“Seven people from my high school, Lakeland High School, came here at the same time,” Black explains. “Me, Chris Rainey, Paul Wilson, John Brown, Steven Wilks, and the Pouncey twins, all in one year. “Me, Wilson, and the Pounceys came early, Hernandez came early as well, along with Joe Haden and Cam Newton. Those are the guys that you tend to hang out with. And that was a hell of a class. We arrived right after our team had won the 2006 National Championship. We got to go to the White House and met Bush.
“The Pouncey twins moved in with Hernandez on campus. I moved in with Markihe Anderson. But my best friends on the team were the Pouncey twins. I was always over there. Hernandez was always there. Hernandez went back home to Lakeland with us a couple of times.
“Then our tight end, Cornelius Ingram, got injured.
“Ingram tore his ACL at camp, going into the 2008 season. Hernandez played some significant minutes freshman year, but he wasn’t the starter. When Ingram got injured, Aaron picked up right where Ingram had left off and probably was even better. He grew up very fast. We saw a lot of great plays out of him. He was like two totally different people, off the field and on the field.
“Off the field everybody was always together, always joking, having fun. To this day, ninety percent of the guys I talk to are from that team. But that’s one of the things that gave us an advantage over other teams. We trusted that the man next to us would get his job done. And we never let anybody down. Hernandez was a significant part of our championship runs. Big plays. But Aaron always did big plays. Miami, Tennessee, in that 2008 season. He was the best tight end in the country—and he went hard.
“We had to go hard. Those of us on defense had to be better than the offense. The offense stressed that they had to be better than us. Ultimately that made us a better team.
“But Hernandez was also in there with Percy Harvin. We had Louis Murphy, Riley Cooper, David Nelson, Brandon Frazier, and Harvin at wide receiver. All those guys are NFL players today. We had Tebow at quarterback. We had one Pouncey on the O-line. We had another Pouncey at the O-line. We had Chris Rainey in the backfield. We had Jeff Demps, the fastest eighteen-year-old in the world—in the world—at running back. All those guys are first-round, second-round picks. We had studs all over the field. Who wouldn’t want to bring it to the offense? We had to show our best stuff.
“But Aaron’s thing with me was, he’d say something weird that made zero sense. He’d come up to me and say, ‘If the hamburger eats the ketchup and climbs the tree, who’s going to come to the ocean?’
“He would just bust out laughing. I’d think of the most random thing to say to him. Then he would say something back. Everybody loved Chico. We laughed together. We went to the White House together, again, after winning the 2009 National Championship. We met Obama. We ate together. Hamburgers. Pizza. Whatever we wanted. It’s catching up to me now, but back then we burned it off super-fast. And Chico was always the life of the party.”
Others who knew Aaron in Gainesville would speak about him in similar terms. After a rocky start as a freshman, Aaron became a ferociously driven football player. As a member of Florida’s student body, he was quick to make jokes, polite and deferential when he had to be, and disruptive when it served his purpose.
“He had a beautiful smile on his face,” Urban Meyer recalls. “Later in his career, it seemed to change.”
Even in Florida, it came down to this: Aaron loved to be the center of attention. But he was also impressionable and eager to please, and when the people around him made questionable decisions, he tended to go along.
“Here’s the thing about being around violence,” a person who encountered Aaron up in New England would say. “One time is bad luck. Two times, you have bad habits. Three times, you’re a goon. Violence is only around you so often by mistake. After a while, you are who you hang out with. And Hernandez did not have the best taste in friends.”
Chapter 14
Cops in Gainesville called it “the procession.” Every Saturday night, hordes of people spilled out of the clubs and made their way down University Avenue, stopping here, stopping there, partying, fighting, causing trouble for three blocks, five blocks, or more. It was not unusual for thirty or forty cops to occupy a two-to-three-block area, babysitting the college students for hours on end, doing all that they could to get the kids home and keep them safe until Sunday morning.
Now, on the last Saturday in September of 2007, with school back in session, the procession was back in full force.
The day had gone badly for Florida—the Gators had lost 20-17 to the Auburn Tigers. Aaron Hernandez had played in the game and needed to blow off steam afterward. That night, he went to a nightclub called Venue.
Venue was a relatively new club in Gainesville, but it had already become a favorite with UF’s football players. Previously, it had been some other club. Before that it had been something else—a restaurant called Shakers. Students came and went, no one remembered. But what Aaron Hernandez knew, as a regular participant in the procession, was that when the doors closed, at two in the morning, the crowd would regroup in a parking lot behind the building. Sometimes there were fights.
Sometimes, arrests were made.
It was not the place a player as volatile as Aaron should have been. Certainly not on a day where the game had gone badly. But, try as he did to keep an eye out for his teammate, Tim Tebow couldn’t be there for every minute of Aaron’s life. And tonight, a former Gator named Reggie Nelson was back in town.
Nelson was in the NFL now—he’d been the Jacksonville Jaguars’ first pick in that year’s draft. Down from Jacksonville, he was riding high in Venue’s VIP booth. Chris Harris, who had been drafted by the Chicago Bears in 2005, was with him. Mike and Maurkice Pouncey were also there, along with several other players and soon-to-be players.
A bouncer named Antwuan Hamm would recall that Nelson had not been seen at Venue for some time. But Hamm had already gotten to know the Pounceys, who were there all the time and—according to the bouncer—always spoiling for a fight. They weren’t the only ones. A local man named Justin Glass had also gone to Venue that night. He had brought two friends along to the club: a man named Randall Cason and an older friend, Corey Smith, whose nickname was “Squirt.”
Squirt had two kids, a good job, and a white Crown Vic. There was nothing thuggish about him. In fact, he had taken Glass under his wing and done his best to keep him off the streets. But Glass was caught between Squirt, the good father, and Cason, who was more of a negative influence.
According to Gainesville PD, Cason and Glass had gone to the club looking for trouble.
Neither man wanted to listen to anything Squirt had to say.
According to Randall Cason, everything that followed stemmed from an incident that had taken place the previous week—an altercation Cason’s brother had gotten into with several UF football players. Now, in the dark, crowded club, Cason found himself in the middle of a similar altercation.
Words were exchanged, and menacing glances. A football player reached out and tried to grab a chain Cason was wearing around his neck—but the chain was too thick to break.
Reggie Nelson would say that, when he arrived at the club, Aaron Hernandez told him about an incident involving the Pouncey twins: according to Aaron, Cason had snatched a chain away from one of the Pounceys.
According to Hamm, the club bouncer, it was Justin Glass—and not Cason—who got into a confrontation with the Pounceys. Hamm would say that one of the twins approached Glass and said, “I want my motherfucking chain.”
“What chain?” Glass had replied. “I ain’t got no damn chain.”
At that point, Hamm said, club security escorted both of the Pouncey twins out of the club. Having done so, they also ejected Glass.
The Pouncey twins would say that, afterward, out in the club parking lot, a “black man” who had snatched a chain away from Mike Pouncey had taunted them, tugging at his shirt as if to indicate to the Gators that he had a gun in his waistband.