I just saw a story about Bates getting arrested with a gun in his car.
I haven't followed his career, but what happened to him? He went from an elite prospect to somebody that NbaDraft.net has ranked 84th in his class as a prospect right now.
Emoni Bates has been failed by the adults in his life, and now, at age 18, has failed himself.
Specifically, his father started one of those fake charter schools so he could build a high school basketball program around him. School wasn't really a thing. This included getting another top high school recruit to join the team, only for that player to be kicked out of the "school" for essentially not getting along with Emoni and his crew well enough.
Bates was committed to Michigan State (along with the other high schooler mentioned above -- I forget who but could look it up), but at the end reclassified to enter college a year earlier, and wound up with Penny Hardaway at Memphis. He had a bad year, because he wasn't well prepared for college on or off the court, and left the program. No higher-tier programs would offer. Michigan had an open scholarship spot and Emoni pretty much begged to go there, being from Ypsilanti, which is a town over from Ann Arbor, but Juwan Howard passed on him. So he wound up at Eastern Michigan, which is located in Ypsi. As we have seen before and will see again, he fell back in with his hometown crowd and got himself into serious trouble.
He screwed up, but his father was very much a Lavar Ball type, and he was not put on a path to success. He needed a mentor other than his father, and either never looked for one or never was allowed to find one.
Prospect-wise, he's one of those kids who physically matures earlier than the rest, and so looked dominant. He might have been able to maintain dominance with better guidance, or it might have always been that once others caught up to him he'd have been less impressive. Probably somewhere in the middle.