UPDATE 7/06 7:45PM: CNN is reporting that the pistol found at the shooting scene was bought by McNair's girlfriend Sahel Kazemi two nights before the fatal incident, according to police.
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Steve McNair's death on the Fourth of July has revealed that the former football star may have had a dark side that had been hidden from public view, the AP writes. Indeed, even McNair's wife may have only become aware of the romantic affair he had been carrying on with 20-year-old Sahel Kazemi after his death, sources told the New York Daily News
McNair, who was shot four times Saturday in what police have ruled a homicide, was known for his charity work and volunteering and was viewed publicly as a happily married man. But as the details surrounding his death emerge, the picture has become more complicated.
From the AP:
Even McNair's longtime agent said he didn't know about the former quarterback's relationship with Saleh Kazemi until news broke of the deaths. Now police call 36-year-old McNair the victim of homicide, though they aren't yet ready to label Kazemi's death a suicide despite her single bullet wound to the head.
"As good as he was on the football field, that couldn't touch the person," agent Bus Cook said Sunday, still shaken by McNair's death. "I mean it just couldn't."
Hints of a problem with alcohol surfaced in May 2003 when a Nashville police officer pulled McNair over on suspicion of drunk driving. Police said the quarterback's blood alcohol content was .18 percent -- well over Tennessee's legal limit. He also was charged with having a 9mm weapon with him, but all the charges were later dropped.
McNair was charged with drunken driving in 2007 because he let his brother-in-law drive his pickup truck. Those charges were later dropped when the DUI charge against the brother-in-law was reduced to reckless driving.
And McNair could have been charged again Thursday night when the same officer who arrested him in 2003 stopped a 2007 Cadillac Escalade driven by Kazemi and registered to both her and McNair. Kazemi was arrested on a DUI charge, and he was allowed to leave in a taxi.
Meanwhile, Kazemi's sister Soheyla tells the Florida Times-Union that her sister "expected McNair to leave his wife in the next two or three weeks and eventually marry her."