Police: Boxer Mayweather vehicle seen at shooting scene
KEN RITTER
Associated Press Writer
LAS VEGAS — Police searched boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s Rolls-Royce at his home today in the investigation of a shooting outside a Las Vegas ice skating rink, authorities said.
No one was hurt, but another vehicle was hit with bullets between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Pacific on Sunday outside the Crystal Palace Skating Center, police Lt. Patrick Charoen said.
Officer Bill Cassell, a Las Vegas police spokesman, said it was not immediately clear whether Mayweather was present during the shooting at the skating center several miles southeast of the Las Vegas Strip.
Charoen said witnesses described the Rolls-Royce and said it was involved in the shooting. Investigators obtained a warrant to search the vehicle at one of Mayweather's Las Vegas-area homes.
"It doesn't mean he was involved," Charoen said of Mayweather. "He's not a definite suspect. It just means the vehicle was seen at the scene."
Mayweather's manager, Leonard Ellerbe, denied Mayweather was involved in the shooting. He would not say whether Mayweather's vehicle was at the scene.
"Floyd Mayweather was not involved in the reported incident. None whatsoever," said Ellerbe, chief executive of Mayweather Promotions.
The 32-year-old Mayweather lives and trains in Las Vegas. Ellerbe said Mayweather would take part as scheduled Monday as guest host of World Wrestling Entertainment Inc.'s "WWE Monday Night RAW" on cable television.
Ellerbe also was due to take part in a conference call Monday about Mayweather's Sept. 19 comeback fight against Juan Manuel Marquez at the MGM Grand hotel-casino in Las Vegas.
Mayweather is considered a pound-for-pound boxing king, having won six world boxing championships in five weight classes. He is undefeated in 39 fights, with 25 knockouts.
The bout with Marquez (50-4-1, 37 KOs) was delayed in July after Mayweather damaged rib cartilage while training.
The former Olympic bronze medalist traded his "Pretty Boy" nickname for "Money" before abruptly retiring last year and turning his attention to show business.
Despite making millions of dollars in his career, public records show he was hit with an Internal Revenue Service lien last October for more than $6 million in unpaid taxes. Ellerbe has disputed the documents and said he believed they were inaccurate. Clark County Recorder records showed Monday that the lien remained unresolved.
Mayweather appeared on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars" in 2007, and has been featured in an AT&T television commercial.
Mayweather grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he was fined in February 2005 and ordered to perform community service after pleading no contest to misdemeanor assault and battery for a bar fight.
A year earlier, he was convicted of misdemeanor battery stemming from a fight with two women at a Las Vegas nightclub. He received a suspended one-year jail sentence and was ordered to undergo "impulse-control" counseling.
A lawyer who won an acquittal for Mayweather in 2005 after he was charged with hitting his former girlfriend in 2003 outside a Las Vegas nightclub was out of town Monday and unavailable for comment.