All-American Murder Page 6

  The man in the digital sketch looked nothing like Aaron Hernandez.

  In Patty Nixon’s estimation, the University of Florida remained less than cooperative as the investigation dragged on. The case had been frustrating enough from the beginning. Now it had reached a dead end.

  Was Randall Cason lying when he fingered Aaron Hernandez for the shooter? Or was he lying when he recanted, and said that he had no idea who the shooter was?

  Patty Nixon did not trust Cason at all. But the school had stalled her, the Pouncey twins had refused to talk. Aaron himself had refused to cooperate. The detective simply did not have enough information to connect the dots. Nixon did not believe that Aaron had been the shooter. She did not even believe that Aaron was connected to the shooting. But, given how little she’d been given to work with, there wasn’t much she could do to disprove Cason’s original accusation.

  In the end, she could neither arrest nor exonerate. As a result, rumors about Aaron’s alleged involvement in the shooting would never be put to rest.

  Chapter 22

  Patty Nixon had been disappointed by the “extraordinary and unacceptable” amount of time the University of Florida had taken before delivering Aaron Hernandez and his fellow Gators into police custody. But were the university’s actions a part of a community-wide culture of impunity that had risen up around the team?

  “It’s Gator Country,” Corey Smith’s mother, Sandra, says, when asked about the climate in Gainesville and her own sense that, in Corey’s case, justice has never been served. “When they say, ‘Gator Country,’ they mean it.”

  “We were national champions,” a teammate of Aaron’s recalls. “We were walking around with rings on. They had lists of our names at the clubs. If we wanted to get in, they just looked down the roster: ‘There he is. Let him in.’ It was very accommodating. We could do whatever we wanted to. Everyone knew us. We were celebrities. We ran the city.”

  No one could argue that, in Gainesville, the University of Florida, and its 50,000-person student body, played an outsized role. The university’s 88,000-seat football stadium—which was often filled above capacity for Gators games—could fit two-thirds of the city’s entire population. Around town, you’d see stores, shops, and companies with names like Gator Fever, Gator Mania, Gator Cuts, Gator Nails, Gator Cross Fit, and Gator Hydroponics. But, popular as the Gators were, there were those who bristled at the suggestion that UF’s football players were given free rein in the city.

  Bill Cervone, a University of Florida alumnus who is currently serving his fifth term as a State Attorney in Gainesville, says that, over the years, “way too many” Gators have gotten themselves into trouble—usually for “insignificant college kid stuff.” But to him, “the idea that the university runs this town is way overblown.”

  “It’s true to say that economically it’s the engine that drives Gainesville,” Cervone says. “We would be a much different community if the university wasn’t here. Obviously. But it’s way overblown to say that anyone around here, certainly law enforcement, kowtows to the university.”

  “The coaching staff you have asked about are no longer here at the University of Florida, and the incidents involving Mr. Hernandez did not occur on campus,” university representatives say.

  They continue: “UF has always and remains willing to cooperate fully with the Gainesville Police Department, which led all investigations regarding Mr. Hernandez while he was a student. We are not aware of any information—then or now—that requires action by the university.

  “There was a time when the number of football player arrests was unacceptable and we are mindful of that. Our highest priority is to help these young men succeed in collegiate football and academics while growing them as leaders along the way, and many of them do.

  “But we don’t always succeed. Some of our students—including student athletes—come from difficult backgrounds and bring with them lifelong problems. Sometimes it is not possible to overcome those challenges in the relatively short period of time these students are at the university.”

  To his credit, Urban Meyer did his best to mentor Hernandez, making himself available to Aaron day and night. It was an extraordinary investment of the coach’s time—although, of course, Aaron was an extraordinary player.

  “Aaron was unique,” Meyer says. “In a thirty-one-year career, I’ve never seen one like him. His route-running and athleticism. I don’t know if I will see another one. And I didn’t see it at first. I was disappointed in the guy that recruited him. I was disappointed in the player. I didn’t see the competitive spirit. But in the second year, in 2008 and 2009, we used him as much as we’ve ever used any player. He was the guy you would go into the game saying, ‘He’s one of the best players in America. Get him the ball.’

  “He loved the game. He was extremely smart—a truly intelligent player. We’re a very complicated offense. We did a lot of things with him. He was a shovel runner. He was a corner-out runner. He could run all the routes. We isolated him to run the wide receiver screens. We could do everything with him.”

  Meyer had a daily routine: in the mornings, he’d study the Bible. Aaron asked the coach if they could do that together. “Absolutely,” Meyer told him.

  “So we’d sit there. That was every morning for quite a while. Then it started to be once a week. We’d usually take a scripture verse, or he’d read a part. I’d have him read it, and we’d talk about it: ‘What’s it mean?’ Then we’d pray together and he’d go about his day. He was asking for help. It was very obvious. He was over at my house quite often. He was very close with my kids, with my wife. He would come over by himself. He just wanted to experience family. That was almost his catharsis, his time, his release. Once in a while, I would hear about his tough side. I’d confront it. But I didn’t feel it until later on in his career. And then, you know—he just seemed to change. We didn’t have the Bible studies later on. The deep conversations stopped—and I would try to have them. He had his own way of dealing with it. And that concerned a lot of us.”

  Chapter 23

  It was August 30, 2008, the first game of Aaron’s sophomore season at the University of Florida. UF was playing Hawaii, but Aaron was on the sidelines, dressed in the #81 jersey that marked his position as a tight end but wearing the kind of walking boot used by injured athletes. Among Gator fans, rumor had it that the walking boot was worn by players who had gotten themselves into trouble. Other players had worn it previously, and the word in those cases had usually been that the players had failed drug tests and been made to wear the boot as punishment.

  Aaron had spent his freshman year protecting the kickoff returner on special teams (as units who are only on field when the ball is kicked off, punted, or returned, are known). “He’d be part of the wedge and just block,” a teammate remembers.

  As a sophomore, Aaron was determined to show Urban Meyer what he could do.

  “Only so many can play, especially for Coach Meyer,” the teammate explains. “Aaron was on special teams to start, but he just took off from there. He was an animal out there. A force to be reckoned with. He could block. He was strong. He was fast for his size, he could catch, and that package of awesomeness—they just exploited it.”

  And yet, despite all he had done to prove himself, here Aaron was, on the sidelines, wearing the boot, watching his team trounce Hawaii 56-10.

  Luckily for Hernandez, Meyer believed in second chances. The following week, in a game against Miami, the coach finally put Aaron in. In the Gators’ first possession, Hernandez caught a fourteen-yard touchdown pass from Tebow.

  The roar that went up in the stadium set the tone for the rest of the game. The Gators went on to crush Miami, 26-3.

  For their third game of the season—their first away from home—the Gators faced Tennessee. Hernandez read the Bible with his coach in the morning. Once again, Meyer had picked him to start in the game.

  Football was big in Tennessee—Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium coul
d hold 100,000 people. The teams were evenly matched. In 2007, the Volunteers had won the SEC East title—whereas the Gators had come up empty, finishing the season at 9–4. But, the Gators had beaten the Volunteers in their last two meetings, the last time by a margin of just one point.

  There was no part of this game that Urban Meyer was taking for granted.

  The Gators’ first possession against the Volunteers resulted in a forty-four-yard drive. Just over three minutes into the game, the Gators were positioned at 1st and goal. In the huddle, Tim Tebow—who had won the Heisman the previous year—gave out instructions: Fake pass to Percy Harvin, run right, touchdown. But Tennessee’s defensive line was jumpy after letting the Gators’ offense get so deep into their territory on the first drive. When Harvin broke right, he found himself up against a wall of orange jerseys.

  Tebow faked the pass, but the Volunteer tackles rushed through cracks in the Gator line. The quarterback’s options were running out fast. Dodging a tackle, Tebow spun and drove left to run the ball in himself.

  Somehow, he saw, Hernandez had managed to get himself into the open.

  Tebow jumped and made the toss.

  The ball hit Hernandez square between the eight and the one on his jersey. For two games running, he’d scored the first Gator touchdown on passes from Tebow. Now, in the end zone, Aaron let the ball drop at his feet, spread his arms out like Christ on the cross, and felt the crowd roar all around him.

  By the end of the season, the Gators were back in the number-one slot in the college rankings, having lost just one game (to Ole Miss)—by one point—in the season.

  It had been a stellar showing for the team—and, especially, for Aaron Hernandez. The sophomore tight end was the talk of the town.

  On January 8, 2009, the Gators traveled to Miami Gardens for the BCS National Championship Game against the second-ranked Oklahoma Sooners. Almost 80,000 fans jammed the stands of Dolphin Stadium—this was beyond capacity, and nearly twice the number of fans that would scream for Madonna, at the same stadium, later that year. The fifty million people watching at home set a record for a college game, and in eighty-two movie theaters in thirty cities across the nation, thousands of people paid to watch a 3D broadcast.

  Tim Tebow, who been writing “Phil 4:13” (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”) in his eye black during the season, had switched to “John 3:16” for this game:

  “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

  During the game, more than ninety million people Googled the verse, which also trended to #1 on Twitter and Facebook.

  “John 3:16” made an even greater impression on Aaron Hernandez. Years later, when he was alone in his prison cell, it would come back to him in a way that continues to haunt his friends and loved ones.

  The game got off to a slow start. By halftime, the score was still 7-7. Then, in the locker room, Tebow gave his teammates a motivational speech that Bear Bryant himself would have been proud of.

  “Get in here!” he said. “Get in here right now! Thirty minutes! For the rest of your life!...I promise you one thing. We’re going to hit somebody and we’re going to move the ball down the field and score a touchdown. I guarantee you that.”

  Consciously or not, Tebow was quoting—and mangling—James Van Der Beek’s speech in the 1999 film Varsity Blues. But the quarterback’s delivery was everything, and his teammates responded in kind.

  “Look at me!” Tebow shouted. “Look at me! We got thirty minutes for the rest of our lives. Thirty minutes for the rest of our lives! Let’s go!”

  In the second half, Tebow made good on his promise. By the end of the game, he’d completed eighteen of thirty passes for 231 yards and two touchdowns.

  Playing on a sore ankle, wide receiver Percy Harvin managed 121 yards and scored a touchdown.

  Aaron Hernandez caught five passes for fifty-seven yards—another impressive showing.

  The final score, 24-14, won the Gators their second National Championship in three years.

  All in all, Aaron had finished the season with thirty-four receptions, 381 yards, and five touchdowns.

  Eight days later, Terri Hernandez married Aaron’s cousin Tanya’s ex-husband, Jeffrey Cummings, in Las Vegas.

  It appears that Aaron did not attend the ceremony.

  Chapter 24

  In the 2009 season, Hernandez led the Gators in receptions, with sixty-eight for 850 yards and five touchdowns—two of them in the same game, against rival Florida State. In December, he won the Mackey Award, given annually to the best collegiate tight end, along with the All-American and All-Southeastern Conference first-team picks.

  After the Gators won the 2010 Sugar Bowl that January, there seemed to be no question that Aaron Hernandez had earned a spot as a first-round pick for the NFL. He seemed to have every reason to skip senior year and enter the upcoming draft. But Aaron also knew that there were questions about his behavior and his drug use—questions that he would have to address at the league’s upcoming Scouting Combine in Indiana.

  To prepare, Aaron spent several weeks on the West Coast, where Brian Murphy, the founder of Athletes First—the sports agency Aaron had signed with—oversaw his training for the NFL Combine and Pro Day.

  “He flew out to California, with his brother, and lived here for two and a half months,” Murphy says. “That’s what we do with all our recruits. These days, we spend about $75,000, $100,000 on each person. We have our own training facility. They train there. They work out with our tight end coaches. We give them a physical therapist, a soft tissue specialist, a mental health specialist. We teach them the ins and outs of the NFL.

  “We got to spend every day with Aaron. We talked about his past. We talked about where he grew up. We talked about his dad. We talked about his mom. We talked about everything. I really got to know him well.

  “The idea is to get these players ready for the draft and ready for life. You’re not in Florida anymore. You can’t be late for meetings. You can’t play by your own rules. And Aaron tried his hardest.”

  In February 2010, Aaron joined Tim Tebow, Maurkice Pouncey, Brandon Spikes, and six other Gators who had flown to the Combine in Indianapolis.

  Aaron had torn a muscle in his back and stood on the sidelines as dozens of scouts, assistants, and coaches watched his teammates drill and work out. The prospects were tested for their speed, strength, and stamina, for their intelligence—even for the flexibility of their joints.

  By the end of the testing, few of Aaron’s teammates had impressed the scouts.

  More than one scout voiced his doubts about Tebow, worrying about the quarterback’s accuracy and release speed. But if the scouts were skeptical about Florida’s star QB, they were fascinated by Aaron Hernandez.

  “He weighed in, got measured, did the body test,” Brian Murphy said. “Most importantly, he did all of the interviews. He had an inordinate amount of interviews with the teams. There’s some physical testing he did not do. But the reality with Aaron was, no one in the NFL cared about watching him physically work out. Everyone knew he was a freak of nature. They didn’t want to waste time. They didn’t care. They wanted to spend time with him. They wanted to interview him in those fifteen-minute slots. Everyone wanted to see what he was like in person.”

  For all of his charm, Aaron did not do well in the interviews. The NFL scouts seemed to see right through his mask.

  “Self-esteem is quite low,” one would note. “Not well-adjusted emotionally, not happy, moods unpredictable, not stable, doesn’t take much to set him off, but not an especially jumpy guy.”

  “It was pretty well known that he had failed some drug tests at Florida, and there were questions about his maturity that come along with that,” another scout told Boston Globe reporter Shalise Manza Young. “You worried about the people he hung out with.”

  “The year before he came out, I was at their Pro Day, and
I remember seeing the Pounceys, and then him,” an AFC college director told NFL Network reporter Albert Breer. “It was very clear that they were the leaders, that they were the influential guys, and he was behind them, a tagalong, a follower in that sense. He was always following them. And they were trying to bring him along.”

  The Pouncey twins had a bad reputation among the scouts. And Hernandez was already known for his drug use, and for his knack for getting himself out of scrapes.

  “They couldn’t pin a lot of stuff on him,” another AFC college scouting director told Breer. “But people at the school would tell you, ‘Every time there’s an issue, he’s around it.’ He was a con guy. Very believable. Spoke well. A lot of things inside of you hoped you’d turn him around, but people that I talked to said they didn’t trust him, that he’d burn you.”

  The perspective on Aaron Hernandez was simple: He was smart—smart enough to beat the system. But he could also be reckless, if not downright self-destructive.

  “He was very, very immature,” an NFC personnel executive told Breer. “Urban did him right by having him follow Tebow, and he was such a follower. He could go in any direction. Everyone knew that if you didn’t keep an eye on him, he was an easy guy to persuade to do the wrong thing.”

  According to Jonathan Clegg of the Wall Street Journal, a psychological profile assembled by a North Carolina scouting firm called Human Resource Tactics, at the request of several NFL teams, suggested that Aaron enjoyed “living on the edge of acceptable behavior,” and noted that he “may be prone to partying too much and doing questionable things that could be seen as a problem for him and his team.”