A former minor league hockey player who was part of the now-defunct Colorado Gold Kings is being held in the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office on a murder charge out of a North Carolina town.
Bogdan Rudenko, 32, was arrested Friday at a Howard Johnson’s hotel in Colorado Springs for investigation of a killing Dec. 20 in Stallings, N.C.
Rudenko last played for the former Twin City Cyclones in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the 2008-09 season, according to . The team went out of business March 31.
He has played at 19 different minor league teams in Russia, the U.S. and Canada in 15 years, according to the website.
The right winger’s longest stint with any team was with the Gold Kings between 1998 and 2000, according to . The Gold Kings went out of business two years after he left.
According to dropyour , which tracks hockey brawls, Rudenko got into 31 fights on the ice between 1997 and 2007.
While he was with the Gold Kings he got into six brawls, according to the website.
The identity of the homicide victim has yet to be released, but police told the Charlotte Observer that they believe he’s Russian born, in his early 30s and has no family in the U.S.
“We’ve not yet established the motive of this homicide,” Stallings Police Chief Larke Plyler said Saturday. “There are other people we would like to talk to as part of the investigation.”
He said Stallings, with about 12,000 residents, is a bedroom community of Charlotte. The latest murder was the first since 2007, Plyler said.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com
