A SHOT IN THE DARK

In the simplest possible terms -- all that’s really known for certain -- Loren Wade shot a man.

It was past midnight when he left his apartment in Tempe, Ariz., to pick up his girlfriend outside a nearby dance club. He found her standing beside a car, talking to some guys. Words were exchanged and Wade drew a gun from his pocket.

The killing made national news in March because Wade was a star running back at Arizona State. Not often does a big-time college player get hauled in for first-degree murder in the middle of spring practice.

As the days and weeks passed, reports surfaced about previous incidents of threatening behavior by the 21-year-old. Tattoos marked his arms and he kept that pistol in his car. It might have been easy to dismiss him as a thug, or even a monster.

Maybe that would make his alleged crime easier to comprehend.

But in a videotape of his police interrogation that night, Wade bears little resemblance to a stone-faced killer. He sits with head bowed, face buried in his hands.

“I know I made a mistake,” he sobs. “A big mistake.”

Back in Los Angeles, people recall him as a decent young man whose single mother worked hard to raise him, get him out of a rough neighborhood in South-Central. Despite his talent, they say, he never acted like a big shot. “Five hundred kids I’ve coached, he’s the last one I would think is capable of doing something like this,” his high school coach says.

It turns out the story of Loren Wade and what happened that night might not be so simple.

*

Police reports and the taped interview shed some light on events leading up to the shooting. Wade told police that he stayed in his apartment on the night of March 25, drinking cognac, and “went to sleep because I had practice at 9:15 in the morning.”

His girlfriend, former Arizona State soccer player Haley van Blommestein, had gone to a hip-hop dance club called CBNC in nearby Scottsdale. There, amid colored lights and loud music, she ran into an old friend, Brandon Falkner, who had played safety for the Sun Devils a few years earlier.

Shortly before 2 a.m., Wade said he awoke and spoke with Van Blommestein by cell phone. The nature of their conversation remains unclear, though Wade said he was upset because she had lied about going out. He pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants and headed to the club to pick her up.

CBNC was closing down, crowds of partyers emptying into the parking lot, police said. Wade could not find his girlfriend so he called her again and she told him that she was by an adjacent bank. As Wade moved in that direction on foot, Falkner pulled up near Van Blommestein in his gray BMW and they chatted.

Accounts vary as to exactly what happened in the next few moments.

Jorge Sanchez, one of several off-duty sheriffs working security at the club, recalled an agitated Wade yelling into his cellphone -- “Where are you at? Stay where you are.” -- as he walked toward the bank. The three other men in Falkner’s car told police that Wade approached quickly.

Wade and Falkner apparently did not know each other. At 25, Falkner was older and had played on earlier Sun Devil teams. The other guys in his car remember Wade saying “Who the ... is you?” and “You ain’t talking to my girl.”

Tyrone Bowers, another former Arizona State football player, sat in the passenger seat. The big linebacker said that Wade suddenly drew his gun and used it to hit Falkner in the head. Then -- and this is the crux of the case -- Bowers said that Wade deliberately aimed the pistol.

Following some distance behind Wade, Sanchez, the off-duty sheriff, reported that he heard Van Blommestein cry: “No, no, no.” A single gunshot rang out.

The bullet struck Falkner in the head and he slumped over, his foot against the accelerator, his car lurching forward. Bowers reached for the steering wheel as the BMW veered across the parking lot.

The car ricocheted off a sport utility vehicle, the airbags deploying, then careened another 100 feet or so before slamming into a tree beside a bus stop. Bowers and the other passengers scrambled out, heading down the street, fearful that the shooter might come after them.

Wade had not moved. Sanchez and another off-duty sheriff closed in quickly, guns drawn, ordering him to get on the ground.

*

If only Wade and Falkner had played together, friends of both men say. If only they’d had a chance to meet.

Falkner arrived at Arizona State in 1998 as an all-state defensive back from nearby Peoria. Life had not been particularly easy for him. His mother, Joyce, fell gravely ill while he was young.

His father, Bonnie Lee Falkner, declined to comment but acquaintances say that Brandon coped with the situation surprisingly well.

“He let us know that she was in the hospital for a long time and that she was suffering,” said Komlan Lonergan, a friend and teammate. “But he wasn’t the type of person to dump all that on somebody.”

Instead, Falkner was known for his constant smile, his penchant for telling jokes and being the life of the party. “Brandon was friends with everyone,” said Pete Rotkis, who played beside him in the secondary.

Falkner’s career at Arizona State was solid, if unspectacular. He played for much of three seasons and had one of his best games at the Rose Bowl against UCLA in 2000, recording five tackles and a sack.

In the fall of 2002, he should have finished his college career as a senior, a veteran on the roster -- and should have been teammates with a newly arrived freshman, Wade. But a few months earlier, Falkner was dismissed from the squad for what school officials would only say was a violation of team rules.

By all accounts, the young man dealt with the adversity of being kicked off the team with characteristic aplomb. As Wade settled in with the Sun Devils, Falkner ventured overseas to play pro football in Germany, in the picturesque southern city of Schwabisch Hall. He roomed with Lonergan and other Americans on the team.

“We had so much fun,” Lonergan said. “You get to travel, the nightlife is good and there’s good beer, of course.”

Though Falkner had a mediocre season on the field in 2003, Coach Siegfried Gehrke asked him to return the following spring. In an e-mail, Gehrke said the team’s decision was “not only based on his football ability, but to a great extent on his being just an awesome person.”

The Schwabisch Hall Unicorns made the playoffs of the German Football League in both of Falkner’s seasons, losing twice in the first round. After 2004, he hinted to his coach and teammates that he was done with the game and talked to Lonergan about returning to Arizona State to study photography.

Last October, Gehrke drove him to the airport in Stuttgart. The coach recalled: “We wished each other good luck for the future and said goodbye.”

*

While Falkner’s playing days wound down, Wade’s career was on the rise. No one questioned his status as a star at Serra High in Gardena, where he rushed for nearly 4,000 yards in three seasons and was captain of the team. When Coach Scott Altenberg was asked about the former player, he talked about something more than statistics.

“So nice and carefree,” he said. “Such a good kid.”

Wade never had problems on the field or in the classroom, the coach said, and showed a knack for helping younger players.

“Some kids don’t want to talk to the head coach,” Altenberg said. “Loren would always be the guy who would come to me and say ‘So-and-so’s having trouble with the offense or struggling somewhere.’ He was a guy who was really interested in seeing other people do well.”

This reputation carried over to Arizona State when Wade accepted a scholarship to play for the Sun Devils in the fall of 2002.

“He was a great guy,” receiver Derek Hagan said. “A great teammate.”

Mark Brand, an athletic department spokesman, said: “Loren Wade was one of the most polite young men I have ever been around. He was a gem.”

After redshirting his first season, Wade gained 773 yards in 2003, setting a school record for a freshman and ranking fifth among running backs in the Pacific 10 Conference. The next fall, in 2004, he started the first three games and led the team in rushing.

Then, it seems, things began to come apart.

At roughly the same time Falkner was leaving Germany, news broke that an athletic department employee had let Wade use her car and had put her name on his utility bill so he could avoid paying a deposit. The employee was fired. In part because Wade had turned himself in, conference officials handed the team a relatively light penalty -- two years probation -- but Wade had to sit out the remainder of the 2004 season for receiving improper benefits.

Back home, his high school coach stopped hearing from him.

“I gave him some space because I knew he might be embarrassed,” Altenberg said. “I was very worried about him because I know how sensitive he is to failure, how he is when he feels like he let people down. He tends to go internal.”

Over the next few months, Arizona State Coach Dirk Koetter was concerned enough to suggest that Wade seek counseling. He also spoke with Wade’s mother, Patsy.

There had been scattered incidents of trouble in the player’s past, a brawl during a basketball game at Serra and a fight with an Arizona State teammate. After the team suspended him, his problems seemed to accelerate.

Last December, neighbors called police after hearing him threaten to kill Van Blommestein during an argument. There was no physical violence and officers took no action. In March, Van Blommestein twice summoned police, claiming Wade had threatened her. He also allegedly threatened a friend of hers. Van Blommestein could not be reached for comment on this story.

At no point was Wade arrested or charged. School officials were aware of some but not all of his brushes with the law because they involved different police departments in the area. When Koetter asked Wade if he owned a gun, he said no. The coach also spoke with Van Blommestein, who told him the same thing and said she was not in danger.

In the wake of the shooting, as reports of these incidents appeared in the news, former Serra teammate Eric McNeal struggled to make sense of it all.

“I mean, honestly, he’s never been that type of person,” said McNeal, who now plays safety for UCLA. “I have friends who played who were like that. You know, the bully types, trying-to-make-a-statement types. He was no way near that.”

*

The interrogation plays out in black and white, slightly out of focus, the videotape showing a small room with two chairs and a table pushed against the wall. Wade sits alone, arms crossed tightly.

It is the morning of March 26 when a detective walks in and they begin to talk. Step by step, Wade recounts the events of that night, his words often blurred by tears. “I should have just stayed at home,” he says.

Wade tells the detective he bought the gun from “a guy” during his freshman year. “I really don’t have a reason why,” he says.

Time and again, they return to those few fatal seconds as Wade approached Falkner’s car. Wade denies being jealous, insists he was simply angry at Van Blommestein for lying. The detective repeatedly asks why he took the gun from his car and he invariably answers that the sight of four men in the BMW intimidated him.

By Wade’s account, it was Falkner who spoke first, asking: “Who the ... are you?”

“That’s when I lost my composure,” Wade says. “I was upset and I lost my composure. I said, ‘That’s my girl.’ ”

Time and again, he describes pulling the gun from the pocket of his sweatpants, reaching through the car window to punch Falkner with the pistol in his hand.

“When I hit him, the gun just went off,” he says.

And later: “I was just in shock, man. ... I had no idea the gun was going to go off. It scared me when it went off.”

At certain points, the detective walks out of the room, leaving Wade to himself. He wipes his face or sips from a bottle of water on the table. Upon returning, the detective settles on a new approach, asking to see a tattoo on Wade’s right arm that reads, “Philippians 4:13.” (“I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.”)

The detective keeps coming back to this: “If you believe, right, then whatever happens in this world doesn’t matter, right? It’s all what happens after this life, right? ... I want to know the truth. As a Christian, that’s what you’d want to tell is the truth.”

Emotions appear to come over Wade in phases. One moment, he speaks calmly. The next, he cries.

“I swear, dude, I’m being honest with you,” he says. “I know I made a big mistake and I’ll pay for that. But I had no intention of shooting that guy.”

*

Within days of the killing, Arizona State administrators impaneled a committee to investigate not only the facts surrounding the case but also university policy on violent behavior. Dozens of faculty, staff and students were interviewed.

In a report issued this summer, the committee found no wrongdoing, but faulted Koetter and athletic department officials for “errors in judgment” in how they handled a troubled Wade after his suspension for receiving improper benefits.

“We found that they tried to do too much, taking it upon themselves to provide services that can be better provided by other university components,” law professor Myles Lynk, who chaired the investigation, said in a prepared statement.

The school vowed to make changes, including improved communications with outside police and the creation of a hotline for reporting violence. Koetter said he would learn from the experience, but later reflected: “If people -- me or anyone else -- could foresee something like this happening, we’d never have any murders in the world.”

By August, the coach and his team were back in training camp, looking toward their season opener against Temple, yet in some ways still dealing with the shock of last spring.

“You’re at practice with a guy one day,” teammate Hagan said. “And the next day he’s gone.”

Wade sits in jail awaiting a trial scheduled to begin early next year. His defense has focused on arguing for a lesser charge such as manslaughter, attorney Ulises Ferragut claiming the pistol was defective and fired accidentally when Wade used it to strike Falkner.

Ferragut has also tried to counter what he describes as unfair publicity surrounding his client.

“ASU has, in my opinion, tried to cover themselves by pointing the finger at Loren,” he said. “Now they’ve sort of turned their backs on him and, through the media, have exacerbated the situation and made him look like a monster, as though Loren Wade is this person on campus that is menacing everyone.”

Some media reports have been particularly damning.

According to a recent story in the Arizona Republic, court documents allege that hours before the shooting Wade discharged his gun in a Tempe parking lot, nearly hitting a teammate in the foot. The Republic wrote that documents also allege Wade called Van Blommestein 40 times that evening and that a medical examiner doubted the fatal wound could have occurred while Wade was striking Falkner with a gun.

Back in Los Angeles, Patsy Wade wants to tell her son’s side of the story but said she needs Ferragut’s approval. On several occasions, the attorney promised to arrange a telephone conference with a reporter but did not follow through.

Koetter also takes care in choosing his words. “The focus gets shifted off the fact that this was a terrible tragedy,” he said. “Two families totally ripped apart.”

The coach does not try to defend or marginalize what happened that night. He can understand how outsiders might see the killing in stark terms, good versus evil. But, like others close to Wade, he cannot reconcile this violent, monstrous image with the young man he knows.

The situation, he says, isn’t that simple.