Cal Football Players Present at Fatal Shooting

A player for the UC Berkeley football team was slightly wounded in a July incident that resulted in the shooting death of a promising Ivy League student who had returned home to Berkeley for the summer to work for a homeless program, according to charges filed Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court.

The charges, and comments Tuesday by Cal football Coach Jeff Tedford, were the first official acknowledgements that several members of the university football team were present at the July 17 shooting, which followed a heated argument during which several unidentified men allegedly called the victim, 19-year-old Dartmouth College student Meleia Willis-Starbuck, and her friends derogatory names.

Charged with murder was Christopher Hollis, 22, a close friend of Willis-Starbuck who allegedly fired into the crowd after she called him for help.

Hollis, who was a fugitive for two months before his arrest Sunday in Fresno, was also charged Tuesday with assaulting UC Berkeley freshman football player Gary Doxy, 18, a Long Beach Poly High School graduate who was allegedly grazed on the hand by a bullet.

“A few of our student athletes were there,” Tedford said Tuesday. “They have been very cooperative all along with the situation. None of our players have been implicated in any wrongdoing.”

Tedford described the injury to Doxy, a redshirt freshman defensive back, as “a little bitty scratch on the wrist that didn’t even bleed.”

Another player present at the scene was junior tight end David Gray, 21, of Richmond, Tedford said. In December, Gray was arrested in San Francisco on suspicion of carrying a weapon. He was released after he told authorities that he had taken the gun from another person to prevent violence.

UC Berkeley spokesman George Strait said university officials had not previously commented about the involvement of student athletes because they were instructed not to by the Berkeley Police Department.

“We followed the lead of the Berkeley Police Department because they had an ongoing criminal investigation,” Strait said.

“It was never any secret that Cal players and Cal students may have been involved,” he added.

Willis-Starbuck’s death shocked the community of Berkeley, where she had been a popular and gregarious high school student.

The tragic nature of the killing was accentuated by the fact that many people also know and like the alleged killer, Hollis, who made his first appearance in court Tuesday afternoon, represented by Oakland attorney John Burris.

“Apparently the football players were agitating the ladies,” said Burris, who portrayed the killing as a tragic accident after Hollis rushed to the aid of his harassed friends. “Certainly my client was under the impression that they were in danger. But this was an accident. He certainly didn’t intend to kill the young lady.”

Joan Edelstein, the mother of one of Willis-Starbuck’s closest friends, said she believed the university has not been completely forthcoming about the role of the football players in the incident.

“I’m very concerned about the failure on the part of the university to come forward prior to this time,” Edelstein said. “This was a truly missed opportunity to educate the student football players about how to have respectful and appropriate relations and interactions with women.”

According to several witnesses, several men had approached Willis-Starbuck and her friends and invited them to a party. When the women refused, the men called the women a derogatory name.

Willis-Starbuck asked the men if they would use the same term to describe their own mothers. As the argument became more heated, Willis-Starbuck called Hollis on her cellphone and asked him to come. According to one disputed account of a witness, she asked Hollis to “bring heat.”

Willis-Starbuck and Hollis were longtime friends, so close that they called each other brother and sister. Attorney Burris said Hollis was traumatized by the death of his friend and his role in it. Burris and former Berkeley football coach Vincent Trahan spoke with Hollis when he was a fugitive, hoping they could persuade him to turn himself in.

Both men described Hollis as “relaxed” now that he was in custody.

“From what I can tell,” Burris said, “he is surely relieved to be in custody and ready to face the charges against him.”