Former NFL wide receiver Travis Rudolph is on trial for murder after a confrontation that stemmed from a domestic violence accusation against him. Rudolph shot one man dead and injured another. Week two of the televised trial of the former Florida State University star began Tuesday.
He is charged with one count of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder after killing Sebastien Jean-Jacques outside Rudolph’s Lake Park, Florida, home two years ago.
Rudolph’s then-girlfriend, Dominique Jones, was cross-examined on the second day of testimony in the trial. She testified that she never intended for her brother and his friends to harm Rudolph. However, Jones admitted she became enraged during an evening of playing cards and drinking shots of tequila with Rudolph at his house on April 7, 2021, when she discovered text message exchanges with other women on his phone while he was in the bathroom.
The discovery led to an argument in which Rudolph demeaned her and she left in fury after breaking a window on his vehicle, she told the court. It was then Jones sought her brother, Keishaun Jones, to confront Rudolph, texting him to “Please go shoot his s*** up.”
What Happened?
Around midnight on April 7, 2021, Keishaun Jones and three other men came to the now-27-year-old Rudolph’s house to confront him about the dispute with his girlfriend hours earlier. Rudolph, who has not testified so far in the trial, would later say that when the confrontation turned violent, he got his AR-15.
By this time all four men who had come to the house were running back to their car some 300 feet from the house, and by the time they got to their Rudolph opened fire with a barrage of 39 shots. Jean-Jacques was fatally wounded in the front passenger seat of the car. The driver and one back seat passenger were uninjured, but another was wounded and left behind by the fleeing driver.
Rudolph has been on house arrest since last year. He unsuccessfully sought a “stand your ground” defense.
Attorneys for the two sides are taking opposing positions at trial, with one posing Rudolph as the aggressor and the other asserting that he was a victim. Rudolph’s defense attorney Heidi Perlet portrayed Jones as a married real estate agent who was out of work and having an affair with Rudolph.
Jones testified that after she read his text messages with another woman, Rudolph became confrontational and wouldn’t let her leave. She said she smashed his PlayStation and called him a “broke b***h,” with the confrontation spilling into Rudolph’s front yard.
The examination of Jones tells the story vividly.
When “Shoot Up His S**t” Goes Wrong
“Isn’t the moral of the story is that you sent your brother and your friends to go kill Travis?” Perlet asked Jones.
“No, the moral of the story is him putting his hands on me,” Jones said. “That is really the basis of everything, and I didn’t send my brothers to kill him.”
“No, you just sent a text to go ‘shoot up his s**t,’ right?” Perlet followed up with.
“I didn’t say shoot him,” Jones answered. Huh?
When Jones was asked to explain her text message, she said it was “nothing violent toward a person.”
“I was upset, and my adrenaline was running, and I said something that I didn’t mean,” Jones said. She said she “didn’t necessarily mean for anything to happen to Travis, his family, his house, or anything.”
However, she confessed to deleting the “shoot up his s**t” and her brother’s messages in a group text that called Rudolph a “dead man walking” before turning her phone over to the authorities.
More Drama
Jones returned to Rudolph’s home to get a tequila bottle, which Perlet claimed Jones used to hit Rudolph in his head. Jones further testified that she picked up a brick during the scuffle to smash his car window. Amid it all, Jones revealed that Rudolph never touched her but that she did strike him.
“I don’t think I slapped him, but I did, like, throw a punch or two, yeah, at him,” she testified.
Rudolph was a standout receiver at Florida State, where he made 153 catches for 2,311 yards and 18 touchdowns in his three seasons with the Seminoles during the 2014-16 seasons. He left school early to declare for the NFL draft and went undrafted, but signed with the New York Giants in 2017, spending two seasons with the team. He eventually signed to the Miami Dolphins practice squad in 2018, but an ACL tear on his first day of workouts took him out of the NFL.
Rudolph signed with the Canadian Football League’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers in 2020 and was released after his arrest.
