Ex-NFL Player Arrested & Charged For Staging Hate Crime To Collect Insurance Money

For four seasons, Edawn Louis Coughman made the rounds in the NFL. From 2012 to 2016, the now-31-year-old was apart of six different teams: the Seattle Seahawks, Dallas Cowboys, Buffalo Bills, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Washington Redskins and Houston Texans. For most of his career, Coughman’s affiliation with many of those teams was during the offseason or as a member of the practice squad. Since 2016, the offensive tackle has been a free agent, and while he’s been living a fairly quiet life, he’s made headlines after becoming the target of a recent alleged hate crime.

Coughman owns Create & Bake Restaurant and Coughman’s Creamery, an establishment nestled in a suburb of Atlanta. According to Gwinett County Police, they received a call last Tuesday from someone who indicated that a person in a black Chevrolet Silverado with no license plate broke into the bakery. When police arrived, they saw a number of spray-painted words and images inside including “MAGA,” “n*gger,” and a swastika. According to NBC News, the surveillance equipment was damaged, wires were cut, cushions in the seating area were sliced, mirrors were broken, and the spray paint was still wet.

Police immediately canvassed the area looking for the black vehicle described by the caller and located it not far from from the bakery. When they pulled the truck over, Coughman was behind the wheel and in the cab of the truck were “several televisions” that were “still attached to the brackets with damaged drywall,” according to police.

“It appears as though Edawn conjured a premeditated plan to damage his own property, attempt to make it appear as a hate crime, file a claim with his insurance company, and sell off the undamaged appliances and electronics,” said police. Coughman was arrested and charged with concealing a license plate, insurance fraud, and filing a false report of a crime. He’s since bonded out of jail.