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.
“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.