King County Sheriff Claps Back at "Goofus" NFL Investigation on Josh Brown

The NFL's negligence in investigating domestic violence cases seemingly knows no bounds. After the Ray Rice scandal in 2014, the league promised to clean up their act by doing things like: not covering up evidence that proved players had committed acts of domestic violence. Seems like the right way to go. But another element to that cleaned-up approach should maybe also be, I dunno, learning how to do an investigation in the first place.

In the wake of Wednesay's release of documents that shows New York Giants kicker Josh Brown had admitted to physically and emotionally abusing his wife—at one point calling her a "slave"—the NFL came under fire for their lack of information on Brown's domestic violence arrest in 2015. So, being the NFL, they tried to cover their asses by passing the buck in a statement:

NFL investigators made repeated attempts—both orally and in writing—to obtain any and all evidence and relevant information in this case from the King County Sheriff's Office. Each of those requests was denied and the Sheriff's Office declined to provide any of the requested information, which ultimately limited our ability to fully investigate this matter. We concluded our own investigation, more than a year after the initial incident, based on the facts and evidence available to us at the time and after making exhaustive attempts to obtain information in a timely fashion. It is unfortunate that we did not have the benefit or knowledge of these materials at the time.

While, yes, the NFL did make attempts to obtain documents, the King County (Washington) sheriff John Urquhart went on KIRO radio to shed some light on exactly what those attempts were like. According to Urquhart, the person who filed a written request for the case documents, Robert Agnew, did not identify himself as a representative of the NFL.

"Nowhere on the request does he say that he works for the NFL. And so we don't know that it's the NFL, and we're not going to give it out anyway, so we denied it. And on October 7th, a few months later, he sent in another request for the case and again, he didn't indicate that he works for the NFL."

And this is where Urquhart transitions out of the facts and starts to throw a bit of shade the NFL's way:

"We don't have them calling us here. We've got some goofus from Woodinville named Rob Agnew, asking for the case file," Urquhart said, later adding, "We have no idea who this yokel is."

"Yokel?" "Goofus?" That's a pretty sick diss in old-man-speak.

When asked about the "oral" attempts to contact the King County Sheriff, Urquhart said someone named Deborah Katz, who identified herself as NFL security, called a case detective, requesting documents. According to Urquhart, Katz was denied based on the fact that the Sheriff department could not release documents for an open investigation—a standard practice. Urquhart then elaborated that had the NFL gone through the proper channels—and talked to people within public disclosure, as opposed to a case detective—the sheriff department might be able to give them a verbal acknowledgment of what was going down in Brown's case.

While it seems that the case detective maybe could have redirected Katz to the right place, Urquhart lands a pretty solid own on the NFL for not knowing their ass from their elbows.

UPDATE:

Deadspin made a nice little request of the King County Sheriff office for any documentation pertaining to Agnew's requests. And it turns out that the man, an ex-FBI, Seattle-based private investigator, was being updated on released information at the same rate as reporters who also made documents requests. The only difference is that reporters were doing things with that information—like reporting it. Meanwhile, the NFL was just sitting on their hands.

Also noteworthy, from Deadspin:

The name of an ex-FBI private investigator named Robert Agnew also came up in the Indianapolis Star investigation of how USA Gymnastics kept allegations of abuse from being investigated by police. It's unclear if the NFL's Agnew is the same person referenced in the Star's report.

Wouldn't it be funny if the NFL hired someone who has a track record of covering up abuses in the sports world…