All-American Murder Read online

  “Lord,” she said, “whatever your will it will be done, not mine. I don’t know what I’m going to face right now.”

  In the hospital, Sandra was led straight to Trauma One. There, in order to prove that she was Corey’s mother, she told the doctors about a scar he had on his shin. “When I lived in Miami he would come visit,” she said. “He loved mangoes, and next door there was a mango tree. He said, ‘Can I ask the neighbor about the mango?’ I said, ‘If he’s home.’ He didn’t ask. He got stuck on the fence and scarred his leg.”

  It was good enough for the doctors, who let her in to see her son. Corey was alive, but bandages covered his head and his face. He doesn’t look like my son, Sandra thought. There were tubes everywhere and the doctors asked Sandra to agree to brain surgery. They had to cut open the skull, a doctor explained, in order to dig out the bullet.

  The bullet had exploded part of Corey’s brain. The doctors did not know if he would make it. If he did pull through, the doctors said, it was not clear that he would be able to walk, or talk, again.

  Chapter 17

  Back at the crime scene, witnesses interviewed by Gainesville PD said that the shooter was black. A thin man with cornrows, they said. About 5′10″ in height.

  But, at the hospital, Cason swore that he knew what he had seen. After the shooting, he’d jumped back into Squirt’s Crown Vic. With Glass at the wheel, they had peeled off toward Shands Hospital, which had the nearest ER. On the way, Squirt bled, badly—the shooter had hit him in the back of the head. But Glass, who had been shot in the arm, thought that Squirt was still breathing.

  The car’s insides looked like something out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. There was blood and brain matter on the dashboard, blood on the windshield, blood on the seats and the ceiling. A few spent shells rolled around on the floor. One shell had lodged in the ashtray.

  Blood poured down Glass’s arm as he steered.

  At the hospital, they carried Squirt in. Glass was taken to a trauma wing on the hospital’s tenth floor. Cason went back outside, to where the Crown Vic was parked, and found the police there waiting for him.

  “This is all my fault!” Cason yelled. He told the cops that Squirt had been shot because of the altercation he’d had at the club.

  “It should have been me that was shot,” Cason said.

  That morning, Sandra signed off on her son’s surgery. Corey was wheeled into an operating room, and doctors spent hours removing the bullet and performing a “bone flap” procedure, sewing the part of Corey’s skull that had been removed into his stomach, where it would need to remain for the next nine months.

  While the doctors worked, Sandra called her sisters to tell them about what had happened. There was hollering and crying. Sandra asked them to bring Barbara by. By nine thirty—Corey was still in surgery—the waiting room was full of family and friends. Corey’s godmother was there, along with his ex-girlfriend, and they were mad—mad enough to tear up a garbage can in the waiting room.

  After his surgery, Corey was wheeled into the hospital’s trauma unit, where Sandra was finally allowed to see him. Corey was already coming to. He seemed to recognize his family. And he was able to speak.

  “But he didn’t call me Ma, which was strange,” Sandra says. She and her sisters showed him pictures of people he knew to see if he recognized them. He did. But as he did so, he kept pounding his chest.

  Sandra realized that he was hitting himself where he’d been defibrillated—Corey’s heart had stopped more than once.

  Sandra asked her son a question: “Who shot you?”

  Corey told her: Two men were involved. Then, to indicate the skin tone of one of the men, Corey started to flip his hand over, from front to back. “It was like this,” he said, showing the palm of his hand. Then he flipped his hand around: “Not this.”

  To make sure Sandra understood, he flipped his hand over again and showed his palm: “He was this color,” Squirt said.

  Light-skinned. Like Aaron Hernandez.

  Part Three

  Chapter 18

  Patty Nixon’s phone rang at two thirty in the morning. Her husband slept through the ringing—Nixon’s husband slept through everything—but Nixon, a detective in Gainesville’s police department, sensed that the call was important.

  It was.

  A shooting had occurred on the 1200 block of West University Avenue.

  Nixon knew the location—right across the street from a sign marking one of the entrances to the University of Florida. She was told that there were two victims. One had been shot in the arm. The other had taken a bullet to the head. The man who’d been shot in the head was alive but “circling the drain,” Nixon recalls.

  The detective got dressed and woke her husband. He’d have to get the kids to school that morning. For now, Gainesville PD was treating the case as a homicide, and Nixon knew from experience that homicide calls could keep her out in the field for twenty-four hours, or more.

  Nixon made a quick stop at the crime scene on her way down to the hospital. Of all the places to do something like that, she thought when she saw the site of the shooting.

  The street would have been mobbed with students at the time that the crime had occurred. Whoever the shooter or shooters had been, they were not the smartest tools in the shed, Nixon thought.

  By the time Nixon got to the hospital, at half past four in the morning, a crowd had gathered in the parking lot. The police were there, along with Randall Cason, who had been in the backseat of the Crown Vic at the time of the shooting. “It should have been me!” Cason was shouting.

  Nixon had been told, over her police radio, that Cason was describing the shooter as a 6′3″ or 6′4″, 240-pound “Hawaiian” or “Hispanic” man. Cason had said that the man had been wearing jean shorts and a green collared shirt. He had tattoos. More likely than not, Cason had said, he was a member of the UF football team.

  Cason had also told the police that Reggie Nelson had been standing out on the sidewalk at the time that the shooting occurred. Somehow, Cason said, the Pouncey twins were also involved.

  Nixon knew who the Pounceys were. She knew who Nelson was. But she could not place the man Cason had identified as the shooter. She decided to drive Cason down to the station herself.

  There, she put Cason in an interview room and called UF Police Detective Brian Norman, who gave her the number for Coach Urban Meyer’s personal assistant, Jon Clark. By six thirty in the morning, Nixon had Clark on the line. “We need to talk to the Pouncey twins about an attempted murder that happened tonight,” she told the assistant. Then she asked Clark if he was aware of any white, Hispanic, or Hawaiian men that the Pouncey twins were hanging out with.

  Clark gave the detective one name: “Aaron Hernandez.”

  Chapter 19

  At seven o’clock that morning, Detective Nixon called Jon Clark again. The assistant had said that he was on his way to pick up Urban Meyer. He had promised to call her back about setting up an interview with the Pounceys.

  But half an hour had passed, Clark had not called, and when Nixon called him again Clark said he was busy and told the detective, once again, that he would call her back.

  Every minute counted in an investigation like this. Now, with the clock ticking, Nixon began to feel as if the university was stalling her. “It took an extraordinary amount of time to get those guys over there,” the detective says. “We had to go through the University of Florida to find out who Hernandez was, and that took an excruciatingly long amount of time.”

  While waiting for Clark to arrive, Nixon called Detective Norman and asked him to send a photograph of Aaron Hernandez over e-mail. Then she turned her attention to Randall Cason.

  According to Gainesville PD, Cason was a suspected gangbanger. According to Detective Nixon, the second man in the car, Justin Glass, “was a wannabe gangbanger.” Squirt—Corey Smith, who had been shot in the head—was the only straight-up civilian who had been in the Crown Vic that night.
r />   “Cason was the only one saying Hernandez was involved,” Nixon says. “The shooter, according to every other uninvolved witness, was a black male. 5′8″, corn rows…Hernandez looks nothing like that. He’s a very big guy. We knew we had a credibility problem right off the bat.”

  Once the e-mail with Hernandez’s photo came through, Nixon showed Cason a photo lineup: six men, including Hernandez. When Cason pointed Hernandez out, Nixon called Clark yet again and told him she needed to question Hernandez, along with the Pouncey twins. Clark told her that the players were being called into the football office and would be brought to the station after that.

  Nixon called Clark several more times that morning. Then, at around ten, another one of Urban Meyer’s assistants—a man named Hiram de Fries—finally did bring the Pouncey twins and Hernandez down to the station.

  Why the delay? As the detective understood it, the university had taken the time to call in its lawyer.

  Nixon knew how things worked in Gainesville. “It’s a big business and big money,” she says.

  “They can have lawyers, that’s no problem. But the amount of time it took them to respond…This is a really serious case: a shooting where somebody was supposed to die. Thank God, he didn’t. But, in my eyes, a four-and-a-half-hour response time was pretty extraordinary and unacceptable.”

  Chapter 20

  Down at the station, Patty Nixon and other police officers were talking about the delay. When the Pouncey twins and Aaron Hernandez finally showed up, the conversation shifted.

  “Cops who were football fans knew that the Pounceys were promising,” Nixon says. “But I remember them talking about how soft they were physically, saying, ‘Wait until the strength coaches get ahold of them.’ They were big guys in stature, but soft. Hernandez, on the other hand, was a physical specimen—even at seventeen.”

  Mike Pouncey, Maurkice Pouncey, and Aaron Hernandez were placed in separate interview rooms.

  Each room was small, with a tall ceiling, “just like you see on TV,” she says. Each one had a desk, two chairs, and audiovisual recording equipment. Nevertheless, Hernandez felt comfortable enough, in this austere and threatening environment, simply to doze off.

  “I was a little frustrated to walk in to see him sleeping,” Nixon recalls. Instead of waking him, she went to question the Pouncey twins.

  According to the detective’s report, Maurkice told Nixon that “he, his brother, Aaron Hernandez, and a friend of theirs…went to the Venue. Around 0130 hrs, a man snatched his thick gold chain off his brother Mike’s neck. The chain was thick with a large ‘Jesus’ head’ as a medallion. Pouncey stated the club was so crowded that he didn’t see who snatched it.

  “After the club was closing, Pouncey said, they were standing outside. A male walked up to them and said, ‘I got your chain’ and pulled on his shirt like he had a gun. [Pouncey] said there was such a crowd, he couldn’t be certain he had one but his actions were indicating he had one. The black male also said, ‘I rule these streets.’ [Pouncey] said he told Reggie Nelson about the chain incident. Nelson told him there was nothing he could do about it. Pouncey said Nelson spoke with the male later and told him nobody wanted any trouble.”

  Mike Pouncey told the detective that he had left Venue “somewhere around 0129 hrs. He said a male snatched his large gold chain. He didn’t see who because the club was so crowded but he told an unknown bouncer. Pouncey said they went to the parking lot, where the black male who had snatched the chain approached them.

  “He said, ‘I got something for you. You need to stick to football.’ He pulled the chain out and told him to come get it. The male kept backing up as [if] he had a gun. Reggie Nelson told us not to worry about it. We left the area at that time.”

  The statements lined up, more or less. Both twins told Nixon that, after the incident, they accompanied Nelson and Aaron Hernandez to a campus apartment belonging to their friend Markihe Anderson. Then, after twenty or thirty minutes at Anderson’s place, they had gone to get some food at a Checkers restaurant—this would have been at two-thirty in the morning, or thereabouts. Afterward, they had gone back to Anderson’s apartment.

  There was just one discrepancy between the twins’ statements: Maurkice Pouncey said that Hernandez had been with them the whole time.

  Mike said Hernandez had left the Checkers before them, at around three in the morning.

  Chapter 21

  Down in the lobby, Patty Nixon’s colleague Detective Michael Schentrup was interviewing Reggie Nelson.

  Nelson told the detective that Aaron Hernandez had been the one who had told him about Randall Cason snatching Mike Pouncey’s chain. Outside of the club, Pouncey himself had pointed Cason out as the chain snatcher. Because Nelson knew Cason, he spoke with the man. Cason told him that the chain had already been given away. Nelson told Cason that the players didn’t want any trouble. According to Nelson, they had left, after that, on good terms, heading, with some other players, to Markihe Anderson’s campus apartment, away from the school’s football stadium.

  Detective Schentrup relayed this information to Patty Nixon. He and Nixon read Nelson his Miranda rights. Then they questioned the NFL player again.

  Nixon asked Nelson if he was covering anything up—anything pertaining to the shooting. Nelson denied it. He seemed to be open and cooperative. At around noon, Nelson was released.

  Nixon released the Pounceys, too. Finally, at half past noon, she and Schentrup went to the interview room where Hernandez was sleeping.

  Aaron woke up as soon as they entered. Although she had her doubts regarding Cason’s statement, and his fingering of Hernandez, she read Aaron his Miranda rights before starting the interview. “I didn’t want any gray area,” Nixon recalls.

  But Hernandez said, “I’m not going to say anything. I want my lawyer present. I’m sorry, my lawyer told me to say that.”

  Sorry or not, that was the extent of his cooperation with Gainesville PD.

  That afternoon, Nixon and other detectives interviewed several eyewitnesses to the shooting. Every person they spoke with identified the shooter as a black man with corn rows and a green polo shirt—under six feet tall—slim. No one said anything about a Hawaiian, white, or Hispanic man—certainly not one who was as tall as Aaron, weighed 240 pounds, and had a buzz cut.

  And so, at six in the evening, Nixon and Schentrup picked Randall Cason up at his apartment and asked to interview him again. Down at the station, Cason admitted that he had assumed Hernandez had been the shooter—assumed it because of the incident in the club. Cason also said that he hadn’t seen anything at all. That he’d balled himself up inside the Crown Vic, trying not to get shot. By the end of the interview Cason had rescinded his initial identification of Aaron Hernandez and Reggie Nelson, and blamed the chain snatching on someone else—“one of his boys,” Cason said.

  Fourteen hours into her investigation, Patty Nixon had gotten exactly nowhere.

  That Monday, Nixon called Aaron Hernandez and warned him to be careful out on the streets. Cason had put it out there, she said, that Hernandez had done the shooting. Hernandez thanked the detective and said he’d be careful.

  On Tuesday, Nixon visited Corey Smith at Shands. The shooting victim had trouble remembering words, but was much better off, overall, than expected. The detective told him about her investigation. She also asked him if he was holding anything back.

  Squirt swore to her that he wasn’t.

  As far as the detective was concerned, she had hit a dead end.

  That fall and winter, Nixon made several attempts to interview Cason and Glass.

  “I continued to call Cason and continued to show up at his house,” the detective says. “There were times I sat up on his house trying to contact him…I felt like they knew who the shooter was…I just felt like they were definitely holding something back—it felt like they either, not knew the shooter, but certainly could give me a better description of the shooter. But as far as being successful, get
ting that information out of either one of them—no. I got no additional information out of them, and no cooperation, which was frustrating.”

  The detective kept on the Pouncey twins, too: “I decided at one point to take a different approach with them and act like after hearing that these chains were being popped off of their neck—bless their heart, you know what I mean?—that to me says they were victims of robbery. I tried to approach them—‘let me take care of you, let me arrest somebody who actually tried to rob you guys and let’s talk about it’—and let me do it that way. They wanted no part of that. But then I ended up approaching them again at another point, where I actually met them at their lawyer’s office, to see if I could appeal to their humanity. I described what the victim was going through and what he had to go through and what was in front of him in terms of surgeries and just not getting his life back, the difficulty he’s having, and that sort of thing. I was pretty sure they knew what had happened. But again—unsuccessful.”

  Seven months later, Corey Smith came down to the police station, his head encased in the blue helmet he would have to wear for nine months following his surgery.

  An E-FIT (Electronic Facial Identification Technique) computer program was used to make a composite of the man who had shot Smith in the head.