“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, getting 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.
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?