A Pennsylvania reporter is standing by his story on Draya Michele’s child endangerment case after she said on Basketball Wives LA that the reports about her were false.
Before she was Draya Michele on VH1, she was Andraya M. Howard of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. Reports at the time, based on the police affidavit, said she was arrested in January 2011 for leaving her 7 year old son home alone without food in a filthy apartment while she worked in Philadelphia. Baller Alert was one of the sites that reported it.
On Basketball Wives LA, Draya pushed back hard. She said the story was not true and that it had been blown out of proportion. Watching her break down on camera was tough, and anyone who has ever been lied on knows how that feels. So Baller Alert went back to the source.
The reporter wrote the story for the Reading Eagle. He said his article was based entirely on the police affidavit of probable cause, which he had in hand. When Howard’s mother called the paper to complain that the story was inaccurate, he went back to the arresting officer. He says the officer told him the story was very accurate.
He did not stop there. He pointed out that a judge ordered Howard to attend family counseling and asked why a judge would do that if the court didn’t believe the officer’s account. He also said Howard “shows her character” by accusing the police and the paper of making up facts after accepting her punishment before a judge.
The court record backs up the outcome of the case. On June 14, Howard was accepted into Pennsylvania’s Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program in Berks County Court on a charge of endangering the welfare of a child. She was given two years of probation and ordered to attend family counseling and complete 40 hours of community service.
The reporter called her entry into ARD “tantamount to a guilty plea.” That isn’t quite how the program works. ARD is a pretrial program for first time offenders. People who enter it do not plead guilty, and the court does not find them guilty. They agree to court supervision and conditions like probation and community service, and once they complete everything, the charges can be wiped from their record.
That leaves two sides that don’t match. The reporter and the officer stand behind every detail in the police affidavit. Draya says the story told about her is not the truth. She accepted the court’s conditions without a conviction on her record.
