37. Interview with David Lerner: Part 3

15 July 2011

– Really sorry about that, man. Sometimes I start talking and I just get all involved and—pretty bad habit, I know.

– Ex-wife, bro. Soon-to-be-ex-wife.

– Yeah. I met Patty at that apartment. Shit was fun back then, back when college was all I had to think about. I met a lot of people at that apartment actually. But this dude, Earl, nobody ever really saw much of him. Don’t know if it was because he was busy with school or whatever. Don’t even know if the dude was in school. I mean, I think he was. I remember his truck had a FSU parking decal on it, could’ve been expired though. I never saw him on campus, and he was so antisocial at the apartment, I’ll be honest, I probably couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup if you stuck a bunch of other black dudes in it.

– I’m not racist at all, by the way, don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t think, like, all black people look alike or nothing. My boy Jason, if he was standing in a group of black dudes, I’d be able to find him in like half a second. And Dwight, kind of hard to miss that giant motherfucker.

– It’s just, that’s how little I saw this dude, Earl. Couldn’t recognize his face, not until after the news broke about all that stuff he’d done and his picture was, like, plastered all over TV. He was easy to recognize then.

– Real sketchy, that whole thing. I think he might have been framed actually, wouldn’t put it past Tallahassee P.D. Such a B.S. city. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. The legal process, it’s a joke over there. Everywhere actually.It’s like, everything’s such a big effing deal because everybody’s so damn bored with their jobs or something. You know?

– I never asked Earl any questions. Like I said, I try not to get involved in stuff that doesn’t involve me like, I mind my own business and I expect everybody else to do the same, pretty much.

– Yeah, some cops came over once, after everything happened, asked me if I knew anything about Earl or heard anything suspicious around the time he did what they say he did. I told them I didn’t know nothing, and that was the truth.

– I mean—it was mostly the truth.

– Dude, are you sure this isn’t going to, like, get back to the team? I mean, it was a long time ago so I don’t think it could mess anything up right now or nothing but, you know, I just don’t want to make things harder for my lawyer.

– Alright. I mean, I did tell the cops most of it though. I didn’t, like, lie to them or nothing. Just didn’t tell them the whole truth. Because, I mean, the whole truth is it was my junior year, second year as a starter. Bitching season, bro. My stats were, like, insane: 21.5 points, 2.9 assists, 3.9 rebounds, ACC Player of the Year, All-ACC First Team. [Mr. Lerner shakes his head wistfully] I miss that season, man. I mean, the pros are awesome, but everybody’s a superstar here. I’m getting, like, shit playing time out here right now. I was king in college.

– Yeah, the cops were asking questions. But we’d just barely dropped out of the tournament like a month and a half earlier and I’d just declared and I was checking my projections like every hour, you know? How deep the draft would be that year, all that. Plus FSU had just gotten in all that trouble with that cheating scandal and players were getting suspended left and right and, you know—my apartment wasn’t always clean. Some of my boys used to come through and, you know, they’d leave sometimes and forget to take all their shit and some of that shit could’ve gotten me in serious—whatever. There was just a lot of reasons why I really didn’t want to get involved in any legal-type stuff. And, whatever, it was mostly the truth. Because I don’t know what I heard that night. I don’t know, and I really don’t want to.

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