Ricky Williams was in Tyler, Texas on January 11 to attend the Earl Campbell Tyler Rose Awards. Since he got to his hotel, the Courtyard Marriott, a little early, Williams decided to take a walk in the nearby wooded section around the city to kill some time. When he returned about an hour later, the 1998 Heisman Trophy winner was greeted in the hotel parking lot by cops who were responding to a call of a "suspicious person" in the area, per Yahoo! Sports.
In a statement released by the Tyler, Texas police, someone placed a call reporting a "suspicious person behind his fence line in his backyard" after his dog started barking, alerting the resident of a possible individual in the area. Williams says that he thought he was walking along a trail, and not in another person's backyard.
Shortly after being handcuffed and searched, Williams tried to give his side of the story to officers. “Why would I be in someone’s backyard?” Williams asked. “You might’ve saw a black person and got suspicious, but I wasn’t doing anything.” As you can see in the above video, the former NFL running back grew increasingly frustrated over the situation. “I started to get a little bit upset and they said, ‘Calm down,’ and I said, ‘Listen, you don’t know what it’s like to be a black man, this is not the first time this has happened to me when cops have harassed me and I haven’t done anything,'” he said on the Dudley and Bob with Matt Show on KLBJ in Austin.
Shortly after police identified the "suspicious person" as Ricky Williams, he was let go.
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