By Gregg Bell
McClatchy News Service
RENTON — The next step in the ugly domestic-violence case against former Seahawks offensive lineman Chad Wheeler will come a week earlier than originally planned.
Wheeler’s arraignment hearing will now be 9 a.m. Monday at the Maleng Regional Justice Center in Kent, according to an update Thursday from the King County Prosecutor’s office.
Wheeler is expected to enter pleas on two felony charges — first-degree domestic violence assault, a Class A felony, and Class C domestic violence unlawful imprisonment — and on a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.
The Kent Police Department arrested Wheeler last Friday night for allegedly attacking and strangling his girlfriend in an apartment.
The standard sentencing range, if the case gets to that, for first-degree domestic violence assault is 93-123 months. If the defendant is also convicted of unlawful imprisonment, the first-degree domestic violence assault standard range increases to 111-147 months, a prosecutor’s spokesman said.
Wheeler, 27, was released from the King County Jail Tuesday on $400,000 bond.
The Seahawks issued an extraordinary statement Wednesday to “strongly condemn” Wheeler and to emphasize they had cut ties with him. The team let his contract expire at the end of the 2020, during which he was a backup who played in five games.
To reinforce they are done with him, the Seahawks placed Wheeler on league waivers Wednesday. That absolves the team of even the option to not tender a restricted free-agent contract offer to him, which Seattle wasn’t going to do, anyway.
He is likely to go unclaimed and thus will be a free agent, out of the league at least for now. The NFL has the right to suspend him under its personal-conduct policy and will investigate whether to do so.
Charging documents filed in court Wednesday allege the 6-foot-7, 310-pound Wheeler “strangled, suffocated and beat” his 5-9, 145-pound girlfriend Friday night inside an apartment in Kent “into unconsciousness—twice—both times leaving her for dead as blood poured from her nose and mouth, preventing her from breathing.”
The charging documents state Kent police responding to the alleged victim’s 9-1-1 call eventually fired a Taser round into the body of an uncooperative Wheeler in an attempt to detain him, “with little effect.”
The documents also state scans taken of the woman at Valley Medical Center revealed a fractured humerus in her left arm, and she showed “signs of strangulation.” She also showed signs of having aspirated fluid in her lung” and “over the next day, she vomited large amounts of blood.”
Doctors found swelling and bruising in the woman’s face they believed was consistent with her having been punched. She reported not recalling Wheeler striking her in the face, but that he had choked her into unconsciousness.
“The injuries, then, would either be the result of the defendant repeatedly punching the victim in the face as she lay unconscious,” the prosecutor’s charging document signed by Jason D. Brookhyser senior deputy prosecuting attorney for King County states, “or those injuries were inflicted as the defendant pressed his hand down against her nose and mouth, preventing her from breathing.”
The prosecutor’s office asked a judge to require Wheeler to be put on electronic home detention, with an ankle-monitoring device equipped with GPS tracking capability. A judge issued a no-contact order between Wheeler and the alleged victim, valid through March 8.
