington finished with a 6.3 national grade, projecting him as a possible second-round talent. Then the whispers started. In team interviews, he had been up-front about his record. "No big deal," he says he was told by league gatekeepers. But Ben Roethlisberger and Michael Vick were causing a stir, ushering in a new tide of character scrutiny. And as the draft neared, owners and their decision-makers began to think it through. How do you defend your choice to draft a known sex offender? Would Washington need to announce his crime every time his team traveled to another state? (No.) Would teammates accept him?

... his agent, former NFL defensive back Vann McElroy. "You get a feeling from bad guys. Things keep coming up. But Tony is clean, and has been for years."

Finally, the last pick came. No call. No one drafted him. "I couldn't explain it," he says. "I didn't want to have to explain it." ...But in the days and weeks after, there was only silence -- no invitations to camp, no tryouts, nothing.

Before the draft, McElroy hired sports psychology consultant Robert Andrews to determine Washington's readiness for the pressures of the NFL....Andrews dug deep in his evaluation, administering a battery of psychological tests. Washington profiled as a leader. A sociable person. A man with resilience. "Nothing to indicate any trouble down the road," Andrews says.

One front-office source from a team that dropped Washington off its draft board says the player didn't seem to show enough remorse. More to the point, the team didn't want to deal with the complications of having a sex offender on the roster. "He'd be a media distraction," the source says. "You have to ask, is he worth the headache?"

"I get it," Washington says. "It isn't just about sports. It is politics and money. Why would they take on a sex offender? I wouldn't."

"I feel for my brother," Caylen says calmly. "I was so happy when he got out of jail. He had no reason to be in there." She wants this to be known, to be clear: "My brother never, ever raped me. He never tried to hold me down. Or threaten me. Or abuse me. Or frighten me. Or anything like that. What some of these people are speculating, none of that ever happened." The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office recounts it differently... "They twisted our stories around," Caylen says. "They wanted us to incriminate each other. They told me if I said that, we could all go home."

Caylen remembers Tony's return from jail, how they hugged each other and cried with relief, how they "thought everything was done with." She didn't understand then what her brother's sentencing meant, how the ghost of their choices would haunt him, the specter trailing him until death. "We thought we could all just move on with our lives."

On his arm, Washington sports a tattoo of the NFL logo. Around his collarbone is more ink, several inches high and running shoulder-to-shoulder, which he got after the draft: "Only God can judge me."

WASHINGTON IS idling in the parking lot outside the high school field in Plano, where he practices with his Arena football team, the Dallas Vigilantes. He's early, so he rolls down the car windows and waits. He says hello to a few other players who amble past, some he knows from watching the NFL, men "who used to pull millions." He earns $400 per game.

Last night, his credit card was denied at Walmart. He had to leave his shaving cream and deodorant on the belt.... Washington is broke

Hours pass. His exhausted teammates goof and lounge on the grass, helmets at their feet. Washington stays dressed, keeps on running, trusting somehow that it matters.

"What I dream for, it may not ever come to me," he says softly, eyes skipping over his NFL tattoo. "But I have to be ready to receive it. Just in case. Otherwise, what am I doing?"

Recently there has been been a slim ray of light. A scout from a UFL team has been sniffing around, albeit cautiously. "I'm trying to make that jump from a kid having a tough time to a kid who has sex with his sister," the scout says. "No one is going to argue that Tony is not talented enough. We just need to know the ramifications of putting him on the roster."

"I used to always be in such a rush," he says. "Now I wait." For what?

"For change. For a chance. For somebody to decide it is enough. Because in the end, no matter how much right I do, it isn't my choice to say, 'You're forgiven.'"

Until that day, for as long as the universe will allow, he will put on his pads, and he will stand in the heat, on that line, and he will take the hits, one after another, unflinching. It is the thing he does best.

It is, he believes, what he deserves.

Honestly, it reminds me of Ricky Williams' story at first... but then it just keeps getting so much worse. He's like Michael Oher from "The Blindside" if a family HADN'T saved him from his siutation. Perhaps a teammate like Williams, with sexual molestation in his background, would be a good mentor for this kid.

I don;t know if the Dolphins interviewed this kid at the combine, but it sounds lik he would be great for this team, and that the team would be great for him, as it could help him really continue healing and growing as a man. Who doesn;t like a redemption story? I wonder if the fear is that he still loves his sister more than platonically?

Anyways, this is all a PR issue. I think we've shown we will step beyond PR lines at times (Incognito, Brandon Marshall to an extent). But this is WAY outside the lines.

Should we be brave enough to sign this kid?????