Recently I was at a friends house hanging out and watching some NBA pre-season basketball when I got a call from Dave (Spahn- Senior Writer).

“Dude, did you hear about the Bloom kids?” he frantically blabbered into the phone.

Half paying attention to what he was saying and half on the NBA game, as I was not sure if he had anything good to actually tell me or if he was going to just tell me another piece of trivial, useless, information like he sometimes does (he is a basketball nerd), I replied with a meager “Nah, what?”

I wasn’t prepared for the ton of bricks that was about to hit me.

“Rajsaun (Thompson) and Brian (Conway) got arrested,” he said, followed by a short pause. “Armed Robbery at an ATM and they made some girl take her clothes off. Rajsaun and Brian dude, Rajsaun and Brian.” Dave knew how upset I was going to get, so after these comments, we were just silent.

The rest of the conversation is irrelevant. It mostly consisted of me insisting he was lying, hoping to hear him laugh on the other side of the phone line and tell me he was joking, and me just stammering through sentances on how this couldn’t have happened, not to Rajsaun and Brian, not the kids I know.

I later found out that this is all (allegedly) true. The two star players of the Bloom basketball team got arrested for sticking people up at an ATM. Brian is committed to play basketball at the University of Northern Iowa. His father, Brandon Cole, was a star at Bloom and at DePaul University. Rajsaun, who’s father Ray was a star at Iowa, had a host of offers from division one and division two schools. He played in my fall exposure league last year, and was a friend of mine. We spoke often about how hard he was working on his game, and how greatful he was for all the opportunities he was given. His mother was visable in the stands at many of his games this summer.

A reporter from the SouthtownStar managed to get in touch with parents of the two troubled stars, and get a short interview with them for an article. I linked the article below.

“Family members dispute police version of incident surrounding Bloom duo’s arrest”