NEW YORK — 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.
