“Once I got away from my old lifestyle for a while,” Johnson said, “it wasn’t hard. I have the Meyers and my teammates to thank for that.”
But Marty Johnson did not keep assault weapons in the trunk of his car. He did not threaten people’s lives, shoot people in the head, try to strangle women, or deal cocaine outside of the stadium on game days—all incidents involving Gator players that Meyer would have to contend with in 2007.
When he addressed the UF Alumni Association Gators Clubs, Coach Meyer used a certain phrase to describe his team: “The top one percent of one percent,” he would say. When it came to the 2006 season, he wasn’t wrong: The Gators ended up 13–1, setting a school record by winning both the SEC and BCS Championships. The last game of the season was a stunning upset over the number-one ranked Ohio State Buckeyes—the team Urban Meyer now coaches.
But that was the year before Aaron’s arrival in Florida. In 2007, Aaron’s first year on the team, Meyer’s players brought home a record their coach had never asked for and didn’t want.
They brought him the NCAA record for most players arrested in the course of a single year.
Chapter 12
Coach Meyer did what he could to minimize the damage. What that meant for Aaron Hernandez, in particular, was that Tim Tebow was assigned to keep an eye on the hotheaded player.
Tim and Aaron could not have been much more different. Tebow was the youngest of five children, all of whom had been homeschooled by their deeply religious parents. While Tebow’s teammates in Florida partied, fought, got high, and spent time in strip clubs, he stuck to the straight Christian path he had followed since boyhood.
The quarterback was clean-cut, clean-spoken, open about being a virgin and saving himself for marriage. Tebow sang hymns on the sidelines, and on the field he dropped down to one knee, bowed his head, and prayed after victories.
Before long, the phrase “Tebowing” would enter the national vocabulary. It involved striking the same kneeling pose.
Tim wrote references to Bible verses in his eye black. When the NCAA passed a rule that banned players from writing such messages, it became known as “The Tebow Rule.”
Like Hernandez, Tebow was an especially versatile player—6′3″, physical. A dual-threat quarterback who was as likely to run with the ball as he was to pass it. And if Hernandez had been an exceptional player in high school, Tebow had been even better. ESPN had aired a documentary about his senior year, and his decision to play for Florida over Alabama, called Tim Tebow: The Chosen One.
Now, at the start of Aaron’s first full school year in Florida, Aaron and the Chosen One were living next door to each other. On the road, Urban Meyer put them together as roommates. And on the field, Tebow was a constant inspiration. Aaron knew all about a famous game Tim had played as a high school sophomore, in 2003. In the course of that game, a bad tackle broke Tebow’s leg. Tim heard the pop and felt the bone moving. But his team was down seventeen points.
“Don’t take me out,” Tim told his coach, before fighting back against the deficit and tying the game, running for a twenty-nine-yard touchdown on his broken leg.
As a Gator, Tebow showed just as much heart. Playing against the Kentucky Wildcats, in October of 2007, Tebow separated his right shoulder but continued to play, beating a tackler and running in the winning touchdown.
Hernandez also scored in that game—it was his first touchdown as a college player. Urban Meyer could see Tebow’s influence rubbing off on the tight end. “Aaron used to text me all the time,” Meyer recalls, “about him and Tim going to train in the evenings: ‘While you’re sleeping, I’m working out. We gotta go win a national championship!’”
But in other respects, Aaron was failing, in heroic fashion, to live up to Meyer’s expectations.
The coach was especially concerned about Aaron’s friends from Bristol. He noticed a difference in Aaron whenever he returned from Connecticut. “It would almost take us a few weeks to get him back to thinking about the team and thinking about what to do right,” Meyer says. Time and again, the coach told his players: “You know, we’ve got to be very cautious about outside influences. Cautious of people who maybe should not be in your life.”
Aaron would ignore the advice.
“It wasn’t healthy at all,” Meyer says of the Bristol influence. Players that Aaron was close with would tell the coach, ‘He shouldn’t go home. Don’t let him go home anymore.’”
DJ told the coach the same thing: “He needs to be around people that are good for him.”
But Aaron was loyal to his friends on Lake Avenue. Loyal to his cousin Tanya, and her man, TL, loyal to Carlos Ortiz, and to Bo Wallace. They were the friends who had taken him in after his father’s death. No matter the consequence, he never turned his back on any of them.
Chapter 13
For all the trouble that Hernandez would get into up in New England, Aaron’s teammates on the Gators would always remember him fondly.
“Let me tell you right now, there’s not one person in this world who didn’t like Hernandez,” Ahmad Black says. “We called him ‘Chico,’ and everybody loved Chico. Everybody in Gainesville. Everybody in the division. Everybody.”
Black, who went on to play for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, came to Gainesville at the same time as Hernandez. Like Aaron’s high school friends, he remembers Hernandez as a class clown—someone who’d make funny faces to trip his friends up in public speaking, or pop Ziploc bags in the back of the class to make his professors jump.
“Seven people from my high school, Lakeland High School, came here at the same time,” Black explains. “Me, Chris Rainey, Paul Wilson, John Brown, Steven Wilks, and the Pouncey twins, all in one year. “Me, Wilson, and the Pounceys came early, Hernandez came early as well, along with Joe Haden and Cam Newton. Those are the guys that you tend to hang out with. And that was a hell of a class. We arrived right after our team had won the 2006 National Championship. We got to go to the White House and met Bush.
“The Pouncey twins moved in with Hernandez on campus. I moved in with Markihe Anderson. But my best friends on the team were the Pouncey twins. I was always over there. Hernandez was always there. Hernandez went back home to Lakeland with us a couple of times.
“Then our tight end, Cornelius Ingram, got injured.
“Ingram tore his ACL at camp, going into the 2008 season. Hernandez played some significant minutes freshman year, but he wasn’t the starter. When Ingram got injured, Aaron picked up right where Ingram had left off and probably was even better. He grew up very fast. We saw a lot of great plays out of him. He was like two totally different people, off the field and on the field.
“Off the field everybody was always together, always joking, having fun. To this day, ninety percent of the guys I talk to are from that team. But that’s one of the things that gave us an advantage over other teams. We trusted that the man next to us would get his job done. And we never let anybody down. Hernandez was a significant part of our championship runs. Big plays. But Aaron always did big plays. Miami, Tennessee, in that 2008 season. He was the best tight end in the country—and he went hard.
“We had to go hard. Those of us on defense had to be better than the offense. The offense stressed that they had to be better than us. Ultimately that made us a better team.
“But Hernandez was also in there with Percy Harvin. We had Louis Murphy, Riley Cooper, David Nelson, Brandon Frazier, and Harvin at wide receiver. All those guys are NFL players today. We had Tebow at quarterback. We had one Pouncey on the O-line. We had another Pouncey at the O-line. We had Chris Rainey in the backfield. We had Jeff Demps, the fastest eighteen-year-old in the world—in the world—at running back. All those guys are first-round, second-round picks. We had studs all over the field. Who wouldn’t want to bring it to the offense? We had to show our best stuff.
“But Aaron’s thing with me was, he’d say something weird that made zero sense. He’d come up to me and say, ‘If the hamburger eats the ketchu
p and climbs the tree, who’s going to come to the ocean?’
“He would just bust out laughing. I’d think of the most random thing to say to him. Then he would say something back. Everybody loved Chico. We laughed together. We went to the White House together, again, after winning the 2009 National Championship. We met Obama. We ate together. Hamburgers. Pizza. Whatever we wanted. It’s catching up to me now, but back then we burned it off super-fast. And Chico was always the life of the party.”
Others who knew Aaron in Gainesville would speak about him in similar terms. After a rocky start as a freshman, Aaron became a ferociously driven football player. As a member of Florida’s student body, he was quick to make jokes, polite and deferential when he had to be, and disruptive when it served his purpose.
“He had a beautiful smile on his face,” Urban Meyer recalls. “Later in his career, it seemed to change.”
Even in Florida, it came down to this: Aaron loved to be the center of attention. But he was also impressionable and eager to please, and when the people around him made questionable decisions, he tended to go along.
“Here’s the thing about being around violence,” a person who encountered Aaron up in New England would say. “One time is bad luck. Two times, you have bad habits. Three times, you’re a goon. Violence is only around you so often by mistake. After a while, you are who you hang out with. And Hernandez did not have the best taste in friends.”
Chapter 14
Cops in Gainesville called it “the procession.” Every Saturday night, hordes of people spilled out of the clubs and made their way down University Avenue, stopping here, stopping there, partying, fighting, causing trouble for three blocks, five blocks, or more. It was not unusual for thirty or forty cops to occupy a two-to-three-block area, babysitting the college students for hours on end, doing all that they could to get the kids home and keep them safe until Sunday morning.
Now, on the last Saturday in September of 2007, with school back in session, the procession was back in full force.
The day had gone badly for Florida—the Gators had lost 20-17 to the Auburn Tigers. Aaron Hernandez had played in the game and needed to blow off steam afterward. That night, he went to a nightclub called Venue.
Venue was a relatively new club in Gainesville, but it had already become a favorite with UF’s football players. Previously, it had been some other club. Before that it had been something else—a restaurant called Shakers. Students came and went, no one remembered. But what Aaron Hernandez knew, as a regular participant in the procession, was that when the doors closed, at two in the morning, the crowd would regroup in a parking lot behind the building. Sometimes there were fights.
Sometimes, arrests were made.
It was not the place a player as volatile as Aaron should have been. Certainly not on a day where the game had gone badly. But, try as he did to keep an eye out for his teammate, Tim Tebow couldn’t be there for every minute of Aaron’s life. And tonight, a former Gator named Reggie Nelson was back in town.
Nelson was in the NFL now—he’d been the Jacksonville Jaguars’ first pick in that year’s draft. Down from Jacksonville, he was riding high in Venue’s VIP booth. Chris Harris, who had been drafted by the Chicago Bears in 2005, was with him. Mike and Maurkice Pouncey were also there, along with several other players and soon-to-be players.
A bouncer named Antwuan Hamm would recall that Nelson had not been seen at Venue for some time. But Hamm had already gotten to know the Pounceys, who were there all the time and—according to the bouncer—always spoiling for a fight. They weren’t the only ones. A local man named Justin Glass had also gone to Venue that night. He had brought two friends along to the club: a man named Randall Cason and an older friend, Corey Smith, whose nickname was “Squirt.”
Squirt had two kids, a good job, and a white Crown Vic. There was nothing thuggish about him. In fact, he had taken Glass under his wing and done his best to keep him off the streets. But Glass was caught between Squirt, the good father, and Cason, who was more of a negative influence.
According to Gainesville PD, Cason and Glass had gone to the club looking for trouble.
Neither man wanted to listen to anything Squirt had to say.
According to Randall Cason, everything that followed stemmed from an incident that had taken place the previous week—an altercation Cason’s brother had gotten into with several UF football players. Now, in the dark, crowded club, Cason found himself in the middle of a similar altercation.
Words were exchanged, and menacing glances. A football player reached out and tried to grab a chain Cason was wearing around his neck—but the chain was too thick to break.
Reggie Nelson would say that, when he arrived at the club, Aaron Hernandez told him about an incident involving the Pouncey twins: according to Aaron, Cason had snatched a chain away from one of the Pounceys.
According to Hamm, the club bouncer, it was Justin Glass—and not Cason—who got into a confrontation with the Pounceys. Hamm would say that one of the twins approached Glass and said, “I want my motherfucking chain.”
“What chain?” Glass had replied. “I ain’t got no damn chain.”
At that point, Hamm said, club security escorted both of the Pouncey twins out of the club. Having done so, they also ejected Glass.
The Pouncey twins would say that, afterward, out in the club parking lot, a “black man” who had snatched a chain away from Mike Pouncey had taunted them, tugging at his shirt as if to indicate to the Gators that he had a gun in his waistband.
The accounts contradict one another, to an extent. But the involved parties seem to agree that Reggie Nelson stepped in to defuse the increasingly tense situation, getting in between the Pouncey twins and the locals.
Nelson knew Cason socially. Trying to broker a peace, he told Cason that the players didn’t want any trouble.
Cason told him that the chain had already been given away.
Cason and Nelson ended up shaking hands and hugging. Then, Cason and his friends took off in Squirt’s car. The football players took off in their own cars. Aaron Hernandez went with them.
The whole affair might have ended then and there, peacefully.
But, as it turned out, the night was just starting.
Chapter 15
The traffic was thick as Squirt’s Crown Vic inched its way down University Avenue. The clubs were all closed now. The streets were full of people.
The three men were headed to see a couple of women they knew. The night was warm and the car’s windows were down. They had just passed a McDonald’s on their right. On the opposite corner there was a sign that welcomed visitors to the UF campus.
Glass was driving Squirt’s car. On the floor next to him, hidden under a black T-shirt, there was a gun—a Taurus 9mm that had been stolen from the Jacksonville sheriff’s office.
Randall Cason was in the back seat. On the floor, under his foot, he had a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber pistol—a gun from which the serial number had been filed.
Squirt, in the passenger seat, was the only unarmed man in the vehicle.
Stopping at a red light, Glass noticed some girls driving in the next lane. He pointed them out to Cason. But what Cason saw when he looked over was Reggie Nelson’s Tahoe, a few cars behind their own.
Cason thought they had settled their argument back at the club. Now, he guessed they had not.
“They’re following us,” Cason said. But the light was still red, the traffic still bumper-to-bumper.
If they were being followed, there wasn’t much they could do about it.
Suddenly, Cason would say, he noticed two men on the sidewalk: Reggie Nelson and the freshman, Aaron Hernandez. Cason would claim that Hernandez walked up to the Crown Vic and looked inside. Then, Cason says, Hernandez raised his hand, shoved a gun through the open car window, and pulled the trigger.
“Oh, my God!” Cason yelled as blood splattered all over the Crown Vic’s upholstery. Squirt slumped forward, slowly. Glass ye
lled out—he’d been hit, too, in the arm. Glass jumped out of the car and Cason jumped out after him, gun in hand, and racked the weapon. A bottle of Coors Light that Cason had been holding fell out of the car and rolled and rolled down the street as Cason yelled: “You killed my friend!”
According to Cason, Hernandez was already too far away to hear him, running through a Holiday Inn parking lot, toward the McDonald’s. Nelson also appeared to have fled. But Cason could see the Tahoe—someone else must have been driving it now—heading northbound on 13th.
At that very moment, a stranger in some other car tossed a full pack of Black Cat firecrackers out into the street.
The firecrackers popped and smoked on the pavement. Pedestrians out on the sidewalk ducked. Drivers piled out of their cars, shouting and pointing in every direction.
The scene could not have been more chaotic.
Chapter 16
In Sandra Hines’s Gainesville neighborhood, a phone ringing in the middle of the night only meant one thing: bad news.
On the morning of September 30, 2007, the call came at four in the morning.
Sandra jumped out of bed and ran to answer it, already expecting the worst.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this you, Ma?”
Most of Squirt’s friends called her “Ma.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Sandra said. “What’s wrong?”
“You need to get to the hospital. He’s been shot!”
Sandra took a deep breath.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
Squirt’s friend paused before answering: “I don’t know.”
Sandra’s niece, her other son, and her mother, Barbara, lived with her in the apartment. She woke her niece up but left her son and her mother sleeping.
Barbara had raised Squirt while Sandra worked evening shifts at South Florida State Mental Hospital in Miami. Sandra knew how upset her mother would be, so she and her niece left quietly. Slipping out of the apartment, they got into a Buick Century Sandra had recently borrowed from an out-of-town friend. The sky was still black and Sandra took the long route to Shands Hospital—a route that cut through UF’s campus. The school was quiet at that hour, and Sandra prayed as she drove.
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