Football player stabbed on Knox

A Terp football player was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries after being stabbed in the chest during a fight that had spilled from a Knox Box party into the street early Sunday morning, police said.

The victim, freshman defensive back Trenton Hughes, confirmed yesterday he was the victim of a stabbing over the weekend but declined further comment. Prince George's County Police said Hughes was treated at Washington Hospital Center and released after he was found on Campus Drive shortly after the stabbing.

Maj. Kevin Davis, who commands District 1, said University Police contacted county police after they were contacted by a stabbing victim on Campus Drive. County police began an investigation after they were told the stabbing happened after a fight on Knox Road.

Davis said a verbal argument, that may have been over a girl, escalated into a fist fight during which a knife was drawn. After Hughes was stabbed, his attacker fled. No arrests have been made, Davis said, but he described investigators as having "strong leads." He encouraged "anybody that was at that party that might've seen something" to call police.

Athletics Department spokesman Doug Dull declined to comment.

Although Hughes suffered non-threatening injuries during the fight on Sunday, the incident bears a striking resemblance to a fatal student stabbing that occurred off the campus in November of 2002.

In that incident, a student named Brandon James Malstrom suffered a fatal stab wound that severed his aorta after a fight broke out at a party on Dickinson Avenue. He died after being rushed to Prince George's Hospital Center.

Police eventually charged two suspects with crimes related to the stabbing, but because the stabbing occurred during a fight, it was never clear who drew the weapon. The Maryland Court of Appeals threw out charges against one of the men charged in connection with Malstrom's slaying in 2006, ruling that prosecutors had applied the wrong charge.

The murder had wide-ranging implications for policing downtown, including the expansion of a shared jurisdiction agreement between University Police and county police. Davis said, however, that he doesn't think police coverage was an issue in Saturday's stabbing.

"There's a lot of human rage and human emotion involved in an incident like this," Davis said. "There's no shortage of police officers. I don't believe for one second that any additional police officers could've stopped this."

Davis noted that students should be wary of fights at parties because police have increasingly seen fights become more bloody and in some cases, fatal.

"There was a time and place when a fistfight was a fistfight and you didn't have to worry about someone bringing a knife or a bat or a gun," Davis said. "But in this day and age, we can't assume people won't bring that to a fistfight."

Editors Kevin Litten and Jeff Amoros contributed to this report. worsleydbk@gmail.com