After Desperate Attempt to Save a Life, A Struggle to Understand Its Violent End

But here in this upper-middle-class neighborhood, he was a sweet, smiling teenager who dazzled his teachers at the exclusive Gulliver Preparatory School when he transferred in midway through his sophomore year because his father thought he would have a better chance at college if he left the public school system.

Frank Gisonni, who taught marine biology to Taylor and Williams, remembered Sean as a bright child who mingled easily among the children of prestige at Gulliver.

Taylor met Jackie Garcia, the niece of actor Andy Garcia, at the school, and everyone felt they were destined to become a couple, Gisonni said. His senior year he was named prom king and he attended it wearing an all-white tuxedo and a white top hat. He even danced with the school's founder and matriarch, Marian Krutulis, who is in her 80s.

"She was very proud of him," Gisonni said. "He was such a charmer."

Family members bristle at the perception of Taylor as a brutish loner, and several would not speak to reporters because of it. Those who did said he was a good kid who lived in a solid neighborhood with his father and kept out of trouble. The problem, they said, came when Taylor spent time with his mother, Donna Junor, in a less desirable area near Homestead, south of Palmetto Bay. It was those acquaintances who pulled him down, they said.

When Taylor starred at Miami and then was a first-round pick of the Redskins in the April 2004 NFL draft, signing a seven-year, $18 million deal, the old friends put more pressure on him.

"You don't want to seem like you are better than them," his father, who is the police chief of Florida City 10 miles to the south, said Monday night as he stood outside the hospital. Pedro Taylor said what often happens is a person who moves away from the area and starts his life anew will occasionally return to the old neighborhood and resume his friendships with the people he always knew without understanding what had happened in the time that he was gone. His friends may have found new enemies, stirred up rivalries, and the person coming back has no idea what is going on. He was not certain this is what happened in Sean's case, but he said he urged his son to cut those ties nonetheless.

"That's the biggest problem," said Ed Hill, one of Taylor's cousins, as he sat on a bench outside the waiting room on Monday. "Once you grow up you can't go back and do the things you used to do. Now you got people in the area who want to take what you got and you've got too much to lose when you do that."

One family friend, who asked not to be identified for fear of insulting the family, said he told Taylor to simply stay out of Florida. "Too many people here know you. Too many people are jealous of you," the friend said.

Hill asked former Dallas Cowboys offensive lineman Nate Newton, who was arrested in 2001 for transporting more than 100 pounds of marijuana, to speak to Taylor about the dangers of hanging around with the wrong people. Pedro Taylor said he had a long father-son talk after Sean's arrest, telling him to realize the opportunity that existed for him. And, many in the family said, the talks worked.

"I think he realized the important things in his life," Pedro Taylor said. "All this foolishness and people wanting to get in, I think it went away. He never was a partyer."

Many who were close to him say having a child changed Taylor, making him understand the responsibility for taking care of another life. But it might have been the 2005 arrest and the fear that he was going to go to prison that jolted him the most.