Iverson kicked Tawanna out and she left the house with Iverson's cousin, Shaun Bowman.

Hours later, in the dead of night, Iverson and a friend got in his Mercedes-Benz 600 coupe and went out looking for them. He banged on the door of Bowman's West Philadelphia apartment, and angrily demanded that Bowman's roommate and a friend tell him where they were.

As the 76ers superstar heatedly spoke, a handgun bulged from his waistband. If he didn't find his wife, Iverson said, "I'm going to hurt somebody."

Iverson then allegedly said "somebody's going to die tonight, and it's not going to be me."

Sources said he made the apartment dwellers reach his wife and Bowman on a cell phone, and then Iverson said into the receiver: "I have a gun to somebody's head."

Bowman then called 911.

That's one version of the July 3 middle-of-the-night encounter that Philadelphia cops and a growing phalanx of lawyers are now trying to sort through.

Police and prosecutors must now figure out if that's exactly how it happened, and - if it is - whether Iverson broke any laws. It might all boil down to whether the NBA superstar was indeed packing heat last Wednesday morning. Iverson pleaded no contest to a weapons charge in 1997 and was given probation.

"To our knowledge, Mr. Iverson does not own a gun or have a permit to carry a gun," Police Lt. Michael Chitwood, who is running the investigation, told the Daily News yesterday.

Chitwood spoke after a highly unusual, hourlong meeting with Iverson's chief lawyer, Lawrence H. Woodward, of Virginia Beach, Va. The meeting also included Chitwood's boss, Southwest Detectives Capt. Steven Glenn; Chief of Detectives John Maxwell and Police Counsel Karen Simmons. Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson even stopped in the meeting briefly.

In a city where a murder is committed almost daily, it's unusual for the police commissioner to get involved in what for a mere mortal might be considered just a low-grade firearms case.

But nothing is ever usual when it comes to Iverson, the hard-charging, 6-foot, three-time NBA scoring champ who is loved by hoops fans for his moves on the court but loathed by some critics for his gansta-rap lifestyle.

Regardless of the outcome of the police investigation, the allegations against Iverson have rocked a Philadelphia sports world already reeling from a string of disappointments in the increasingly distant 13 months since the Sixers' guard took them to the NBA Finals.

Ironically, Sixers fans had been encouraged when Iverson decided to spend the summer here in Philadelphia rather than his native Hampton, Va., where he'd encountered so much trouble in past years.

Yesterday, one family insider said she now wished Iverson had gone to Virginia, instead. "I told him, you need to come down south," she said. "It's just because he's a big celebrity, a superstar. People are out to get him."

Iverson has not yet told his side of the story - neither to the news media nor to the detectives trying to get to bottom of what happened at the Cobbs Creek Court Apartments at 62nd and Chestnut last week.

"Mr. Iverson has been in regular contract with his attorneys since the allegations surfaced and has also been in contact with the Philadelphia 76ers," Iverson's lawyers - Woodward and Thomas Shuttleworth - said in a written statement.

"Mr. Iverson's attorneys have provided information to the authorities and will continue to do so as needed," they said. "Mr. Iverson will not make any public comments as the allegations are still being reviewed by the authorities. Mr. Iverson understands and respects that the authorities must investigate the allegations."

At the Iverson home on Monk Road, in Gladwyne, children's squealing voices could be heard from inside the three story brick mansion, which has a four-car garage, swimming pool and regulation size basketball net off the parking lot. No one answered the driveway intercom.

One man that police were talking to last night was Duran Topping, the apartment-house resident who told the Daily News on Sunday that he ran into Iverson about 3 a.m. Wednesday. Yesterday, people who know Iverson confirmed that the visitor's unusual greeting - "What's going on, cat daddy?" - is frequently uttered by Iverson. And they said Iverson drives a dark Mercedes like the vehicle Topping saw.

Last night, the two men who encountered Iverson - Bowman's roommate, Charles Jones, 21, and a 17-year-old neighbor - spoke briefly with reporters.

"He had a gun," the 17-year-old, who said his name was Hakeem, told reporters. When asked if he was wielding it around he said, "No, we just saw he had it."

There were scuff marks on the door to Bowman's No. 309 apartment. Sources say the two have filed an official police report.

The latest incident comes at the end of a tumultuous year for the 27-year-old Iverson.

At this time last year, Iverson was on top of the world. His brilliant, pain-wracked play in the 2001 NBA playoffs, singled-handedly carrying the injury-riddled 76ers all the way to the Finals, had made him Philadelphia's most popular athlete. Then he donned a white tuxedo to marry Tawanna Turner, his longtime fiancee and mother of his two children.

Iverson's many fans prayed that newfound maturity would finally dissipate the clouds of controversy that have swirled around his life off the basketball court.

But death and violence would come back to haunt Iverson one more time, and friends agree that this time it him hard.

On Oct. 14, one of the groomsmen from Iverson's wedding, Rahsaan "Ra" Langford, 29, was murdered after a barroom fight back home in Newport News, Va.

"He helped me so much just by being a real friend and always telling me when he thought I was wrong," Iverson told local writer Larry Platt in a Playboy interview this year. "And I needed that in a friend, instead of a bunch of people telling me everything I want to hear. That's not going to help."

He wore a black armband that said "Ra" and tapped it before every foul shot.

But things were not going well on the court. Iverson's belated decision to undergo shoulder surgery caused him to miss all of training camp and the first five games of the regular season - all Sixer losses. When he returned, he carried all of the burden of the Sixers' offense on his repaired shoulders, and his shooting average dipped below 40 percent. The team got knocked out of the playoffs in the first round.

His on-again, off-again relationship with coach Larry Brown hit the skids - culminating in trade rumors and finally Iverson's bizarre, rambling postseason press conference where he wondered what all the fuss was about missing practices.

This was his first full summer in Philadelphia. Hampton had seemed to bring nothing but trouble. Iverson grew up there in abject poverty, born to an unwed 15-year-old mother and raised in an apartment that was frequently flooded by a busted sewage pipe. One summer growing up, his best friend, Tony Clark, was murdered, and so were seven other buddies.

In 1993, when Iverson was 17, he was the one in trouble. No one has ever firmly established what happened that February night inside a Hampton bowling alley. All anyone can agree on is that there was a racial brawl. Cops arrested Iverson and three other black teens, but no whites. He spent four months behind bars before the governor granted him clemency, and his conviction on the obscure charge of "maiming by mob" was later tossed altogether.

Still, Iverson went back to Virginia - and trouble. Mercedes and guns tended to be involved. In 1997, after he was named the NBA Rookie of the Year, he was a passenger in a vehicle stopped for speeding near Richmond, Va., when police found two marijuana cigarettes in the car. They also found a .45-caliber handgun that belonged to Iverson in the front seat. Iverson got probation in the court of law and a one-game suspension from the NBA courts.

The next year, two friends back home borrowed Iverson's $138,000 Mercedes and got busted on drug charges.

This summer was going to be different. Friends say that he wanted to oversee work on an addition to his home. Sure, he and his buddies hung out in the usual spots, shooting pool at Dave & Buster's and hitting some after-hours clubs. But he also showed up at the Sixers rookie camp for the first time, and it seemed he couldn't wait for next season.

By now, though, he had a large crew in Philadelphia. That group included his cousin, Shaun Bowman. Iverson's aunt Jessie Bowman - the sister of his mom, Ann Iverson - had been cook and housekeeper for Iverson earlier in his NBA career. Sports Illustrated said Iverson supported Bowman and her three kids including Shaun, the oldest.

Records suggest that Shaun Bowman served in the U.S. Army at Fort Gordon, Ga., in 2000 and 2001 and lived for a short time in Hampton before coming back to Philadelphia this spring.

Sources said both Bowman and Tawanna were considered outsiders in the tight-knit Iverson family, and that he was somebody she could turn to in an hour of trouble