“We don’t typically recruit in Connecticut,” says Urban Meyer, who was the head coach in Florida at the time. “But I remember watching the videotape. I’m always looking for that hybrid player. We’re not looking for a big, slow tight end. We want a guy that can do a lot of things.”
At first, Meyer did not see anything special in Aaron. “That was more our staff,” he says. “I’m the ultimate decision maker, but I didn’t know enough about him. He looked like a very athletic guy. But to say that I saw something special—I did not.”
Nevertheless, in April, the Gators had flown Aaron down for a meeting. Aaron told his brother that he was only going down for a vacation. But down in Gainesville, the Gators’ freshman quarterback, Tim Tebow, showed Aaron around the campus and football stadium. Sitting beside Heisman Trophy candidate Chris Leak, Aaron took in a spring game. He met with the team’s other coaches, who had done their best to convince Urban Meyer that Aaron truly was special.
Aaron had spent his whole life in Central Connecticut. Florida might as well have been a different planet.
He made his intentions known then and there. In a video posted on the GatorCountry.com website, he said, “I’m going to be a Gator. This is what I want. They can compete for a national championship, and that’s what I want to be in.”
“It was hard,” Aaron said of his decision. “I was close with Coach Edsall, the coaches, and the UConn players. They’re a great building program. It was something I thought I wanted to be around. But then I became the number-one tight end in the country, so I wanted to play at a top school against the top kids. My dad always said to be the best you have to play against the best.”
DJ had become an integral part of Randy Edsall’s organization. He tried everything he could think of to get his brother to reconsider. “I think it’s still up in the air a little bit. He talks about Florida and everything, but it’s not over until it’s over,” he told the Hartford Courant. “I think when it comes down to crunch time he’s going to really think about the family and put everything in perspective and just really realize that maybe Florida is a little too far. We’re such a close family. If I put myself in his shoes, I know that would be really tough for me to do. I just see him doing the same, in the end finding it really difficult to go there.”
But Aaron felt that, short of winning a national championship, there was nothing UConn could do to get him to change his mind.
Aaron had grown up watching the Patriots quarterback, Drew Bledsoe. He had his sights set on the NFL.
Playing for the Gators would give him the opportunity.
“I really did always want to play with my brother,” he told the Courant. “But I also have to think about what’s best for me and my career, and what’s best for me I think is Florida.”
Down in Gainesville, Gators were treated like royalty wherever they went. Hernandez found that appealing. But there were also compelling reasons for him to move far away from Bristol.
According to a family friend, “Aaron started to get mad at the dumb things that Terri was doing.” The desire to get away from his mother is “what really drove the Florida decision. He wanted to get the fuck away from her. She’d been a problem for a long time. And a lot of people were very disappointed with how Terri carried herself after Dennis passed—even shortly before. Her affair with Jeff Cummings. People did not like the decisions that she was making at the time. They felt as though she had started to tarnish the Hernandez name. Even friends who were tight with the family got to a point where they wouldn’t invite her to things anymore, because of the things she was doing or what they had heard about her.”
If Terri had been more of a steadying influence—if Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow had been less persuasive—or if DJ had succeeded in changing his brother’s mind, everything might have turned out differently for Aaron. Like their father, who had done all he could to keep his sons on the right course, DJ wanted nothing more than to keep Aaron close and keep him safe.
But Aaron had settled on another path. Up in Bristol, he’d kept up his friendship with people like TL Singleton, Carlos “Charlie Boy” Ortiz, and Ernest “Bo” Wallace.
Down in Florida, he would begin to act like a thug.
Part Two
Chapter 8
Aaron graduated from Bristol Central a semester early, in December of 2006.
In January, the University of Florida’s second-ranked football team trounced the top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes in the BCS National Championship game.
When Hernandez arrived in Gainesville that month, the Gators were being feted all over town. Aaron had only just turned seventeen. According to Urban Meyer, he was still deeply affected by Dennis’s death.
“Everybody was walking around on eggshells,” the rangy, plainspoken coach explains. “I knew he’d lost his father. I didn’t realize how sudden it was. And when Aaron got to us that spring, I realized the impact that loss had on him.”
“He was very young, coming out of high school. We tried to counsel him through that. He tried to quit at least a dozen times. My wife’s a psychiatric nurse. She met with him. I would talk to his brother at least every other week. I felt like he was trying to grab hold of something. And I wanted to make sure that he was going to grab hold of the right thing.”
Meyer recalls that Aaron would pull himself together, seem “to get everything under control.” Then he would have visions—“visions of his dad,” Aaron would say—and try to quit, yet again, and go home to Bristol.
“Decimation,” Meyer says, when asked about the impact of Dennis’s death. “I mean, it just destroyed him. There were times he would melt down in my office—break down and start sobbing about his dad. How much he missed him. It happened so fast he never had a chance to say good-bye.
“I lost my father when I was forty-eight years old. I was a grown person when my mom passed away. For me to give advice on something I’ve never walked in those shoes—but I did walk in those shoes, a little later in life. My relationship with my mom was very similar to Aaron with his father. So we would talk about that nonstop. And it seemed like it would comfort him. He would often ask me about that: ‘Tell me when you lost your mom…’ And uncomfortable as that was, I understood. That was his grieving. His opportunity to release a little bit and talk about it.”
If Aaron was in pain, he took care not to show it outside of Urban Meyer’s office. Despite his age, he was quick to find his place on campus. Friends Aaron made as a freshman describe him, today, as kooky, outgoing—a class clown.
“First time I met Aaron, he was on campus with a long pink T-shirt all the way to his knees, blue gym shorts, and bedroom shoes,” Aaron’s friend Markihe Anderson remembers. “He always wanted to be around people. Hang out. Do anything for fun. Anything for excitement. He was always goofing off, making everybody laugh.”
When Anderson went home to Fort Meyers, Aaron would tag along.
“He brought the energy like he already knew my family,” Anderson says. “First time he met them. Ask him for a handshake, he’d give you a hug. He called my ma ‘ma.’ He called my grandma ‘grandma.’ He called my brother ‘brother.’ He had that personality. He swept everyone off their feet.” But a few months after Aaron’s arrival in Florida, an ugly, off-campus incident provided a glimpse of the demons that lurked behind the mask.
Chapter 9
It was midnight on the last Friday in April. Aaron was upstairs at a campus restaurant and bar called the Swamp, drinking lemonade with Tim Tebow and hanging out with his new friend Shaun Young—a tennis player who was the only one of the three who was old enough to drink alcohol.
Classes were over. Finals were set to begin the following week. The Swamp—which was packed to the gills every weekend—was full to overflowing.
The bar was a perennial favorite with students at the University of Florida. It had a prime location: Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, where the Gators played (it, too, was known, to one and all, as “the Swamp”), was just a few blocks awa
y. The beer the bar served was cheap and ice-cold, the waitresses all wore short shorts, and the tree-covered patio had just enough shade to keep the Florida sun at bay.
The Swamp was also a good place for the school’s star football players to see, be seen, and be admired, and although Aaron was still a freshman, he already had admirers of his own.
Before long, a waitress appeared with two shots someone had sent over.
Not carding Aaron was a natural mistake on the part of the waitress. “Hernandez looked like a thirty-year-old man,” the Swamp’s owner, Ron DeFilippo, recalls. “Like LeBron—a man-child at seventeen. If you saw him walking your way you’d cross the street.”
There was also the fact that, in Gainesville, the drinking age did not always pertain to underage Gators.
When Tim Washington flew down to visit Aaron in Florida, he was struck by the way players were treated in town. “If you’re a Gator, you can do no wrong,” Washington says. “I remember, after a game, we went and pulled up at the liquor store. Aaron walked in and got what he wanted to get. I was just sitting there like, ‘Yo, you’re a freshman! They know you’re a freshman. How can you buy this? How can you even do this?’ It was not normal. We went to after-parties where some of the DJs had water bottles for players when they came in because they needed to hydrate—except the bottles were full of vodka.”
Aaron Hernandez was not a big drinker. Back in Bristol, marijuana had become his drug of choice. And in any case, he didn’t like the way that this alcohol tasted. He dumped the shots that the waitress had brought into his lemonade. An hour later, at around one in the morning, he went downstairs to head out. But as Aaron made his way toward the exit, a manager stopped him, waving a bill for twelve dollars.
“What about this?” the manager said.
Tim Tebow and Shaun Young would both say that the manager—a man named Michael Taphorn—was aggressive. Taphorn was right up in Hernandez’s face, they recalled, and “irate.” Tebow stepped in to resolve what was rapidly turning into a conflict. A woman standing nearby offered to pay Aaron’s bill. But Taphorn ignored her, waved Tebow off, and ordered Hernandez out of the bar.
Ron DeFilippo remembers things differently: according to him, when Hernandez was confronted with the bill he said, “‘I don’t pay for anything in this town’—like he had celebrity status.”
All parties agree that Hernandez walked outside of the bar with Taphorn following close on his heels. Then, accounts diverge. According to Hernandez, Taphorn stayed up in his face. According to Taphorn, Hernandez pushed him a few times on their way out of the bar. Then, standing out on the gray wooden patio, Hernandez lost his temper completely.
“He sucker-punched me,” Taphorn would tell the police. Having done so, Hernandez bolted, losing one of his shoes as he ran away.
Taphorn was in terrible pain. The blow had exploded his left eardrum—an injury that would take six weeks to heal. Still, he ran after Aaron. Along with some of the bar staff, who had come outside to back their manager up, he called out to Hernandez: “Come back!”
Aaron did not come back. Taphorn picked up the shoe—a black sneaker. It was still in his hands when the police arrived.
Chapter 10
Hernandez had been in Gainesville for less than four months. He was a Gator, but hadn’t played in an actual game yet.
Michael Taphorn had recognized him all the same.
“The freshman tight end,” Taphorn told Sergeant Rowe of the Gainesville Police Department.
After taking the manager’s statement, Rowe placed a call to Tim Tebow.
“It will be in Hernandez’s best interest to give us his side of the story,” he said, and Tebow agreed. He was relieved when Sergeant Rowe went on assure him that no one would alert the press, and that his own name would be kept out of the media.
Two hours later, at three in the morning, Rowe got a call back: Hernandez, Tebow, and Young were waiting for him a few blocks away from campus. Upon arrival, the sergeant informed Hernandez of his Miranda rights, but Hernandez chose to tell his side of the story.
Aaron was calm and collected. Mask firmly in place, he told the sergeant he didn’t know that the woman who’d brought him the shots was a waitress. He had thought she was a fan. And since he had not ordered the drinks, or liked them, he did not see why he had been asked to pay for them.
But, Hernandez said, Taphorn had “kept advancing” on him. Aaron had called out to Tebow for help. Then, outside of the bar, just to get Taphorn out of his face, he had thrown a punch.
Aaron gave Rowe his Connecticut driver’s license. He gave the officer his mother’s telephone number. He told Rowe that he and Tebow had already called their coach, Urban Meyer, and described the incident.
Rowe was impressed with the young man. Hernandez was polite and professional. He seemed to be sober. Rowe decided against charging him with underage drinking—that was a matter the university could handle internally. But Aaron was also facing a felony battery charge.
It was up to Taphorn to decide whether he would press the matter.
In the days that followed, Taphorn and Ron DeFilippo both heard from the university. “A couple of people who worked for Urban Meyer, but never really identified themselves, said, ‘It’s in everybody’s best interest if we reprimand the kid, get him under wraps, and let him go his own way,’” DeFilippo recalls. Then, according to DeFilippo, a handler who worked for Meyer rang him up and said: “Let this thing go. Anything you ever need for the Swamp, just give us a call.”
In the end, Taphorn changed his mind about pressing charges. Part of the deal that was struck was that Hernandez would have to come back to the bar to apologize.
Hernandez never did. But he did make another appearance at the bar. According to DeFilippo, sometime after the night of the incident, members of his staff saw Aaron drive by the Swamp, making shooting gestures with his hand. DeFilippo called the university, yet again. He told the official he talked to, “Get the kid under wraps.”
But, at the time, school officials had bigger headaches to deal with.
Chapter 11
Earlier that month, a few days after April Fool’s Day, Aaron Hernandez’s teammate Ronnie Wilson had made his way through XS, a nightclub in Gainesville.
Wilson was a sophomore, an offensive guard, and—at 6′4″ and 315 pounds—one of the team’s biggest players. He was a man who drew glances wherever he went, and on this night, not long after midnight, Wilson got sucked into a nasty exchange with a young man named Frank Fuller.
Despite the way Gators were treated in football-mad Gainesville, it wasn’t unusual for tensions to arise between UF players and locals. All around town, and especially in tough neighborhoods, there were thugs, or wannabe thugs, who liked to try the players, or test them. Getting in a player’s face gave you a lot of cred in the neighborhood.
Fuller, who was enrolled at a nearby community college, was not a thug. But as tensions rose, Wilson spat on Fuller, slapped him, and punched him. Then he walked out of the club.
Fuller followed, dialed 911, and stayed on the line as he tailed Wilson’s BMW down University Avenue. At 13th Street, Wilson made a right. Fuller turned with him. A few blocks later Wilson turned right again and pulled into a UF parking lot. There, he got out and popped the trunk of a blue Crown Victoria.
Fuller expected Wilson to turn around with a baseball bat—or maybe a tire iron—in his hand. That would have been bad enough. What he saw instead was much more frightening.
“He’s got, actually, an automatic weapon!” Fuller shouted into his cell phone. “I am extremely fearful for my life right now,” he said.
Wilson had taken a step forward and pointed an AK-47 at Fuller’s car.
The dispatcher told Fuller to get out of there, fast. “I’m trying to,” Fuller shouted as he slammed his car into Reverse. “I’m trying to get away as fast as possible. Oh, shit!”
As he peeled out of the parking lot, Wilson raised the AK toward the sky and fired.
Wilson would tell the police he had fired the weapon because he had been “afraid for his life.” Then, after being suspended by Coach Urban Meyer, the offensive guard copped a plea: Two years’ probation and one hundred hours of community service—service that Wilson performed while on suspension. Once he was done, Meyer let him back on the team.
This was the sort of thing that gave Urban Meyer a bad name in certain circles in Gainesville. In Gator Country, it was said, being an actual Gator brought you a boatload of special privileges. It was not that you were encouraged to behave badly, per se. It was just that, if you did behave badly, the odds were better than decent that you would be given another chance.
It was a state of affairs that explained a few of the chances that Aaron Hernandez would get as a Gator. But there was another side to the stories told around town about Urban Meyer and his troublesome players.
Years earlier, while coaching at Utah, Meyer had seen exactly what second chances could mean to troubled kids who had never caught a fair break.
There, a tailback named Marty Johnson had plowed his car into another car and fled the scene. The arrest for drunk driving that followed was Johnson’s second—it landed Johnson in jail and brought pressure on Meyer to kick him off of the team. Meyer did that, but he and his wife, Shelley, whose psychiatric speciality was addiction, also visited Johnson in jail. Their eleven-year-old daughter, Gigi, wrote Johnson encouraging letters. Upon Johnson’s release, Meyer gave the kid a second shot on the team. He brought Johnson into his home and his life. And, against all odds, Johnson ended up abstaining from alcohol, playing in the Fiesta Bowl, finishing college, and turning his life around.
All-American Murder Page 3
