113 days ago, I blogged about my frustration with my Kansas City Chiefs, in terms of how they got rid of two key cogs (Justin Houston and Dee Ford) from the strongest aspect of their defense last season, as well as releasing two franchise pillars (Houston and Eric Berry) to clear cap space to possibly sign Tyreek Hill to a $200 million max contract prior to the recording that caused child abuse allegations to once again come out against him during this past April. He was previously investigated for the allegations a month prior.
Of course, I heard the recording around the same time that many other people heard it and came away very disappointed in Hill for what appeared to be a second serious legal problem in his life. Or so I had thought, because this past early-June, the likelihood of Hill facing suspension for violating the personal conduct policy appeared to be doubtful. And of course, those doubts were confirmed a month later, as the full recording of the audio recording between Tyreek Hill and Cristal Espinal (his son’s mother) came out,and was drastically different compared to what we heard during this past April. And as to what the difference between the two were, well the first one was a doctored up version that had no background noise and had Espinal playing the “poor innocent me” card, while the second one had background noise and had Hill denying that he was the one whom caused his son’s arm to break. Plus, Espinal made mentions of the 2014 domestic violence situation on the latter of those two recordings, to which Hill clearly questions her if he did anything during that time (2014), only for her to completely avoid answering him about that. And with that being said, I’m not convinced that he committed domestic violence against her during that time. Especially when an audio expert confirmed that there was nothing suspicious about the latter of the two recordings, along with the paper trail of a group of connected text messages that pretty much confirm Espinal as the guilty party.
Of course, KCTV-5 committed yellow journalism, by running the last two minutes of the recording, thus causing the rest of us to have an outraged reaction about Hill. And while I’m not sure how the rest of the listeners feel about what has transpired between Hill and Espinal since the latter of the two recordings came out, I for one would like to apologize to one Tyreek Hill for being duped by the sound byte manipulation of KCTV-5. I jumped to an unnecessary conclusion, by thinking you were the guilty party. And while I am guilty for piling on that TV station’s irresponsible portrayal of you, I also did genuinely wish for you to better yourself as a person. And I still genuinely wish that for you, whether you’re a Kansas City Chief or not.