Posted on 08/16/2004 9:22:15 AM PDT by Pharmboy
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Police said Monday they believe a former Olympic athlete killed his neurosurgeon wife before jumping to his death from a 10th-story dormitory window. Investigators identified the man as Robert Howard, a University of Arkansas medical student who competed in track and field in the 1996 and 2000 Olympics, said medical school police Capt. Bryan Patterson.
"Nobody that I know of had any kind of a hint that there were any kind of problems at all, let alone problems to that degree," said Dick Booth, an assistant coach at Arkansas who helped Howard prepare for the Olympic trials last month.
Leslie Taylor, a spokeswoman for University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said campus police received a call early Saturday from someone concerned about a medical student.
Police arrived at the dormitory room and tried to talk to the man, but he jumped out of the window about 20 minutes later, Patterson said.
Later that morning, investigators went to a private residence and found the student's wife, Dr. Robin Mitchell, stabbed to death. Mitchell was chief resident in neurosurgery at the medical school.
"There is evidence that the student killed his wife," Little Rock police said in a news release.
Howard finished eighth in the triple jump at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and seventh at the 2000 Games in Sydney. The former All-American and NCAA champion, who competed for the university from 1994-98, took last year off from medical school in an unsuccessful bid to make the Olympic team this year.
Howard graduated from Shea High School in Pawtucket, R.I., in 1994 where he was one of the state's all-time top high school track performers.
"This is the last thing you would expect from somebody like Rob, but you never know what's going on in people's lives," said Thom Spann, Howard's high school coach.
AP-ES-08-16-04 1138EDT
Former Olympian Killed Wife, Jumped to His Death
What scores did the judges give him?
Oh, that's bad. Wonder if performance enhancing drugs, combined with the failure of making the team, contributed to this tragedy.
...and I wonder how he was doing in medical school. It's not easy, y'know.
Probably pretty crappy ones - it looks like he completely missed the pool. Nice form, though.
Not very good ones. Like most "murder-suicides," this guy got it backwards.
steroids was my first thought, that and not making the team and the games being on...
sad sad sad all the way around. Sad that he killed someone, but also sad he had so much hurt that this happened.
Eh, it'll save a messy trial by newschannel.
An Olympic jumper jumping to his death is sorta like an Olympic swimmer drowning.
It's a sad story.
His wife was a chief resident..why would they be living in dormitory housing?
My gosh, another guy going to medical school kills his wife--then saves us all the trouble of a trial. If only he'd done it the other way around...
are steroids linked to violence?
Apparently he didn't do as well with the long jump.
And now for something completely similiar....
olympic Judo Champ's Boyfriend Jumps Off Same Balcony
Fox Sports ^ | August 10, 2004 | Niko Price
Posted on 08/10/2004 8:05:07 AM EDT by SoloGlobalExplorer
NEA IONIA, Greece (AP) - As relatives tell it, it was the stuff of Greek tragedy: A love-struck young man threw himself off his balcony Monday, two days after a quarrel prompted his girlfriend - a member of Greece's Olympic judo team - to jump from the same spot.
"He had very intense feelings about the girl. He was very much in love," said Nikos Drakopoulos, a printer who lives across the hall from the couple. "He could not see himself living if she was gone."
Giorgos Chrisostomides, 24, was on life-support at an Athens hospital with injuries to his head and back. His high-school sweetheart, 20-year-old judo champion Eleni Ioannou, was at another hospital in critical condition with multiple fractures to her head and body.
http://msn.foxsports.com/story/2650756
Yeah, that concrete poisoning is a bitch.
Red
They call it roid rage.
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