No charges filed against man who admitted yelling racial slur at Utah women’s basketball team

No criminal charges will be filed against an 18-year-old Idaho high school student who officials say admitted to shouting a racial slur at members of the University of Utah women’s basketball team, according to Coeur d’Alene chief deputy city attorney Ryan Hunter.

Prosecutors said the suspect, Anthony Myers, admitted to law enforcement that he yelled the racial slur and the explicit comment from his car on the night of March 21. But he will not be charged, Hunter wrote in a six-page decision released Monday, due to “insufficient evidence to establish probable cause” as well as a potential violation of the man’s First Amendment right to protected free speech.

Surveillance video reviewed by law enforcement revealed a man shouting the N-word from inside a silver sedan as members of Utah’s traveling contingent left a nearby restaurant and began walking back to the team hotel at the Coeur d’Alene Resort.

The police report from that night also stated that members of Utah’s group were met by three trucks that “aggressively” revved their engines in an attempt to intimidate, but Hunter wrote that after surveillance footage was reviewed, there was no evidence that any of the trucks shouted anything toward members of the team or traveling party.

Utah, a No. 5 seed in this year’s NCAA Women’s Tournament, changed hotels out of safety concerns after the incident and expressed it was “very disappointed” in the decision to assign its team to a hotel so far from the Spokane, Wash., venue in which it played. The men’s NCAA Tournament and a youth volleyball tournament created a hotel crunch that put the women’s team in Idaho, about 30 minutes away.

“It’s shocking,” Utah coach Lynne Roberts said after her team’s second-round loss to Gonzaga in Spokane, Wash. “There is so much diversity on a college campus and so you’re just not exposed to that very often. … But, you know, racism is real. It happens. It’s awful.”

The University of Utah declined to comment.

(Photo: Eakin Howard / Getty Images)