The bar was a perennial favorite with students at the University of Florida. It had a prime location: Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, where the Gators played (it, too, was known, to one and all, as “the Swamp”), was just a few blocks away. The beer the bar served was cheap and ice-cold, the waitresses all wore short shorts, and the tree-covered patio had just enough shade to keep the Florida sun at bay.
The Swamp was also a good place for the school’s star football players to see, be seen, and be admired, and although Aaron was still a freshman, he already had admirers of his own.
Before long, a waitress appeared with two shots someone had sent over.
Not carding Aaron was a natural mistake on the part of the waitress. “Hernandez looked like a thirty-year-old man,” the Swamp’s owner, Ron DeFilippo, recalls. “Like LeBron—a man-child at seventeen. If you saw him walking your way you’d cross the street.”
There was also the fact that, in Gainesville, the drinking age did not always pertain to underage Gators.
When Tim Washington flew down to visit Aaron in Florida, he was struck by the way players were treated in town. “If you’re a Gator, you can do no wrong,” Washington says. “I remember, after a game, we went and pulled up at the liquor store. Aaron walked in and got what he wanted to get. I was just sitting there like, ‘Yo, you’re a freshman! They know you’re a freshman. How can you buy this? How can you even do this?’ It was not normal. We went to after-parties where some of the DJs had water bottles for players when they came in because they needed to hydrate—except the bottles were full of vodka.”
Aaron Hernandez was not a big drinker. Back in Bristol, marijuana had become his drug of choice. And in any case, he didn’t like the way that this alcohol tasted. He dumped the shots that the waitress had brought into his lemonade. An hour later, at around one in the morning, he went downstairs to head out. But as Aaron made his way toward the exit, a manager stopped him, waving a bill for twelve dollars.
“What about this?” the manager said.
Tim Tebow and Shaun Young would both say that the manager—a man named Michael Taphorn—was aggressive. Taphorn was right up in Hernandez’s face, they recalled, and “irate.” Tebow stepped in to resolve what was rapidly turning into a conflict. A woman standing nearby offered to pay Aaron’s bill. But Taphorn ignored her, waved Tebow off, and ordered Hernandez out of the bar.
Ron DeFilippo remembers things differently: according to him, when Hernandez was confronted with the bill he said, “‘I don’t pay for anything in this town’—like he had celebrity status.”
All parties agree that Hernandez walked outside of the bar with Taphorn following close on his heels. Then, accounts diverge. According to Hernandez, Taphorn stayed up in his face. According to Taphorn, Hernandez pushed him a few times on their way out of the bar. Then, standing out on the gray wooden patio, Hernandez lost his temper completely.
“He sucker-punched me,” Taphorn would tell the police. Having done so, Hernandez bolted, losing one of his shoes as he ran away.
Taphorn was in terrible pain. The blow had exploded his left eardrum—an injury that would take six weeks to heal. Still, he ran after Aaron. Along with some of the bar staff, who had come outside to back their manager up, he called out to Hernandez: “Come back!”
Aaron did not come back. Taphorn picked up the shoe—a black sneaker. It was still in his hands when the police arrived.
Chapter 10
Hernandez had been in Gainesville for less than four months. He was a Gator, but hadn’t played in an actual game yet.
Michael Taphorn had recognized him all the same.
“The freshman tight end,” Taphorn told Sergeant Rowe of the Gainesville Police Department.
After taking the manager’s statement, Rowe placed a call to Tim Tebow.
“It will be in Hernandez’s best interest to give us his side of the story,” he said, and Tebow agreed. He was relieved when Sergeant Rowe went on assure him that no one would alert the press, and that his own name would be kept out of the media.
Two hours later, at three in the morning, Rowe got a call back: Hernandez, Tebow, and Young were waiting for him a few blocks away from campus. Upon arrival, the sergeant informed Hernandez of his Miranda rights, but Hernandez chose to tell his side of the story.
Aaron was calm and collected. Mask firmly in place, he told the sergeant he didn’t know that the woman who’d brought him the shots was a waitress. He had thought she was a fan. And since he had not ordered the drinks, or liked them, he did not see why he had been asked to pay for them.
But, Hernandez said, Taphorn had “kept advancing” on him. Aaron had called out to Tebow for help. Then, outside of the bar, just to get Taphorn out of his face, he had thrown a punch.
Aaron gave Rowe his Connecticut driver’s license. He gave the officer his mother’s telephone number. He told Rowe that he and Tebow had already called their coach, Urban Meyer, and described the incident.
Rowe was impressed with the young man. Hernandez was polite and professional. He seemed to be sober. Rowe decided against charging him with underage drinking—that was a matter the university could handle internally. But Aaron was also facing a felony battery charge.
It was up to Taphorn to decide whether he would press the matter.
In the days that followed, Taphorn and Ron DeFilippo both heard from the university. “A couple of people who worked for Urban Meyer, but never really identified themselves, said, ‘It’s in everybody’s best interest if we reprimand the kid, get him under wraps, and let him go his own way,’” DeFilippo recalls. Then, according to DeFilippo, a handler who worked for Meyer rang him up and said: “Let this thing go. Anything you ever need for the Swamp, just give us a call.”
In the end, Taphorn changed his mind about pressing charges. Part of the deal that was struck was that Hernandez would have to come back to the bar to apologize.
Hernandez never did. But he did make another appearance at the bar. According to DeFilippo, sometime after the night of the incident, members of his staff saw Aaron drive by the Swamp, making shooting gestures with his hand. DeFilippo called the university, yet again. He told the official he talked to, “Get the kid under wraps.”
But, at the time, school officials had bigger headaches to deal with.
Chapter 11
Earlier that month, a few days after April Fool’s Day, Aaron Hernandez’s teammate Ronnie Wilson had made his way through XS, a nightclub in Gainesville.
Wilson was a sophomore, an offensive guard, and—at 6′4″ and 315 pounds—one of the team’s biggest players. He was a man who drew glances wherever he went, and on this night, not long after midnight, Wilson got sucked into a nasty exchange with a young man named Frank Fuller.
Despite the way Gators were treated in football-mad Gainesville, it wasn’t unusual for tensions to arise between UF players and locals. All around town, and especially in tough neighborhoods, there were thugs, or wannabe thugs, who liked to try the players, or test them. Getting in a player’s face gave you a lot of cred in the neighborhood.
Fuller, who was enrolled at a nearby community college, was not a thug. But as tensions rose, Wilson spat on Fuller, slapped him, and punched him. Then he walked out of the club.
Fuller followed, dialed 911, and stayed on the line as he tailed Wilson’s BMW down University Avenue. At 13th Street, Wilson made a right. Fuller turned with him. A few blocks later Wilson turned right again and pulled into a UF parking lot. There, he got out and popped the trunk of a blue Crown Victoria.
Fuller expected Wilson to turn around with a baseball bat—or maybe a tire iron—in his hand. That would have been bad enough. What he saw instead was much more frightening.
“He’s got, actually, an automatic weapon!” Fuller shouted into his cell phone. “I am extremely fearful for my life right now,” he said.
Wilson had taken a step forward and pointed an AK-47 at Fuller’s car.
The dispatcher told Fuller to get out of there, fast. “I’m trying to,” Fuller shouted as he slammed his car into Reverse. “I’m trying to get away as fast as possible. Oh, shit!”
As he peeled out of the parking lot, Wilson raised the AK toward the sky and fired.