“We have been informed that . . . the victim is going to follow through and press charges,” said Feaster, a lawyer by training. “So (Sutter) has been charged with assault-touched to injure. It’s a third-degree misdemeanor in Arizona. The next thing that’ll happen from a legal perspective is that a plea will have to be entered at a hearing on Nov. 30 in Scottsdale. Brett won’t have to be there in person. He can have legal counsel enter a plea for him.
“From an organization perspective, our first reaction is that this is highly out of — totally out of — character for this player. That’s not who or what Brett is. Obviously, it’s unfortunate we’re in this situation and it’s unfortunate for Brett. But, again, it doesn’t reflect Brett. It doesn’t reflect the kind of person that he’s been in this organization. So we are going to do everything we can to support him . . . and help him as he goes through this process.”
Sutter’s situation has a couple of parallels that both don’t bode well for him. Getting arrested in Arizona makes us think of the mess that Oilers goalie Nikolai Khabibulin found himself in after being arrested for and convicted of extreme DUI. The person Sutter allegedly assaulted is a taxi cab driver which brings us to the 20 cent man himself, Patrick Kane, who was booked for assaulting a Buffalo cab driver in a dispute over change. What in the world do cab drivers do to hockey players that make them go off? This has to be a “cats and dogs” sort of thing.
Obviously we’ll find out eventually how this situation gets taken care of, but with the cab driver pressing charges, this is just the beginning for Brett Sutter. At the very least, he should be happy that it’s not a felony charge. Of course, avoiding situations like this would go a long way to staying out of trouble too.