A former member of the Buffalo Bills, who will play in the Super Bowl on Sunday, apparently failed to perform community service in Rochester as ordered by the court. Anthony Hargrove pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in 2007 and agreed to 200 hours of community service.

Hargrove was accused of pushing a Rochester police officer back in 2007 after a night out on the town. At the time, Hargrove was participating in Bills Training Camp at St. John Fisher College.

In October of 2007, Hargrove agreed to plead guilty to disorderly conduct and was fined $300 and sentenced to 200 hours of community service.

Hargrove said he was going to turn the situation into a positive and do something for the kids at the Boys & Girls Club of Rochester.

“I'm not going to leave the city of Rochester with a sour taste in my mouth,” Hargrove said in 2007 after accepting the plea and sentence. “Me and my brother, we're going to get together with the director of the Boys & Girls Club and we'll do something. We'll have a camp and if my career stays here in Buffalo then you'll probably see more of me then."

That was then. Hargrove is now a member of the New Orleans Saints and will play against the Indianapolis Colts for the NFL championship.

As for the community service, Monroe County District Attorney Mike Green said it was not fulfilled. Green said Hargrove's attorney claims the community service was done in Florida and Rochester City Court Judge John Schwartz accepted that argument.

Green believes that decision sends the message that professional athletes are treated differently than everyone else.

"If a court orders you to do something, the way the rules work for all the rest of us is if you're not going to do that you go back to court and you ask to have those conditions changed and the judge says yes or no and everyone's on the same page as to what's going to happen,” Green explained. “That, unfortunately, is not what happened here."

There was some concern within the Boys & Girls Club whether Hargrove was the type of person club officials wanted interacting with their members. Shortly after his plea deal in City Court, Hargrove was suspended by the NFL for violating the league's substance abuse policy.

The club's staff believed Hargrove's message would have hit home as he came from a single parent home, didn’t know his father, and his mother died when he was young. Many kids at the Boys & Girls Club have lived similar lives.

After the league imposed a one-year suspension, the clubs wanted nothing to do with Hargrove.

"Everybody deserves a second chance,” said Dwayne Mahoney, executive director of the Boys & Girls Club. “But after we found out he was suspended from the league for a year we made the decision that we didn't think it was probably appropriate for the kids to have that type of a role model. So we decided against it."

An article in Monday's New York Times details how Hargrove has turned his life around. Both Green and Mahoney say they hope that's true. They only wish he would have fulfilled his court ordered obligation.

New York Times Article on Anthony Hargrove
Boys & Girls Club of Rochester