The latest accusations against Trevone Boykin just became the last the Seahawks are going to hear about him.
The team announced Tuesday it had released their backup quarterback with previous legal troubles in Texas, hours after his girlfriend gave a damning account to Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA of Boykin allegedly choking her last week and leaving hospitalized for days.
About an hour after WFAA posted its report online and said police officers in Mansfield, Texas, are conducting an investigation into Boykin for alleged domestic assault, the Seahawks acted. Swiftly and decisively.
Boykin was their third-string quarterback last season. He was the lone backup to Russell Wilson in 2016, Boykin’s rookie season. That was months removed from a suspension that ended his playing career at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.
Boykin released a statement Tuesday. He said “the story is false.”
“I understand the Seahawks’ decision to release me,” he wrote. “The story that was reported casts a bad light on the organization and on me. I want to be clear that the story is false. The police have taken statements from the accuser, another witness and me. All of these statements confirm that I was not involved in the physical altercation. This woman has lied about me and it has cost me my job. I know that guilt by association is real. This person has fabricated a story and I am suffering the consequences. I will let the legal system run its course and I know I will be vindicated.”
Shabrika Bailey told WFAA she has been in relationship with the 24-year-old Boykin since they were in high school. She said she was at his home in Mansfield on March 20 when they began to argue over a text message Boykin wanted to see on her mobile phone. She refused to let him see it.
“So he goes into a choke,” Bailey told WFAA. “I remember him choking me and I’m trying to calm him down. And I just couldn’t. And I blacked out. I just couldn’t calm him down at all. …
“And I just woke up in a puddle of blood on the kitchen floor. My whole right side was full of blood on the kitchen floor…
“I’ve never seen so much blood.”
She said Boykin drove her to Dallas Regional Medical Center in Mesquite the following day. She said when hospital staffers separated them and started asking them questions independently, Boykin left the hospital and never returned.
Bailey suffered a broken jaw on both sides. She spoke to WFAA with her jaw wired shut. She said she was having difficulty breathing from a constricted airway, so she was airlifted to from the first hospital to another, in Dallas. She was released from there on Saturday, three days later.
Boykin was charged in March 2017 with marijuana possession and public intoxication following a car crash into a Dallas bar in which he was a passenger. WFAA reported Tuesday the driver of the car in that incident was his girlfriend who is accusing him of this latest charge. That 2017 crash in Dallas resulted in and a probation-violation case in San Antonio. He had been on probation there because of a bar fight that got Boykin suspended by TCU from his final college game, the Alamo Bowl in January 2016.
Bexar County (Texas) closed the probation-violation case against Boykin last summer with no finding of guilt. Last month court records in Dallas County showed Boykin “has completed all conditions in accordance with the terms of the conditional dismissal agreement” on the marijuana and public-intoxication charges there.
After these latest accusations, the Seahawks had enough. He played in five games for Seattle, all in 2016, all in relief of Wilson at the end of games or after the starter got hurt in two games that season.
Wilson and six-year veteran Austin Davis, Seattle’s number-two QB last season, are the remaining quarterbacks on the offseason roster.
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