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Evans Resigns After DUI Charge
Dean Legge | dawgpost.com
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ATHENS, Ga. --ATHENS, Ga. -- Damon Evans has resigned as Georgia's athletic director less than a week after he was arrested on a DUI charge.
School president Michael Adams made the announcement Monday following a conference call with the executive committee of the athletic association's board of directors.
Adams says he'll have no further comment until Tuesday.
Evans was arrested late Wednesday in Atlanta. He was charged with DUI and failure to maintain a lane. Also arrested with him was Courtney Fuhrmann, who was charged with disorderly conduct.
Evans became the Southeastern Conference's first black athletic director in 2004.
There was no immediate word on a replacement.
Evans, who was hired to replace longtime Georgia athletics director and football coach Vince Dooley in 2004, was scheduled to begin a new five-year contract that would have paid him $550,000 annually.
"On Thursday night, I thought he would survive this," a UGA official told ESPN.com's Mark Schlabach. "But after reading the police report, I didn't think he would be able to overcome it."
According to a police report released Friday, Evans repeatedly referred to his position at the school before being arrested.
"I am not trying to bribe you but I am the athletic director of the University of Georgia," Evans said, according to the officer identified in the report as M. Cabe.
A Georgia coach told ESPN.com on Sunday that during a meeting with several Bulldogs coaches on Thursday, Evans said his relationship with Fuhrmann, the 28-year-old passenger in his car, was "nothing more than friends."
"He wasn't forthcoming about his relationship with the woman," the UGA coach said.
The officer also said that Evans asked to be taken to a motel instead of jail or to be let off with a warning. According to the report, Evans later said: "I am not trying to bribe you, but is there anything you can do without arresting me?"
In the report, the officer noted he found a "red pair of lady's panties between [Evans'] legs." When he asked Evans, a married father of two children, what he was doing with the underwear, Evans said: "She took them off and I held them because I was just trying to get her home," according to the report.
Evans told the officer that Fuhrmann was nothing more than a friend, according to the report. But the officer said that Fuhrmann later told him that the two had been seeing each other for "only a week or so."
"Just to let you know, it will be erased because he is the athletic director of UGA and he has that power," Fuhrmann told the officer, according to the report.
She was charged with disorderly conduct after police said she repeatedly ignored warnings to stay inside the 2009 BMW while the trooper was conducting the field sobriety test and later acting "combative" in the back seat of the patrol car, according to the report.
"I apologize and don't want to use my influence but she is trying to protect me," the officer said Evans told him.
Fuhrmann told The Associated Press on Friday the charges against her are a "misunderstanding from what the media is portraying it as" but declined to speak further.
Evans apologized for the incident during a news conference in Athens on Thursday and said he "failed miserably." He also apologized to his wife, Kerri, who attended the news conference.
"My behavior and my actions are not indicative of what we teach our student athletes," he said. "My actions have put a black cloud over our storied program."
Evans said Thursday he hoped to keep his job, which he has held since July 2004. He acknowledged he had placed Adams in a predicament.