We all thought it was very cute when a young boy ran onto the court to hug Carmelo Anthony during the Knicks game against the Pelicans; but what if it wasn’t a cute kid but instead someone that wanted to cause Anthony harm?  Well for that reason, two people have lost their jobs.

An usher lost her job and a New Orleans police officer will no longer be hired by SMG to work security details for Pelicans games because of a breakdown that enabled a young boy to run onto the court to hug New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony during a game last week at the Smoothie King Center.

Superdome/Smoothie King Center general manager Alan Freeman said the retractable tensile or crowd control barrier was not in place and the usher who should have been watching the aisle was not in place either.

”Then, there is a police officer stationed in that general area also, and he was not doing his job,” Freeman said. ”So essentially what happened there is that you get two people who were not doing their responsibilities and that led to a black eye for us as the building operator.

”So what we have done since then is first of all, we obviously replaced those two people who failed to do their jobs – the usher and the police officer.”

As a result of the incident, Freeman said the Smoothie King Center’s entire usher staff went through reinforcement training last week that included them having to watch the video of former tennis star Monica Seles when she was stabbed in her back in 1993 during an on-court attack during a tournament match in Hamburg, Germany. Seles survived the attack, but she did not return to play tennis for over two years.

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source: The Times-Picayune