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The Seattle Seahawks entered the offseason with a significant number of questions to answer and holes to address on the offensive line, with two starters set to be free agents and only three players who finished the season on the 53 man roster under contract for 2021. Less than two weeks into the offseason, however, the question of whether to extend a restricted free agent tender to Chad Wheeler appears to have answered itself.
Seahawks player Chad Wheeler was being held in King County Jail on Monday night after being arrested on suspicion of felony domestic violence, accused of assaulting his girlfriend at a residence in Kent.https://t.co/8a51JmSy3C
— Seattle Times Sports (@SeaTimesSports) January 26, 2021
As the Seattle Times reports, the King County Jail Inmate Lookup Service shows Wheeler was booked just after midnight Friday night into Saturday morning, and is being held at the King County Correctional Facility in Seattle. The account of the incident is troubling, including
The report said the incident began when Wheeler asked the victim to bow to him, and when she did not he grabbed her and threw her on a bed.
The report said Wheeler then strangled the victim before she lost consciousness. The report also said when she regained consciousness, Wheeler was standing near the bed and said, “Wow you’re alive?”
Wheeler entered the NFL as an undrafted free agent with the New York Giants in 2017 after a career at USC that saw him miss the Holiday Bowl his junior year following a scuffle with police in December 2015. Wheeler has been with the Seahawks since signing to the practice squad in October 2019 and had been set to be a restricted free agent.