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Brilliant Light, Persistent Shadow
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This was the Sean Taylor most people saw, the one who glared past interviewers, who struggled to open up to coaches and who fired his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, just days after signing his first contract because he felt Rosenhaus spent too much time indulging a father Taylor had yet to fully embrace.
Ultimately it was these two sides -- the warm, giving son who wanted to bring his family together and the brooding, suspicious man who trusted few -- that led him to be sleeping, protected only by a machete, early the morning of Nov. 26 in the house in Palmetto Bay he bought for his mother, great-grandmother and half-brothers and sisters. It is what left Taylor exposed when four men, one of whom had connections to his half-sister Sasha Johnson, scaled the wall outside of the home where he had come to sleep for a single night. And where defending himself, his girlfriend and daughter, he was fatally shot.
Aulga Clarke will be in Honolulu for the Pro Bowl today, as will some 15 of Taylor's relatives, mostly on his father's side of the family, all of whom are still trying to grasp exactly why he is gone.
"It was just his time," said Ed Hill, a cousin of Taylor's father. "There's nothing else you can say."
* * *
No event, say those who knew Taylor well, shaped him more than the custody dispute between his father, Pedro Taylor, and mother, Donna Junor, who never married after he was born in 1983.
Family members talk around the subject, saying that Donna sued Pedro for child support only to later have Pedro win custody when a judge decided that Pedro, who was married at the time and became police chief of nearby Florida City, had the more stable living situation.
Records in Miami-Dade County Family Court show a lengthy battle between the parents that began with an order for Pedro to pay $45 a week in child support when Sean was 2 and culminated with a court order sending Sean to live with his father on July 28, 1994. Sean was 11 at the time, in the summer before sixth grade.
The arrangement troubled him, family members said, leaving him to shuttle on Sunday nights to his father's house just outside Miami city limits, where he lived on weeknights, only to return to his mother's home farther south on Friday afternoons. Before the move, Clarke, who watched him often, remembered Sean as a happy and rambunctious child who would climb the ackee trees in her back yard to bring down the fruit so she could make a traditional Jamaican breakfast of ackee stewed with cod, onions and tomatoes. After he moved away he grew sadder, she said.
One Christmas, Clarke found Sean standing down the street from her house under a light pole with tears streaming down his face.
"I don't live anywhere," she said he told her. "I don't have a home."
"What do you mean you don't live anywhere?" Clarke remembered saying, weeping herself. "Your grandmother has a home, your mother has a home, your father has a home and you have a bedroom right here down the hall in this house."
