KU student accused of selling wristbands to underage drinkers

A Douglas County criminal complaint accused University of Kansas student Hunter J. Noravong of selling wristbands to four underage drinkers, a case that grew out of the January shooting at The Hawk and now puts downtown Lawrence bar practices back under scrutiny. Prosecutors say the wristbands let minors get alcohol without being carded in the usual way.

The complaint charges Noravong with four misdemeanor counts of purchase or consumption of alcoholic beverage by a minor. It says the four alleged purchasers were born between 2008 and 2010, while Noravong, who lives in Shawnee Mission and was born in 2006, is listed in court records as a KU computer engineering student.

Wristbands at college bars are normally a quick signal that a customer has already been checked and is old enough to drink. In this case, investigators say the wristbands themselves were allegedly being sold as a shortcut around the legal age-verification process at a high-profile Lawrence venue near KU’s campus, at 14th and Ohio streets.

The Kansas Department of Revenue’s Alcoholic Beverage Control division appears to have triggered the case after the Jan. 17 shootings at The Hawk, also known as the Jayhawk Cafe. That shooting left 18-year-old Aidan Knowles dead and 16-year-old Brady Clark critically wounded, and it has continued to draw attention to how age checks, crowd control and bar oversight worked that night.

Kansas ABC says a minor-in-possession violation is a class C misdemeanor, with a minimum $200 fine and the possibility of 40 hours of community service. Its drinking-establishment handbook says a licensee can have a defense if it reasonably believed a minor was 21 based on official or apparently official photo ID. ABC training materials also include instruction on underage liquor-law enforcement and fake-ID investigations.

The complaint’s witness list ties the wristband case back to the larger Hawk investigation. It names Daitron Daniels Strickland and Caiden Clem, the two defendants in the shooting case, along with Knowles, Lawrence police officers, ABC officials and others. That overlap makes the wristband allegation more than a routine underage-drinking citation; it places the complaint inside the wider effort to reconstruct what happened around one of downtown Lawrence’s most closely watched crime scenes.

Noravong’s next court appearance was not listed Friday, leaving the case in its early stages as Douglas County prosecutors continue to examine the fallout from the Hawk shooting.