ROOKIE New Orleans Pelicans basketball player Bryce Dejean-Jones died after being shot early Saturday when he broke into a Dallas apartment, authorities said.

    Dejean-Jones, a 23-year-old shooting guard with the National Basketball Association team, kicked in the front door of an apartment, police said in a statement. The noise woke up the resident in his bedroom, they said, and Dejean-Jones failed to respond when the man called out.

    When Dejean-Jones kicked the bedroom door, the man shot him with a handgun, the statement said.

    Dejean-Jones collapsed in the apartment’s breezeway and died at a hospital. The shooting is under investigation, police said.

    Dejean-Jones was “believed to be breaking into the apartment of an estranged acquaintance” but entered the wrong one, the apartment complex manager said in an email to residents obtained by Dallas NBC television station KXAS.

    Sources told ESPN that Dejean-Jones was in Dallas to celebrate his daughter’s birthday and got into an argument with the child’s mother before the shooting.

    (SD-Agencies)