The accounts contradict one another, to an extent. But the involved parties seem to agree that Reggie Nelson stepped in to defuse the increasingly tense situation, getting in between the Pouncey twins and the locals.
Nelson knew Cason socially. Trying to broker a peace, he told Cason that the players didn’t want any trouble.
Cason told him that the chain had already been given away.
Cason and Nelson ended up shaking hands and hugging. Then, Cason and his friends took off in Squirt’s car. The football players took off in their own cars. Aaron Hernandez went with them.
The whole affair might have ended then and there, peacefully.
But, as it turned out, the night was just starting.
Chapter 15
The traffic was thick as Squirt’s Crown Vic inched its way down University Avenue. The clubs were all closed now. The streets were full of people.
The three men were headed to see a couple of women they knew. The night was warm and the car’s windows were down. They had just passed a McDonald’s on their right. On the opposite corner there was a sign that welcomed visitors to the UF campus.
Glass was driving Squirt’s car. On the floor next to him, hidden under a black T-shirt, there was a gun—a Taurus 9mm that had been stolen from the Jacksonville sheriff’s office.
Randall Cason was in the back seat. On the floor, under his foot, he had a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber pistol—a gun from which the serial number had been filed.
Squirt, in the passenger seat, was the only unarmed man in the vehicle.
Stopping at a red light, Glass noticed some girls driving in the next lane. He pointed them out to Cason. But what Cason saw when he looked over was Reggie Nelson’s Tahoe, a few cars behind their own.
Cason thought they had settled their argument back at the club. Now, he guessed they had not.
“They’re following us,” Cason said. But the light was still red, the traffic still bumper-to-bumper.
If they were being followed, there wasn’t much they could do about it.
Suddenly, Cason would say, he noticed two men on the sidewalk: Reggie Nelson and the freshman, Aaron Hernandez. Cason would claim that Hernandez walked up to the Crown Vic and looked inside. Then, Cason says, Hernandez raised his hand, shoved a gun through the open car window, and pulled the trigger.
“Oh, my God!” Cason yelled as blood splattered all over the Crown Vic’s upholstery. Squirt slumped forward, slowly. Glass yelled out—he’d been hit, too, in the arm. Glass jumped out of the car and Cason jumped out after him, gun in hand, and racked the weapon. A bottle of Coors Light that Cason had been holding fell out of the car and rolled and rolled down the street as Cason yelled: “You killed my friend!”
According to Cason, Hernandez was already too far away to hear him, running through a Holiday Inn parking lot, toward the McDonald’s. Nelson also appeared to have fled. But Cason could see the Tahoe—someone else must have been driving it now—heading northbound on 13th.
At that very moment, a stranger in some other car tossed a full pack of Black Cat firecrackers out into the street.
The firecrackers popped and smoked on the pavement. Pedestrians out on the sidewalk ducked. Drivers piled out of their cars, shouting and pointing in every direction.
The scene could not have been more chaotic.
Chapter 16
In Sandra Hines’s Gainesville neighborhood, a phone ringing in the middle of the night only meant one thing: bad news.
On the morning of September 30, 2007, the call came at four in the morning.
Sandra jumped out of bed and ran to answer it, already expecting the worst.
“Hello?” she said.
“Is this you, Ma?”
Most of Squirt’s friends called her “Ma.”
“Yeah, it’s me,” Sandra said. “What’s wrong?”
“You need to get to the hospital. He’s been shot!”
Sandra took a deep breath.
“Is he dead?” she asked.
Squirt’s friend paused before answering: “I don’t know.”
Sandra’s niece, her other son, and her mother, Barbara, lived with her in the apartment. She woke her niece up but left her son and her mother sleeping.
Barbara had raised Squirt while Sandra worked evening shifts at South Florida State Mental Hospital in Miami. Sandra knew how upset her mother would be, so she and her niece left quietly. Slipping out of the apartment, they got into a Buick Century Sandra had recently borrowed from an out-of-town friend. The sky was still black and Sandra took the long route to Shands Hospital—a route that cut through UF’s campus. The school was quiet at that hour, and Sandra prayed as she drove.
“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.