Ronald Gasser, the man authorities say shot and killed former NFL player Joe McKnight, was released from custody overnight without being charged, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office authorities said Friday morning (Dec. 2). 
 
 Gasser, 54, has not been formally charged, said JPSO spokesman Col. John Fortunato. Investigators are consulting with the district attorney's office on the decision whether to formally charge Gasser, Fortunato said. 
 
 As the investigation into McKnight's death continues, Fortunato asked anyone with information about the shooting to contact department homicide detectives at 504-364-5393. 
 
 McKnight, 28, was shot about 3 p.m. Thursday (Dec. 1) at the intersection of Behrman Highway and Holmes Boulevard in Terrytown. A witness, who declined to give her name, said she saw a man at the intersection yelling at McKnight, who was trying to apologize. The man shot McKnight more than once, the witness said. She said he shot McKnight, stood over him and said, "I told you don't you f--- with me." Then the man fired again, she said. 
 
 UPDATE: Gasser was not standing over Joe McKnight when he shot him, authorities say 
 
 Authorities named the shooter as Ronald Gasser, 54, and said he stayed at the scene and turned his gun in to officers. Gasser was in custody and was being questioned, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said. The sheriff said McKnight did not have a gun, and deputies did not find a gun outside McKnight's vehicle. ||||| Skip in Skip x Embed x Share According to police, former NFL football player Joe McKnight was shot and killed following an auto incident on Thursday in Terrytown, Louisiana. USA TODAY 
 
 Joe McKnight during a 2008 game between USC and Notre Dame. (Photo: Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY Sports) 
 
 Ronald Gasser, the alleged shooter in the killing of former USC and NFL running back Joe McKnight, was arrested and charged with simple battery in 2006 stemming from a road rage incident, police said. 
 
 The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office issued a release Friday night describing the incident that occurred on Feb. 20, 2006, between Gasser and a 51-year-old white male at the same intersection where McKnight was killed Thursday in Terrytown, La. 
 
 “During this incident, the victim/reporting person, identified only as a 51-year-old white male from Marrero, called 911 in Jefferson Parish to report that a male subject was driving a red pick-up truck unsafely on Holiday Drive,” according to the release. “The victim observed a phone number on the truck to call if the vehicle was being operated unsafely. When the victim called the phone number, an individual, later identified as Ronald Gasser, told the victim he was the one driving the red pick-up truck. 
 
 “A verbal altercation between the victim and Gasser began at that time. Once the victim reached the service station, he pulled in to begin refueling his vehicle. It was at that time Gasser, who had followed him into the station, confronted him and began to strike him with a closed fist several times.” 
 
 The misdemeanor charge of simple battery was ultimately dismissed. 
 
 Thursday’s incident between Gasser, 54, and McKnight, 28, has been described by police as “the culmination of a road rage incident." Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said Gasser fired three shots – all hitting McKnight – through an open window after McKnight exited his vehicle. 
 
 Gasser remained at the scene, where McKnight was pronounced dead, and was taken into custody. Gasser was released on Friday without charges and had yet to be formally charged as of 9:30 p.m. ET Friday night. 
 
 GALLERY: Joe McKnight through the years ||||| In professional football, careers are short and everybody’s young, but on the New York Jets six years ago nobody seemed younger than Joe McKnight. After being drafted in the fourth round out of U.S.C., in 2010, the halfback showed up at his first rookie camp with a reputation for immense physical talent and a resistance to training, and it was immediately apparent that he was even more talented and more resistant than anybody expected. Because reporters were on hand to watch, members of the Jets staff tried to give McKnight privacy behind a goal post when he vomited. The coaches, generally a frowning cohort when anything went against plan, were aghast. What N.F.L. running back can’t handle light spring exercise? 
 
 The team kept McKnight around because his talent was undeniable, and it held out hope for him. He never achieved the career studded with breakaway touchdown runs that scouts had imagined, but during his three years with the Jets, on the practice fields of Florham Park, New Jersey, he endeared himself in other ways. Little Joe weighed two hundred pounds, but his winning and original personality was that of a very small person among very large people. Part of it was his gift for mischief. At practice, he was always sneaking up on a big somebody, giving him a slap on the helmet, and disappearing into the throng. Everybody liked it when the big somebody chased McKnight, because, in those moments, all his ability was working for him. McKnight was fast and fluid, so improvisational in his directional shifts that, watching him zydeco across the field, you always remembered that he was from the area around New Orleans, the country’s most improvisational city. He was the greatest player of tag I ever saw. 
 
 The team’s head coach, Rex Ryan, no slouch himself at infusing a serious game with high jinks, watched McKnight juking and flitting, and concocted a variety of roles for him. During the period I spent with the team, in 2010 and 2011, the once can’t-miss running back was a receiver, a kick returner, a defensive back, and a special-teams ace. Sometimes these brief jazz solos played out as well on the field as they’d promised on paper. McKnight saved the team’s 2011 opener, against the Cowboys, by zooming in off the edge and blocking a punt that was returned for a touchdown. Against the Ravens, he ran back a kickoff a hundred and seven yards, a team record. As you watched him do it, he didn’t seem to sprint so much as flow. 
 
 To coaches like Ryan and Mike Pettine, the defensive coördinator, who lived to create new patterns within the limits of the familiar grid, McKnight was hot pepper sauce to the football imagination. McKnight’s number was 25, and Pettine named a cornerback blitz package Spartan 25-Boulder 1 Train. The play was introduced in that same game against the Ravens, and McKnight’s unexpected arrival at the elbow of the Ravens quarterback, Joe Flacco, harried him into throwing an interception that another Jets player returned for a touchdown. That was the only time the play was ever called. 
 
 The community of football is filled with kids who grew up poor, who have experienced more than their share of that what makes a child want to run hard in another direction. During his time as a coveted college recruit, people liked to imply that McKnight had a little hustler in him. But, after hearing about how it felt to come from privation and end up on the prosperous campus of U.S.C., I became convinced that big-money college athletic programs need to pay the players. Some of McKnight’s early problems in professional football had to do with horrible things he saw as a high-school student in Louisiana during the time of Hurricane Katrina. Early on in New Jersey, his recurrent anxiety and nightmares and insomnia and flashbacks meant that he simply wasn’t getting enough rest. 
 
 Football players, hidden under helmets, molded into uniform groups, always on the verge of devastating injury, make it their mission to avoid being conspicuous for anything but brilliant play. Most fail. By the end of the 2011 season, McKnight had a shoulder in such wreckage that at practice, when he had to switch from a white offensive to a green defensive jersey, he went behind a blocking dummy so nobody would see his agony as he pulled the new shirt over his shoulder pads. By then, McKnight, the team butterfly, had many times reminded even the sternest of old-schoolers that people are always much more than they first seem. 
 
 Some things nobody can run away from. That McKnight, only twenty-eight, was killed yesterday on a Louisiana road by an enraged man with a gun who apparently didn’t like his driving is a shattering development. (The man was white; McKnight was unarmed.) That the shooter was soon released from police custody only increased the pain for McKnight’s former Jets teammate Antonio Cromartie, who wrote on Twitter, “You tell [me] how can a man murder someone go get to sleep in his bed at night. But my brother can’t. What the hell am I to tell my nephew.” ||||| Getty Images 
 
 The man who shot and killed former NFL player Joe McKnight over an apparent traffic incident had previously been cited for battery over a confrontation at the very same intersection where he killed McKnight. 
 
 The New Orleans Advocate reports that Ronald Gasser, who admits he shot and killed McKnight on Thursday, was issued a misdemeanor summons for simple battery in 2006, after another motorist called 911 and reported that Gasser had followed him to a gas station and punched him over a traffic dispute. That dispute took place at Holmes Boulevard and Behrman Highway in the New Orleans suburb of Terrytown, the very same intersection where Gasser shot McKnight. 
 
 In the 2006 incident, police say the victim had first called a phone number on a pickup truck to report that the truck was being driven unsafely. It turned out that Gasser was the one driving the truck, and the phone number listed on the truck was Gasser’s cell phone. Gasser answered the call for unsafe driving, berated the caller, figured out which nearby car the call was coming from, and followed the man. 
 
 Gasser’s misdemeanor battery summons was later dismissed for reasons that the Sheriff’s Office now says are unclear. 
 
 After Gasser killed McKnight on Thursday, he stayed at the scene, acknowledged to police that he had committed the shooting, and gave officers the gun. Although Gasser was initially brought to a police station, he was released without charges. Gasser claims he shot McKnight in self defense, and Louisiana law allows people to shoot to kill if they believe they are being threatened.
– The 54-year-old man police say killed a former NFL player during a road rage incident Thursday in Louisiana had been arrested and charged for a road rage incident at the exact same intersection 10 years ago, USA Today reports. In 2006, a man saw a truck driving unsafely and called the number on the back of the truck to report it. Ronald Gasser, the driver, answered the phone, got into an argument with the man, and followed him to a gas station, where he allegedly attacked him. Assault charges against Gasser were dismissed, and according to NBC Sports, the sheriff's office isn't sure why. This time, Gasser may not even be charged. Police say Gasser shot 28-year-old Joe McKnight three times Thursday without ever getting out of his car. A witness tells the Times-Picayune that McKnight was trying to apologize when he was shot; she says the shooter shot McKnight again while he was on the ground. Gasser was taken into custody but released without charges. It's unclear if any are coming. Louisiana law makes it legal to kill if you feel threatened, and Gasser is claiming self defense. Police say McKnight was unarmed and had no weapon in his vehicle. “You tell [me] how can a man murder someone go get to sleep in his bed at night. But my brother can’t. What the hell am I to tell my nephew,” the New Yorker quotes McKnight's former teammate Antonio Cromartie.