Ex-Rebel Bryce Dejean-Jones remained an enigma to sad end

It was one of those double-take moments Saturday afternoon, the kind you blink twice at while scrolling a Twitter feed without any warning of the brick wall ahead: Former Iowa State player and current New Orleans Pelican Bryce Dejean-Jones has died, the Dallas County coroner’s office confirms.

The mind wanders as each word sinks in, such terrible news about a player that before he attended Iowa State and realized his dream of making the NBA spent three years at UNLV, some of his time here good, some of it bad, a lot of it troubled.

I picked up the telephone and dialed former Rebels head coach Dave Rice, now an assistant at UNR.

Me: “Have you seen Twitter?”

Rice: “I haven’t been on in about an hour. What’s up?”

Me: “I hope it’s wrong, but there is a story saying Bryce Dejean-Jones is dead.”

Pause …

Rice: “Oh, God, no …”

Of those college coaches Dejean-Jones played for, first at Southern California and then UNLV and then Iowa State, he was under Rice’s guidance longer than anyone. Lon Kruger began the recruitment of Dejean-Jones to UNLV but then departed for Oklahoma, leaving Rice and former Rebels assistant coach Justin Hutson to inherit the pursuit and eventually make the talented and at times volatile wing the first recruit in Rice’s tenure coaching his alma mater.

“You always knew where you stood with Bryce,” Rice said. “He was the one who after a tough loss would stop and sign autographs and take pictures with kids and fans. He was great at our camps with younger players. I always noticed that about him. He cared about people. He had a huge heart. He had a lot of adversity in life, and that could lead to negative things, but he was so endearing and likable. It’s just another sad, cautionary tale about how everything can be taken away in an instant.”

There are still questions to be answered about how and why those tragic and fateful moments played out early Saturday in Dallas, still a toxicology report due on what, if anything, was in the system of Dejean-Jones at the time of his death.

But it has been fairly well established by law enforcement that Dejean-Jones mistakenly broke into the wrong apartment, startled a sleeping resident, who then retrieved a handgun, called out and then shot the player when he didn’t respond.

Dejean-Jones was in Dallas visiting his girlfriend for his daughter’s first birthday, reportedly argued with the child’s mother earlier in the night and thought she had locked him out of the apartment upon returning from a walk. So he kicked the front door down and was then trying to break into a bedroom when he was shot in the abdomen.

He later died at the hospital. He was 23.

I wrote a few years back that Dejean-Jones was like the movie once made on the idea a mirror has two faces, that the relationship between mind and body can take different forms, that what we see on the outside might not necessarily be a person’s true character.

It was difficult at times to separate the basketball player with terrible body language during games from the one found working on his shot for hours afterward; the player who in one moment was shoving a teammate away and in another signing those autographs and taking those pictures with kids; the one whose actions were often interpreted by others as selfish but whose coaches insisted were born from a competitive nature unrivaled by peers.

Dejean-Jones was that riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma.

He was a difficult puzzle to solve.

He could be hard to play with. The ball often lost air in his grip. He hunted for shots more often than not. But then games would end and hours would pass and writers would depart the bowels of the Thomas & Mack Center to the sound of a bouncing ball.

On the court, by himself, hoisting shot after shot, working to improve amid the calming dullness of quiet, was a riddle-wrapped-in-a-mystery-inside-an-enigma.

No one wanted to win more than Dejean-Jones. He owned that sort of competitive fire, that fearless attitude. He was a good kid who was really smart and yet also highly misunderstood, both by his own doing and the presumptions of others.

And he made it. He realized his dream of playing in the NBA with the promise of more seasons to come. He had overcome so much, mostly himself, to realize the fruits of all his hard work and dedication and commitment.

Rice watched him play at last year’s summer league in Las Vegas and said Dejean-Jones had never seemed happier, more confident, more prepared than ever to remain on a healthy and righteous path toward what seemed the brightest of futures.

But he is gone now at 23, and that is an awful, heartbreaking truth.

Ed Graney can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be a heard on “Seat and Ed” on Fox Sports 1340 from 2 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. On Twitter: @edgraney