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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

sports football

Fallen from grace

Antonio Allen became the hope of his district as the star of the Ben Davis High School football team and growing up in one of the most impoverished ares of Indianapolis, but has since been charged with possession of drugs.

Antonio Allen, wrapped in disgrace, stood in court.

“You, Mr. Allen, are charged with dealing narcotic drugs,” the judge said. “Do you understand that charge?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said softly.

“And the possible penalties?”

“Mm-hm.”

She went through his other charges. The former IU safety pleaded not guilty to each — dealing in methamphetamine, narcotics, cocaine — and made his way out of the Monroe County courthouse, where the news cameras were waiting.

Allen buried his head under the shoulder of a grey-dreadlocked man. Allen’s own dreadlocks hung forward across his shoulders as he exited his initial hearing.

A reporter asked Allen if he had any comment.

“God is good,” he said, his eyes locked on the ground.

***

Six months later, people tend to see only one of two sides to Antonio Allen. They rarely see any in between.

One can see both sides by watching interviews of Allen, the former IU football player who was arrested in his cream-and-crimson athletic shorts and shirt while exiting practice in June.

First, focus on Allen’s face while he listens to a reporter ask a question. One sees the stern, hardened eyes and tightly closed mouth of a 205-pound safety that once knocked an opposing running back out cold. This is the face you see in his mug shot, too.

This is the face most of the public thinks of.

Then watch the sharp transition when it’s his turn to speak. He flashes the vibrant three-quarter smile Ben Davis High School Coach Mike Kirschner says lights up any room he enters. You see the gold teeth Allen said he copied off his father as he answers questions warmly and dots his answers with “sir.”

This is the face most who have ever met Allen think of — the hardworking sweetheart who is now taking classes at Indiana State.

This is the dilemma when trying to figure out the prized prospect who has fallen so hard from grace.

Is he the quiet, guarded guy from a rough neighborhood in Indianapolis who keeps to himself or the man who former IU teammate Tim Bennett called the funniest player on the team? Is he the star player whose peers assure had no ego and claim was “too real” for dealing, or the apparent drug dealer with a Colt .45 handgun found in his back bedroom?

The answer, as is the case with most human beings, is somewhere in between the extremes.

***

Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis is home to both suburban, uppermiddle class students and those from poverty. Coach Kirschner likes to call it “the melting pot of society.”

Maybe the worst of those neighborhoods is Haughville, which Allen calls home. Indianapolis crime rates have had Haughville ranked near the top for decades. Allen grew up in an environment of murder and drugs.

Ellis Johnston, 18, played football with Allen at Ben Davis and spent much of his senior year in Haughville.

Johnston lived two houses down from a woman before she was strangled to death and burned last year. He was surrounded by crack addicts, he said. A bootleg house was located right behind his place. He didn’t have a working light on his side of a duplex so he had to run a wire from the neighbor’s place.

“Everybody else around us was packing,” he said.

Yet Allen always seemed to rise above the preconceived notions of the possibilities for a kid from Haughville. Leah Johnson, an IU student and former IDS editor who graduated from Ben Davis, said he was someone everyone knew because of his talent, which transcended any of Haughville’s limitations.

He was courted by a long list of college recruiters and decided to commit to Ole Miss, an SEC program, during his junior year.

“This kid was the hope of our district,” Johnson said. “The hope of his neighborhood and his family and our community.”

Shortly after his commitment to Ole Miss in 2012, Allen spoke to media about being the first person in his family to go to college. He fidgeted as he opened up about his opportunities. He was excited to show his little brothers that college is worth putting the time and effort into.

This wasn’t simply another talented kid at Ben Davis. Allen was someone whom Johnson described as an “inherently good” person. People lit up on the school bus when he entered. Kirschner said he remembers teachers talking about how much they liked him and enjoyed his personality in class well before he became a star player.

Some referred to Allen as a hero to people of the district. When he decommitted from Ole Miss in July 2012 and decided to instead play at IU — the struggling local program — just 10 days later, it only reinforced his hero status in his home neighborhood.

They couldn’t help but see the future for him.

“He’s really gonna do something with his life,” Johnson said she remembers thinking. “He has a chance that none of us are gonna ever have because he was so, so talented.”

***

There was a tree in front of Allen’s childhood home. Allen’s father used to make him tackle it until he knocked the bark off the tree. He couldn’t go to his little league game until the bark was knocked off, even if the game was well into the second quarter.

“A tree can’t move,” Allen said in a 2012 interview. “Now I’m hitting these boys and they’re moving farther back.”

One of these boys was Deionte Buckley. Everybody there remembers the hit. Buckley played running back for a loaded Warren Central squad during Allen’s junior year. He now plays fullback at Cincinnati.

The Warren Central line broke down one play, and the quarterback settled for a short pass to Buckley on a swing route. Allen took his angle to give Buckley the option of taking him on or safely running out of bounds.

“Buckley thought he was smart and had a better plan,” Johnston said. “He tried to go through Antonio.”

Allen delivered a blow so vicious that Buckley’s helmet went flying off.

Buckley laid on the ground, motionless, for 10 minutes.

Kirschner said former Ben Davis Coach Dick Dullaghan, a coaching legend, called it the hardest hit he’d seen in 40 years.

What made Allen so special was he never feared a hit, Kirschner said he believes. Even during Big Ten football games, plenty of players will still hesitate — even just a little bit — before contact. Allen had the uncanny ability to accelerate into the hit without letting up, Kirschner said.

Allen hit so hard he wasn’t allowed to tackle in practice.

He wasn’t afraid to point out his own flaws on the field. He admitted in an interview at IU in 2015 that he was confused sometime in a show of an uncommon sense of humility.

Allen was a part of the 2013 IU recruiting class that was considered to be one of the most talented in program history. The objective was to turn around a disastrous program with star in-state players.

“If we start winning games in a couple of years and get it going,” he told the Bloomington Herald-Times after his commitment, “People are going to look back at this and say, ‘Yeah, Antonio Allen was on that team.’”

***

A confidential informant entered Allen’s 19th Street apartment across from Memorial Stadium with $620 in cash from the Indiana State Police and a video recording device, according to records. He came out with two bags: one with 6.5 grams of heroin, the other with 2.2 grams of meth.

Allen was seen in the video counting the money, weighing the narcotics and handing them to the informant. A poster of himself hung on the wall.

After the second controlled purchase of $770 worth of methamphetamine — the informant was later arrested for trying to hide some for himself — ISP had what they needed to search Allen’s apartment. They found half-smoked blunts in the cabinet, a scale covered with white powder, a Colt .45 handgun and a plastic Tide container with 47 grams of cocaine, 13 grams of heroin and $920 inside.

“This is a high-profile case because who he is and where his future was,” ISP Sgt. Curt Durnil said the day after the arrest. “Now it seems that future is pretty much in jeopardy.”

Fans have tried to reconcile the gap between the football star beloved by his community and the man arrested for drug possession. The answer might lie with Allen’s father, Antonio Lee Allen I.

“All I know is he deals in real estate,” Kirschner said regarding Allen’s father.

Others call him one of the most prominent drug dealers in Indianapolis.

He pleaded guilty to criminal confinement and domestic battery in 2004. Charges of firearm possession by a violent felon and marijuana possession were dismissed. He spent 142 days in jail and violated his probation four months later.

In 2011, he pleaded guilty to resisting law enforcement.

One anonymous source said anybody who is involved in the illegal drug business knows Allen’s father. But Kirschner said he found it important to say he was nothing but respectful in the times he sat in Kirschner’s office. He said Allen moved around a lot but lives with his mother, as his parents are not together.

Bonner said he remembers seeing Allen’s whole family come down for his first IU football game.

“His dad was just, like, so excited, cheesing and all that stuff,” he said. “You could just tell his dad was very proud and happy to have his son playing for IU.”

The grey-dreadlocked man Allen hid under in the courthouse was his father.

***

Kirschner’s office is covered wall-to-wall with memorabilia, mostly of his former players.

There are plaques and pictures of people who have gone on to play college ball or even make the NFL. There are far fewer reminders of his three sectional titles or his 2014 state championship..

Kirschner is a strong-jawed man with a tight white goatee and a cleanly shaven head who still looks like he could hold his own in an Oklahoma drill if he got the rush. Everything about him says football coach.

Antonio Allen is still on the wall, along with Asmar Bilal, who plays at Notre Dame; Isaiah Lewis, who plays at Michigan State; and Tandon Doss, who won a Super Bowl with the Baltimore Ravens.

“As disappointed as we are, the relationship hasn’t changed,” Kirschner said.

Kirschner has the statistics ready about Ben Davis as if he has to recite them quite often. There’s the $35,000 average income for a family of four, the fact 80 percent of students are on free and reduced lunch programs, and there are 63 different languages spoken at Ben Davis.

Coaching at a school like Ben Davis is hardly just about football. Kirschner and his staff buy groceries for players. He has a jar of money in his office so players can come get change after workouts to buy a drink or a power bar. Players, raiding his fridge for food, are often at his house.

The coach, however, admits he’s tired.

“Me and my wife decided many years ago this was maybe God’s way of telling us this is our mission.”

He often has single mothers ask him to speak to players because they are 6-foot-4, 220 pounds and don’t want to listen to their mothers anymore. Kirschner has to be the father figure in a lot of lives.

He said he didn’t quite have that experience with Allen. Allen came in a grown man who said “yes sir” and “yes ma’am” from the start.

But the relationship was still close. Allen was often over in high school for dinner with Kirschner’s family. Allen’s little brother, Rondell, started as a sophomore safety for the Giants this season, much like Allen did.

Antonio Allen tried to make it to every game he could to support his brother.

“If he can get here, he’s getting here,” Kirschner said.

Kirschner said he still loves Allen unconditionally. He said he doesn’t condone anything Allen did, and he’s had meetings with Allen about the situation and has made it clear he is disappointed.

Kirschner was the one who took Allen on visits to IU and Ole Miss. Other coaches took Allen to Iowa and Michigan State. Kirschner said Allen was ready to commit on the drive back from Ole Miss, but he could tell his conviction was starting to waver in the following months once it clicked how far he would be from his family.

***

The failure of the hope of Haughville upsets those who knew Allen or even knew of him. Nobody justifies his actions, but very few are angry with him. Rather, they’re frustrated with the world that dealt Allen the wrong hand from the outset.

It’s almost as if people want to wait and hope this is all a dream.

“I don’t want to go look at it through the media’s eyes and view him off that because I know him as a person,” Bennett said. “I know he is a good person.”

“It didn’t have to go down like this,” Leah Johnson said. “It didn’t have to end this way.”

“We don’t know what his reasoning was for doing what he did,” Ellis Johnston said. “We don’t know. He could have been sending the money back home ... he’s very family-oriented.”

Allen’s Instagram account is an avenue into his life ever since the arrest. He can be seen dancing in his Trent Richardson Indianapolis Colts jersey or posing for pictures with either of his parents.

Kirschner said sometimes we judge a book by its cover. Thus, we don’t realize until a few chapters in the cover isn’t the story.

Kirschner has seen players quit the team and claim they just aren’t feeling football anymore only to get arrested a week later. Plaques of players dominate the walls of his office because the success stories mean so much and the losses hurt so badly.

Now Allen is at Indiana State and is sitting out the season due to transfer rules and awaiting his trial. His original December trial was cancelled and a new one has yet to be scheduled.

Kirschner just said he hopes he appreciates his opportunities, much like he said he appreciated all the trips to Kirschner’s fridge for food.

“If you do something very stupid again, I made it very clear,” Kirschner said he told Allen. “Don’t come back. I can’t do it twice. I can’t go through it twice.”

The Instagram account can explain how Allen sees his future. It is positive. It is hopeful.

In one post, he posed in front of a silver Cadillac SUV in a Jewel Brand t-shirt with the caption, “The shirt tell it at all.”

“Minor setback,” the shirt read, “major comeback.”

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