Death, guns and ‘corrupt cop’ claims: saga that gripped New Orleans reaches its end
Ever since the New Orleans tow-truck company owner Cardell Hayes shot the retired local pro-football champion Will Smith to death and wounded the former athlete’s wife on a city street late on the night of 9 April 2016, people on all sides of the case have made it as complicated as possible in their fight for what they consider to be justice.
It is a case that has gripped southeastern Louisiana – where football players are huge celebrities – and also involved dark, if unsupported, allegations of another deep south staple: police corruption. Competing theories and narratives have vied for supremacy, with almost as many different ideas of what happened as people willing to voice them.
But all the evidence available at two separate trials – including one that concluded early Saturday with a second manslaughter conviction for Hayes – points to a simpler, senseless tragedy that maybe could have only happened in a country plagued with an excess of short tempers, easily accessible guns and laws that make people believe it’s relatively safe in many situations, legally speaking, to fire those weapons.
Perhaps the best guess at what happened on the night Smith’s and
Hayes’s lives collided with deadly consequences is what follows, based on accounts from key observers who initially had no idea precisely who was involved and therefore had no loyalty to either the shooter or the slain.
Smith spent the day attending a street festival as well as dining and drinking with his wife, Racquel, and friends in New Orleans, home to his family and the NFL’s Saints, a team that won its first and so far only Super Bowl title with his defensive help just six years earlier.
The 34-year-old Smith was driving Racquel and two of their companions in his Mercedes-Benz SUV to a hotel bar to continue the revelry when he lightly struck the back of a Hummer being driven by Hayes, who had braked as he approached traffic at a red light. With a friend in the passenger seat, and having no idea who hit his rear bumper, Hayes pulled over – but then began pursuing Smith after he drove away.
Hayes then hit the rear of Smith’s SUV, and the six people in both cars got out, leading to a confrontation that by all accounts was heated.
At that point, a patron at a nearby bar heard one of the men near the crash warn that he had a gun. A second man answered that he had a gun, too, before he was shot in the back and killed.
Investigators later arrived to find Smith with eight bullet wounds – seven to his back – slumped over his front seat, inches away from a pistol that was tucked in between the seat and the center console. Racquel, who recounted being at her husband’s side during his encounter with Hayes, was shot twice in one of her legs and badly wounded.
An off-duty police officer who was on a date at the same bar as the other patron later said he approached the scene after hearing the gunfire, and he was told by Hayes that he used a pistol he had on him to shoot Smith after hearing that Smith was going back for his own gun.
That off-duty officer reported Hayes telling him: “What was I supposed to do?” There was also a recording of a 911 call that night which captured Hayes in the background saying he had shot a man who announced his intention of getting a gun from his car.
Smith’s funeral service was held days later in a theater full of mourners, after a viewing open to the public at the Saints’ practice facility.
Despite his claims that he killed Smith legally in self-defense, Hayes was charged with murder, twice facing judgment in the killing.
The prosecution and the defense have since spent countless hours arguing that one man was clearly to blame and the other was not in the shooting that led to Smith’s death, his wife’s injuries and Hayes’s criminal trials. The local and national news media’s duty to vet all aspects of the case in a collective quest for the truth about what occurred that night in a way has added to the obfuscation.
But the truth is neither prosecutors’ nor defense attorneys’ versions of Smith’s fatal shooting are supported by the neutral, credible accounts relayed in the immediate aftermath.
State prosecutors maintained at both trials that Racquel Smith talked her husband into walking away from the face-off that erupted after the second car collision. She did that because Hayes – a former semi-professional football player – was, improbably,