Darius Williams, son of late Broncos CB Darrent Williams, holds fathers memory close

Inked on his wrist tape and cleats is the date 9-27-82, the letters LLDW and #27. The back of his jersey bears the No. 27 too, and if you look close enough at the 5-foot-9, 185-pound cornerback from Fort Worth, Texas, you’ll see the same facial features and the fire of a player all too familiar in Colorado.

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But Darius Williams is on his own mission, to eventually land in the NFL and live a dream his father only began to realize.

A redshirt sophomore at Texas A&M-Commerce, Darius is the son of the late Darrent Williams, the former Denver Broncos cornerback who was killed in a drive-by shooting in downtown Denver on New Year’s Day in 2007.

Darrent was only 24, but in his two years in the NFL, he left a permanent mark on those who knew him. The greatest mark was left on Darius, now 20, who wears the same jersey number, plays the same position and keeps his father’s memory close.

Last month, Darius returned to Colorado for the first time since Darrent’s death, as A&M-Commerce played Colorado State University-Pueblo, some 100 miles south of the Broncos’ training facility. Darrent would have been 37 that weekend.

This weekend, Darrent will be recognized as one of the Broncos’ top 100 players while one of his closest teammates, Champ Bailey, is inducted into the Ring of Fame. Bailey and the family of Pat Bowlen, the late owner who spearheaded a memorial to Darrent in the form of a local teen center, will also receive their Hall of Fame rings during Sunday’s Broncos-Titans game.

Although nearly 13 years have come and gone since Darrent died, Darius believes his recent trip to Colorado was no accident. No coincidence with the various tributes and personal milestones.

No, this was meant to be.

“It just felt like I was supposed to be there,” Darius said. “The day we got to Colorado it was his birthday, the 27th, and then we played on the 28th. I don’t feel like nothing happens in this world by chance. Everything happens for a reason.”

Tierria Leonard hasn’t forgotten the last time her family was in Denver, and she hopes she never does. Because before the tears and heartache were those few days over Christmas in 2006, when a blanket of snow covered the streets and everything a family is supposed to do at Christmas was done by them. Never did they think it would be the last.

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“It was wonderful,” she said. “We flew up there and we were there a couple of days before Christmas and we went shopping and we decorated the tree. We did all of that. That was our last family memory that we had and they were good memories.

“Unfortunately we don’t celebrate New Year’s at all. I probably should start trying to, but we don’t celebrate it.”

Leonard, the longtime girlfriend of Darrent, returned to Fort Worth with their two children after the holiday, believing at some point they could live together in Denver. Darrent was only beginning his career, but it wouldn’t be long before he solidified his place among the league’s top corners.

But in the early hours of New Year’s Day, Leonard awoke in the middle of the night and checked her phone to see a string of missed calls from the home of Darrent’s grandmother. When she called back, Darrent’s aunt answered and ordered Leonard to rush over with Darius, then 7, and Jaelyn, then 4.

So Leonard slipped on some clothes, corralled her two young children and raced over, finding the front door wide open. Darrent’s aunt instructed Leonard to lay the kids in the back room to sleep, then dropped the news on her.

“I came back in the living room and was like, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’” Leonard recalled. “‘He’s gone.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean he’s gone?’ She was like, ‘He got shot. He’s dead. He’s not coming back.’

“I just fell down on the floor and started crying.”

Leonard assumed her kids were asleep and unable to hear or comprehend the sorrow in the next room. She awoke them at daylight before Darrent’s name was splashed across the morning news.

“That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, to tell my kids that their father is gone,” Leonard said. “They didn’t understand. They were too young. But the only good thing I can say out of all of that is God gave us our last Christmas with him a couple of days before that.”

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Leonard later learned that Darius was not asleep at all. He told her he was “fake sleeping,” and could hear every word. He cried to himself the rest of the night because at 7 years old, his father was everything. His father was his hero.

His father still is.

“I remember a lot, really,” Darius said. “He would pick me up from school. He has this blue Impala. Old-school Impala. Rims, butterfly doors, bunch of screens in there. He would pick me up from school and go to my granny’s house, and he would back the car in and everybody, all his homeboys, they used to come play Madden in the trunk.”

Darrent’s souped-up 1996 SS Impala was both a mark of where he had been and the bumpy road he traveled. Much like its owner, the car was bold and unapologetically flashy, built for both sport and entertainment, yet designed to also be for a family.

His nickname “D-Will” was stitched into the steering wheel and stamped inside the trunk, at least four TV screens were built into the passenger cabin and a bigger screen was installed in the back. The outsize rims left only a small layer of rubber visible to the eye, and the custom doors swung up instead of out because, well, why the hell not?

Darius also remembers the water slide Darrent bought him for his 6th birthday. He remembers the pee-wee football practices he attended and he remembers that day it sunk in that his father was gone.

“I don’t think it probably really hit him until he saw his daddy in his casket,” Leonard said. “I remember he used to ask me, ‘Does heaven have cell phones?’ so he could call his dad.”

Among the lasting images from Darrent’s funeral in Fort Worth was of a young Darius, wearing a pinstripe suit and bawling in the arms of his mother as they stared over Darrent’s casket.

Broncos owner Pat Bowlen chartered a flight to have the team attend the service. Many offering words that evoked more tears. Others were unable to confront the emotions that overwhelmed them.

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“I very much believe that God has a plan for all of us, but that one was hard to take,” former Broncos safety and current 49ers general manager John Lynch said. “A young man — and even then there is a plan for him — but it just seems so senseless what transpired. He had left some trouble that he had been in and involved with, and he had really made something of his life and was really intent on seeing that through, and not only doing that with himself but helping others.

“So to see it so senselessly end, it was just sadness.”

The last game Darrent played was against the 49ers, on New Year’s Eve 2006. In an overtime loss, Darrent had three total tackles and a pass breakup, then headed downtown to celebrate the holiday and the birthday of Kenyon Martin at Safari nightclub. Hours later, he was gone.

“I had gone to a separate party with John Elway and when I got back that night, I got a call from Champ,” Lynch recalled. “That’s who I got the news from about what had gone down. It was just so heart-breaking.”

What Lynch prefers to remember is the guy he often refers to as just a kid.

Like that time the Broncos hosted the Redskins amid freezing rain in 2005 and Lynch had trouble hearing the call in the huddle because of a chattering in the background — a chattering from Darrent’s teeth. He was shivering so severely he had to be taken inside to warm up.

“I said, ‘D-Will, you gotta go get some help man,’” Lynch said. “I thought this guy was gonna die of low temperature. He was so lean and the cold had just gotten to him. They had to take him inside and heat him up, but we laughed about that forever.”

Or the kid who responded to most anything with “All ready.”

“We’d say, ‘D-Will, we gotta get this one today,’” Lynch said. “‘All ready!’ So that became the rallying cry. He was just a cool, cool dude. He really was.”

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And those times when it became clear to Lynch that Darrent was more than just a fearless football player with 4.3 speed and unteachable instincts. Darrent confided in Lynch that he had troubles in the past but was determined to live right for himself and for those who had undergone similar hardships.

“He was kind of a guy who was wise beyond his years and brave beyond his years,” Lynch said. “He’d come up to you and say, ‘Hey, I’m really trying to do some good things in my life. Can you talk to me? How do I do these things in the community?’ He knew I had a foundation. ‘Those are things I want to do. How do I do that?’ He was not afraid to ask questions, so we became very close through being in the same room, but also him sharing some of those things, deeper conversations.”

Nick Ferguson, a fellow Broncos safety and now host on 104.3 The Fan in Denver, was set to get married the day Darrent died. When he saw a 303 area code pop up on his phone, it was Thomas McGaughey, then the Broncos’ assistant special teams coordinator, who was calling to tell him the news.

Distraught, Ferguson believed a wedding hours after Darrent was killed would be too much. But at the urging of teammates, the ceremony went on. Every New Year’s Day, he celebrates his anniversary and mourns the loss of Darrent.

But every day he wears the blue rubber wristband he has had since Darrent left, with his name and jersey number, and the dates he was born and died.

“I’ve worn it every day since the tragedy,” Ferguson said. “My kids are not even allowed to touch it.”

That wristband is also a reminder of what could have been — a hypothetical that still brings tears for Ferguson.

“He was the type of guy who was a tough SOB playing corner,” Ferguson said. “He would come up and hit you, he had the ability to turn any interception into a big play, he’d be punt returner, kickoff — he could have been sensational. Some of the guys now, I think about what Tyrann Mathieu is. I think about what Patrick Peterson is. He could have easily been in that conversation because he had that big-play ability and he had that attitude. It’s just wild what he could have been.”

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To Bailey, Darrent could have been what Chris Harris Jr. became. The ninth-year corner has been selected to four Pro Bowls and is the only two-time winner of the Darrent Williams Good Guy Award, given annually by local media to the Broncos player who best exemplifies Williams’ enthusiasm, cooperation and honesty in dealing with the press.

“He was walking that same path, young, hungry and talented,” Bailey said. “That’s why when Chris came in, I was like, ‘You remind me so much of Darrent. D-Will is just like this.’ And he knew all about D-Will. It just made me want (Harris) to succeed more.”

In the weeks and months after Darrent died, Bowlen and his players decided the best way — the only way — to honor him was to fulfill the dream he often shared with Lynch and others. Darrent was involved in the Boys & Girls Clubs in Fort Worth and the team’s club in Denver.

So the Broncos raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund a teen center at the Broncos’ club and named it in Darrent’s honor. In May 2008, the Darrent Williams Memorial Teen Center opened to grand fanfare, as players, Darrent’s mother and other family members celebrated his life and lasting impact.

“That’s where his heart was,” Lynch said. “It’s a tremendous legacy that lives on.”

A statue of Darrent still guards the club, and murals of him in his No. 27 jersey adorn the walls inside. The team has devoted close to $5 million into that club and it remains the only Boys & Girls Club that is fully funded by a U.S. professional sports team.

“He would have loved it,” Ferguson said. “To see kids like himself have an opportunity where they can go and work on computers, where they can learn — it’s a place of hope. No matter what we do in life, we all like to be validated. That place is validation for those kids.”

In 2017, while in a coaching internship with the San Francisco 49ers, Ferguson sent Darius a care package, loaded with team-issued 49ers gear. Darius had just graduated from Arlington Heights High and was bound for A&M-Commerce.

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In the years since Darrent passed, Ferguson has stayed in touch with Darius, talking to him about defenses and route concepts, and urging him to be cognizant of the people he associates with in social media messages he publishes.

Tierria did meet someone else after Darrent, but after five years in which Darius and Jaelyn grew close to him, he died after a battle with cancer.

“So me and my babies have been through more than what a normal person my age would have been through. Just imagine at 23, 24 years old, the man that you love, the father of your two kids, is just instantly gone,” Leonard said, her voice starting to crack from the emotion. “My life drastically changed within a blink of an eye. You don’t think when you have kids that you set up to be a single parent. But stuff like that, you don’t have a choice.

“I used to cry so much and just try to hold back tears when I would see family members and their kids with their father. It just hurt. My daughter won’t ever have her daddy to walk her down the aisle. She won’t have none of that.”

Loss and heartbreak have been a constant for Leonard and her children, while stability has remained elusive. Leonard’s father stepped up to try to fill the void, taking Darius to the barbershop each week when he was younger. Former Broncos running back Tatum Bell has remained in contact with Leonard, along with receiver Javon Walker, who held Darrent after he was fatally shot that New Year’s Day. And Ferguson has stayed a mentor to Darius.

To ease the pain of the last 13 years, Leonard has kept her family busy. She has maintained the same job since she was 16. Darius played basketball and football at Arlington Heights, and now spends the majority of his months at A&M-Commerce. Jaelyn, 17, played volleyball and ran track, but is focused on the latter and hopes to earn a college scholarship.

When Leonard looks at photos of Darrent now, she thinks back to that Christmas in 2006, when they celebrated as a family and saved some of their happiest moments for last. When she looks at her kids, she always sees Darrent.

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Jaelyn has his smile, and Darius is a mirror image of his dad. When Darius is on the field wearing No. 27, Leonard is convinced she’s watching Darrent.

“I play with passion. I just got a big heart,” Darius said. “I’m a little taller than him, but I have that dog in me. I feel like I got that from him.”

Darius and Jaelyn have yet to see the Darrent Williams Memorial Teen Center, but Leonard hopes to one day show her kids how their father’s legacy lives on Denver.

In the meantime, Darius is on a mission to carry out Darrent’s legacy in his own way.

In Pueblo, he did as he always does before a game and watched the same two-minute highlight reel of his father. He also watched footage of Mathieu, one of his favorite players, then slipped on his No. 27 jersey and promised himself he’d go even harder to honor Darrent.

Although the Lions lost, Darius recorded five total tackles, then added four more (including three for loss) and a blocked kick the following weekend in a win over rival A&M-Kingsville. And the day before the Broncos game, Darius and A&M-Commerce will host Midwestern State in a Division II Showcase game nationally televised on ESPN3.

Darius says his goal to help A&M-Commerce reclaim the Lone Star Conference title, which it last won in 2016. He wants to lead the team on a deep run in the NCAA playoffs and he wants to keep “balling,” just as his father probably would.

Each time, he’ll have his father close, penned on his wrist tape and cleats: “9-27-82 LLDW #27.”

Long live Darrent Williams.

(Top photo of Darius Williams (27): Texas A&M-Commerce Athletics)

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