OLATHE, Kan. — A Kansas State basketball player is now facing charges in connection to a road rage shooting on Interstate 435.

Amaad Wainright was arrested by U.S. Marshals on Tuesday in Kansas City, officials said. The junior guard was arrested on felony warrants out of Johnson County, Kansas.

 

U.S. Marshal Ron Miller said the warrant was issued for Wainwright on March 28 for fleeing and eluding and felony obstruction.

On Wednesday he was transferred to Johnson County Jail and formally charged with harboring, concealing or aiding a person who committed a felony and fleeing and eluding police.

Overland Park Police spokesman John Lacy confirmed to FOX4 that Wainright’s arrest is in connection to a Jan. 17, 2018 road rage shooting on Interstate 435.

A court date has not yet been scheduled.

In a statement released Tuesday, Kansas State Athletics Director Gene Taylor said Wainright has been indefinitely suspended from the basketball team.

“We are aware of Ahmad’s situation, and due to the seriousness of the charges he has been indefinitely suspended from our men’s basketball team per athletic department policy,” Taylor said. “We take matters such as these very seriously and will re-evaluate his status as we learn more information.”

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A man convicted of manslaughter in the 2016 shooting death of former NFL running back Joe McKnight in what prosecutors and witnesses described as a road rage incident, was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison.

“Let this be a cautionary tale to all drivers who rage behind the wheel of their car at other drivers,” Jefferson Parish District Judge Ellen Kovach said at Ronald Gasser’s sentencing, according to NOLA.com. Tragedy could have been avoided, Kovach said, if either man “had the good sense, the courage and the wisdom to simply disengage.”

The men did not know each other but on Dec. 1, 2016, their paths crossed when McKnight, 28, reportedly cut off Gasser, now 56, on a New Orleans bridge, angering him, as Tegan Wendland of WWNO reported. Then in what prosecutors described as a tit-for-tat pursuit of several miles, each man periodically pulled up beside the other and shouted obscenities.

They pulled over about five miles away at a busy intersection just outside the city and argued. Then Gasser, seated behind the wheel of his vehicle, shot McKnight — who was standing outside unarmed — three times, killing him.

That Gasser shot McKnight dead was not in question, he remained at the scene and confessed to police. But Gasser said it was self-defense.

His attorneys argued at trial that their client committed justifiable homicide under the state’s Castle Doctrine, because Gasser remained in his vehicle — his own property — as McKnight lunged into the vehicle to attack, reports NOLA.com.

Yet prosecutors said forensic evidence showed McKnight was never as close as Gasser claimed. They said while McKnight did have a hand on Gasser’s open passenger side window, his clothes showed no sign of gun powder residue and his wounds were not consistent with being shot at close range, according to NOLA.com.

Gasser was not arrested until nearly a week after the shooting.

As WWNO’s Tegan Wendland reported at the time, “Deputies brought him in, questioned him for hours and then released him. … Protesters took to the streets, calling the sheriff’s department racist for releasing the white man after the death of an unarmed black man.”

Gasser was charged with second-degree murder but in January a jury found him guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter.

At his sentencing hearing Thursday, McKnight’s mother, Jennifer, gave tearful testimony, telling Gasser, “You didn’t have to do that,” reports The Associated Press.

McKnight played three seasons with the New York Jets until 2012 and then briefly with the Kansas City Chiefs in 2014, until he tore his Achilles tendon.

Gasser’s attorneys are seeking a new trial.