CLEMSON — More details have emerged in the case of former Clemson football standouts Jadar Johnson and C.J. Fuller, and former Duke football player Quaven Ferguson, each charged with armed robbery and possession of a weapon during a crime.
The three men are accused of robbing the apartment of a former teammate while he was at practice.
“I’m at my boyfriend’s place right now, and it was these two, like, really large black guys,” a female victim said in a 911 call.
“I’m pretty sure they’re on the football team because not only were they ginormous, but my boyfriend’s also on the football team, so I think they knew him from that. … They had, like, hoods on and everything. I tried to rip them off.”
On the afternoon of March 28 at around 4 p.m., three men arrived at an apartment on Sloan Street in the downtown area of Clemson.
They found a woman at the apartment. In the 911 call, the woman stated she was at the residence and was forced inside at gunpoint by two men.
“I think there were two that came in and one was the lookout, but it all happened so fast I couldn’t tell you definitely,” the victim stated in the 911 call tape released Wednesday by Clemson police.. “One of them had a gun, and he like came in, and I tried to, like, push him out and stuff like that. And I knew that my boyfriend has a gun. … I think they knew that he also had a gun and they grabbed it out of his bedside table.”
According to the 911 tape, the three men were described as wearing hoods that were “pulled tight” so all that could be seen was their eyes. But during a struggle with the victim, she pulled out some of the assailant’s hair, which she described as being “shorter dreadlocks.”
“They didn’t say anything. They were just yelling like, ‘Go, go and move, move’ and stuff like that to each other. I tried to stop them, and then they threw my dog onto the wall,” the victim stated. “One of their hoods fell off and I was pulling out their hair trying to get them to get off of me, and they kind of had like shorter dreadlocks.”
Police were able to identify three suspects from surveillance footage taken from the downtown parking garage that showed them entering a white Mercedes-Benz.
After he got home from practice, the player told police that the only person he knew driving that type of vehicle “would be C.J. Fuller.”
The three individuals were arrested and arraigned on March 29 at the Clemson Municipal Court. All three were released on bonds of $25,000. As a condition of their release, all three must wear GPS monitoring devices, not leave South Carolina and not have any contact with the victims.
Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney’s only statement regarding the former players was that “It’s disappointing. That is really it. There is nothing else I can say.”
The three men are due back in court May 17 at 8:30 a.m.
Fuller is a former running back at Clemson.
Johnson, a former Orangeburg-Wilkinson star and Clemson graduate, was at the Tigers’ indoor facility last month for Pro Day. After attempting to join the New York Giants in 2017, Johnson stepped away from football and announced he was retiring for personal reasons.
Johnson said last month at Clemson that he battled depression, but felt like his mental health was back to where he wanted it to be and that he was ready to make his return to football. He performed well at Pro Day and Swinney said all the feedback from NFL personnel was positive.
Both were members of Clemson’s 2016 national championship team and have been friends for years. Ferguson is Fuller’s former teammate at Easley and a former player on Duke’s football team.
In a phone conversation with his mother the next morning while in detention, Johnson said “that he did something stupid” and that he would explain more later.
The Post and Courier contributed to this report.
Zach Lentz is a Clemson University alumnus who got his start working with the Tigers basketball team from 1999-2004. Now a resident of Orangeburg County, he reports on Clemson sports as a correspondent for The Times and Democrat.