Judge: Dead NY Rangers player a victim of organized sports
NEW YORK — A New York Rangers player who died in 2011 of an accidental overdose of prescription painkillers and a minor league hockey player who supplied him with pills are victims of organized sports and its lax attitude toward painkillers, a judge said Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald commented as she spared Jordan Hart, a former player for the Utah Grizzlies, any prison time at sentencing on his guilty plea to a misdemeanour drug possession charge.
Prosecutors had accused the 33-year-old Hart of contributing to the addiction of Derek Boogaard before he died in Minneapolis. Boogaard, who also played for the Minnesota Wild, had resorted to painkillers to cope with numerous hockey-related injuries, including a concussion.
The judge, though, said there was “no basis” to assert that Hart supplied the drugs that killed Boogaard, especially since the autopsy revealed Boogaard had taken a different painkiller than the kind he got from Hart.