Around the Region: UGA Football Star Jailed, Author Sentenced for Fraud, Man Charged With Fracturing Infant’s Skull

-- Athens Patch

One of the ’s star football players was booked in the Clarke County Jail on felony weaspons charges.

UGA running back Isaiah Crowell was arrested at 2:20am at an ACC Police checkpoint at East Campus Road and Green Street, on the UGA campus in Athens, according to ACC Police Department spokesperson Hilda Sorrow.

She said that police officers stopped the 2005 Mercury Grand Marquis for a safety check, "for seat belts." Crowell was driving the car, which is registered in his name.

Officers smelled an odor of marijuana, asked Crowell and his passengers to get out. A search of the vehicle turned up no illegal drugs, but police found a  9mm Lugar pistol under the driver's seat. The registration number had been scratched off, Sorrow said.

The UGA football player was charged with possessing a concealed weapon, having a weapon in a school zone and having an altered ID mark on that weapon. He was suspended from the team.

– Marietta Patch

A Marietta novelist who pleaded guilty in February of defrauding a woman he had dated and another couple in a phony lawsuit has been sentenced to serve more than 12 years in prison. 

Mitchell Gross, 61, will serve 12 years and seven months, then another three years on supervised release, and has been ordered to pay $5.8 million in restitution to his victims, according to a ruling Thursday from U.S. District Judge Julie Carnes in Atlanta. 

Gross, who has written six science fiction and legal thriller novels under the name of "Mitchell Graham,"  on a total of 14 counts of wire fraud and money laundering.

Among the charges were that he used an online Jewish dating service to scam a woman of nearly $3 million, using $1.5 million of that total to repay an ex-girlfriend in a case that generated international attention, including in Israel.

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– Douglasville Patch

Jada Jawan Goodson, 22, was arrested Wednesday by the  and charged with cruelty to children after his 5-month-old infant was admitted into Scottish Rite Children’s Hospital with a bilateral fracture of the skull.

Medical specialists stated the injury likely occurred just prior to the emergency room admittance. Goodson was the primary caregiver the evening the injuries occurred.

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