Last Friday, former Washington Wizard Javaris Crittenton — a key player in the Gungate drama that enveloped the team in 2010 — was charged with murder in connection with the shooting death of 22-year-old Jullian Jones in Atlanta earlier this month. The FBI has now gotten involved in the search for Crittenton, which has expanded from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

It’s an incredibly sad story — obviously, there is a young woman, a mother of four, who is dead. But Crittenton’s path from a high school standout to a murder suspect is just as depressing. That’s hammered home by the (relative) silence it has drawn from people like Crittenton’s former boo-ray rival Gilbert Arenas.

Wizards blogger of record Mike Prada provides some more perspective on why the news comes as such as surprise, despite Crittenton’s history with guns:

Finally, the news has been weird for me to process because Crittenton was one of the guys I talked to most when covering the team my first year. Because he was recovering from injury, he was always lingering around before players were made available, and he was an easy guy to pass the time talking to during those down moments. I remember him being upset with how the Wizards handled his foot injury, which prevented him from building on a promising end to the previous season, but he always did his best to put on a happy face.

I remember talking to Crittenton about his injury a month later. He was lingering in the locker room, and I called him over to get an update. He had this big smile on his face when he answered my questions, which seemed a bit odd to me. In the middle of the interview, Antawn Jamison came over to him, tapped him on the shoulder and gave him this weird look. “Why you talkin’ like that,” Jamison said at the time, wondering, like me, why Crittenton was so excited to talk about an injury.

Given what’s transpired now, it’s still really jarring that someone who seemed so easygoing and cheerful when I saw him be accused of a crime this serious.

Last year, after he was sentenced to probation for the gun incident inside the Verizon Center, Crittenton told the Post’s Michael Lee that he had learned to “Use wisdom in everything and just don’t get caught up in foolishness and nonsense and crazy people around you.” Here’s hoping he follows his own advice and the story doesn’t get any worse than it already is.