In late September, Illinois athletic director Josh Whitman received potentially ominous news about his men’s basketball program’s top returning player.

Police in Lawrence, Kansas, wanted to speak with Terrence Shannon Jr. about an incident that occurred when he visited to attend a Sept. 8 Illinois-Kansas football game.

At first, Whitman wasn’t certain how big a deal the request was. During a news conference in Champaign, Illinois, on Friday evening, Whitman recalled initially not knowing if Shannon was the subject of the inquiry or merely a witness to a crime.

Over the next several days, Whitman looked into the matter and discovered that it was Shannon who was under investigation. Whitman said he gleaned from conversations with the University of Illinois Police Department that the Lawrence police were looking into Shannon’s interactions with a young woman he met at a bar near the Kansas campus.