A brother of Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic pleaded guilty to trespassing and disorderly conduct Friday in connection with a viral gameday fight at Ball Arena last year.
Strahinja Jokic, 43, was sentenced to a year of probation on the misdemeanor and petty offenses, according to the Denver district attorney’s office.
Strahinja Jokic originally was charged with third-degree assault, a misdemeanor, after a on social media that appeared to show him punching a man in the face courtside at Denver’s Ball Arena during an April 2024 game against the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lakers fan who was punched, Nicholas Meyer, suffered a concussion, cuts and bruises on his face and a deviated septum, he claimed in a subsequent lawsuit.
Strahinja Jokic was charged in July 2024. He said then he felt he had done nothing wrong because he was defending an older man he had known for a very long time.
The gameday fight was not Strahinja Jokic’s first run-in with Denver law enforcement. In 2019 he was charged with assault and accused of choking and pushing a woman and preventing her from calling 911.
In that case, Strahinja Jokic pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing phone service, as well as a felony count of trespassing, as part of a deferred sentence in which prosecutors agreed to eventually negate the trespassing conviction if he followed court rules for unsupervised probation and did not commit another crime for two years.
The trespassing charge was dismissed in 2022 after he successfully completed that term, court records show. The misdemeanor conviction stands. Charges of false imprisonment and assault against Strahinja Jokic were also dropped as part of the plea agreement in that 2019 case.
