A former NBA star was arrested Monday at a New York airport after allegedly hitting his young son so hard he had to be hospitalized, according to police.
Ben Gordon, who played 11 seasons with four different teams before retiring in 2015, was arrested at LaGuardia Airport Monday night after the frightening incident. His 10-year-old son, Elijah, was taken to Long Island Jewish Hospital by his aunt, according to the New York Daily News.
The boy’s condition was unknown.
Gordon, 39, was waiting to board a flight to Chicago at 8:45 p.m. when he was stopped by Port Authority police over the alleged abuse, the New York Post reported. In addition to being charged with child abuse, he was expected to face charges of resisting arrest.
Former Chicago Bulls shooting guard Ben Gordon arrested at LaGuardia Airport when he allegedly struck his child, sources say
The child, escorted by his aunt, was transported to Long Island Jewish Hospital to be treated.https://t.co/7W4i4n3rSt
— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) October 11, 2022
Gordon, who earned more than $84 million in his career, was born in London but grew up outside New York City. He played college ball at the University of Connecticut and was picked by the Chicago Bulls third overall in the 2004 NBA draft. The 6-foot, 1-inch shooting guard was voted to the all-rookie team in his first year and averaged just under 15 points a game for his career.
He later played for the Detroit Pistons, Charlotte Bobcats, and Orlando Magic.
Gordon has been plagued by legal and mental problems since his playing days. Two years ago, he wrote about how he wanted to kill himself in his final NBA season.
“There was a point in time when I thought about killing myself every single day for about six weeks,” he wrote in a 2020 essay for The Player’s Tribune. “This was right after my last year in the league, and I was living in a brownstone up in Harlem.”
“I had lost my career, my identity, and my family all pretty much simultaneously. I was manic-depressive. I wasn’t eating. I wasn’t sleeping.
In 2017, Gordon was arrested for driving in New York with a fake license and for robbing the manager of an LA apartment building at knifepoint. In the same year, he was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after becoming abusive to a woman in a store he owns in Mount Vernon, New York, and locking himself in the restroom.
“It got so bad that they had me committed to a mental hospital, and the problem was that I didn’t even understand why it was happening,” Gordon wrote in the 2020 essay.