Facing Next Chapter In Their Lives

Tanya Williams is beautiful. Tall, black, with blond hair and features worthy of a model, she has a gracious, elegant manner. She does not give off the air of a woman who cries a lot, or worries that her new husband will, say, spend years two through 30 of their marriage in prison.

This composure is not always easy to maintain. Last Wednesday, for example, Tanya’s husband, former NBA star and NBC commentator Jayson Williams, was indicted by a New Jersey grand jury on charges of aggravated manslaughter, reckless manslaughter, aggravated assault and witness and evidence tampering. A companion was hit with two tampering charges; another recently reached a plea agreement to testify for the prosecution.

Still, the indictments are not a surprise. On Feb. 25, prosecutors filed charges against Williams stemming from the Feb. 14 shooting death of a limousine driver at the Williamses’ sprawling house in rural New Jersey. And though the indictments carry stronger penalties than the original charges, the day before they came down, Tanya was relatively serene.

“In the first couple of days, you cling to what you know, you cling to what you know is real,” said Tanya, a lawyer who only now is starting to talk publicly about what the Williamses’ lives have been like since what they call “the accident.”

Williams, 34, is free on $270,000 bail and is operating under legal advice not to speak at all. A date for his arraignment was not immediately scheduled. Tanya, 33, is reticent to speak as well. Neither she nor Williams wants to say or do anything that would insult the family of Costas “Gus” Christofi, the driver who was killed, but their lives do go on.

“Eventually, you have to let the pendulum swing back to normal, even though you fully realize that normal will never be what it was February 13th,” Tanya says. A spiritual person, she doesn’t think she is in denial.

“I just haven’t had that night in the dark room with the door closed, crying,” she says. “You do think about it, you think about it every day. But God has just granted us a state of peace.”

The shooting happened in their bedroom. It was around 2:30 a.m., already Valentine’s Day, and Williams was at the house with four members of the Harlem Globetrotters and a crew of friends, having been driven home from a Globetrotters game by Christofi. Williams didn’t know Christofi well--he had been hired for the evening. But Williams has a wide smile and a booming laugh, and he makes friends easily. He invited Christofi, a sports fan, inside for a tour. Christofi, 55, accepted.

“It is a beautiful house,” Tanya says of the estate Williams named “Who Knew?” in homage to his good fortune in signing an $86 million guaranteed contract with the New Jersey Nets in January 1999. Two months after the contract was signed, Williams suffered the first of a series of leg injuries that eventually forced him to retire from the NBA. His playing career was over, but the 40-room house he helped his father’s construction company build continued to be his showpiece.

That night, his tour led Christofi through the bedroom, where prosecutors allege he began playfully handling one of the 12-gauge shotguns he kept there. The gun went off and the shot lodged in Christofi’s chest. There has never been any contention that Williams intentionally tried to kill Christofi. Still, the severity of the indictment means the prosecution believes Williams acted with an “extreme indifference to human life.”

The severity of Williams’s charges partly rests on the prosecutor’s contention that his behavior was reckless, not merely careless. Det. Lt. Daniel James, who has been leading the investigation along with a detective from the New Jersey State police, believes the distinction is clear. “You’re not supposed to throw bowling balls outside a window because there’s a reasonable expectation that if you do, someone is going to get hurt,” he says. “This is similar.”

Just as damning is what police believe happened next. After shooting Christofi, Williams allegedly tried to portray the driver’s death as a suicide, wiping his own fingerprints from the gun and pressing Christofi’s limp hand to the trigger. The state believes Williams then directed two of the other men in the house, Kent Culuko, 29, and John Gordnick, 44, to get rid of Williams’s blood-splattered clothing and lie to investigators about it.

This contention was supported last month when Gordnick’s lawyer provided acting prosecutor Steve Lember with the clothing Williams allegedly was wearing at the time of the shooting, different clothing than Williams had given Lember. Last week, Culuko pleaded guilty to tampering charges, agreeing to testify against Williams and Gordnick.

Lember acknowledges it is possible that Williams, having never intended to shoot anyone, might have panicked at the sight of a dead man on his floor, causing him to mislead the police. “But at some point, in my opinion, panic becomes calculation,” Lember said in a recent interview at his office in Flemington, N.J. “I have no doubt that when an unintended death occurs, there’s panic. But at what point do you step back and say, ‘I have to do the right thing?’”

Tanya will only say that she was out on the night of the shooting, not where she was. She also will not say whether she and Williams have returned to sleeping in their bedroom. She does grant, though, that the police tape has been down for some time, and that the couple feels wholly comfortable in their house, despite what happened there. “It’s what you share, inside the four walls, that make where you live a home, and that hasn’t changed for us at all,” she says.

She adds she is surprised by Culuko’s plea bargain but doesn’t believe it will make the prosecution’s case. “We’re very comfortable with the facts, I think when they come out, people will be satisfied with them,” she says. “We are innocent.”

She is hardly a flashy NBA wife although it is easy to see her paired with Williams, long one of the league’s more popular figures. Smart and engaging, she is not practicing law but has a law degree from Yeshiva University, a school she says she picked “just to get a different perspective, keep learning.” She and Williams go back to their days as St. John’s University undergraduates. Both basketball players, they dated for a while, then went their separate ways after leaving St. John’s.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, after Williams built a career as one of the best rebounders in the NBA, that a mutual friend facilitated their reunion. “It was just like turning one page to the other, like picking right up where we left off,” she says. They were married within two years. They started talking about having kids. They never talked about the possibility of something like this.

Instead, they try to be normal under the most abnormal of circumstances. They still talk about how many children they want, plan vacations. They do not go to New York clubs or make appearances at high-profile events the way they used to, but they do not feel deprived. They know that among those involved in this case, others are in much more pain.

Besides, the other, calmer parts of their lives are still in evidence; Williams and his father, who lives nearby, meet nearly every morning to take care of the sheep, cattle, goats and horses that populate the estate’s farm. Williams still helps his father at the construction company. Two weeks ago, he ran a basketball camp for underprivileged children.

Most of the kids knew little if anything about the shooting, and while Tanya says she is not naive enough to think that some adults may have kept their children away because of the incident, no one has approached either her or Williams with an unkind word. “People have been very supportive, and I would know,” she says. “I’m out there. I go to our grocery store, the Chinese restaurant. People have been nice.”

It might help that the Williamses live in Hunterdon County, far from the in-your-face rush of New York City. With 121,989 residents, Hunterdon is one of the most financially well-off-parts of New Jersey. The most recent set of crime statistics report two murders in a 10-year stretch. When pressed, the only thing Lember can compare the Williams case to is the Lindbergh trial, the 1935 proceedings that sent Bruno Hauptmann to the electric chair for allegedly kidnapping the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh from his Hunterdon County house.

Lember knows the Williams case will be watched closely; this is far from the first time Williams has been in trouble with either guns or the law. In an autobiography published two years ago, Williams describes an incident on his shooting range in which he accidentally almost shot New York Jets wide receiver Wayne Chrebet. In 1994, Williams was charged with firing an automatic pistol at an empty security van outside the Nets’ arena. A judge dropped the charges in exchange for community service, but the prosecutor in the case was outraged.

If Williams goes to trial, Lember will bring up the 1994 case as evidence that Williams knew that handling a gun playfully was wrong, and if Lember is looking to paint Williams as a wild character, a spate of other, less-serious incidents and alterations are on record. Also on record are accounts of Williams’s generosity. When he was 20, he began raising the two children of his two sisters, both dying of AIDS. He has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities.

Since the shooting, though, neither portrayal of Williams may solely fit.

“You go through something like this, it changes you. All the facades are pulled away,” Tanya says. “For him, it was an awakening, to see ‘What is the lesson here? Where do you go from here?’ I think he’s really gotten back in touch with the essence of who he is. And I think he can look at himself and say, ‘I’m still a good man.’

“We know there are people who have been through much worse than this, and there is a man who is dead, so you just try to have perspective,” Tanya says. She refuses to think of being in that big house, alone, with Williams in prison. She refuses to crumble into a scrap heap of worry. She smiles as she describes their nightly routine, which is to pop in a tape of an old television show, “The Jeffersons,” before they go to sleep.

“Jayson loves ‘The Jeffersons.’ He has every episode on tape and I think he knows every word,” she says, and, as she laughs, the charm bracelet around her right wrist shakes. There is just one ornament on it right now, a star of David.

“David is my favorite story in the Bible,” she says. “He was God’s favorite king, even though he was not a perfect man. He sinned, but he was strong in his salvation. I like that.”