April 9 had been a near perfect day, glorious in the Louisiana spring, before the humidity settles in like a compress. After practice, Kevin had gone down to the French Quarter Festival, then watched the sun set over the Mississippi. The house party was a bust, though. Cardell and Kevin left after a half hour or so, didn't even have a drink, and started driving downtown. They were going to Tipitina's, the famous music club in an old warehouse on the river.

Cardell drove east on Magazine Street. He braked for a red light at St. Andrew. He felt a vibration shudder through the Hummer.

He looked in the mirror at a Mercedes SUV on his bumper, then at Kevin.

“We get hit, big brother?”

“Yeah, soul,” Kevin said, low and slow, the way he always talks. “We got bumped.”

At the end of every day at Warren Easton High, the principal, Philmon Edwards, would get on the PA and read whatever news or events had to be announced to the student body. Then he finished with the same simple directive: “Govern yourselves accordingly.”

Kevin hadn't been sure exactly what that meant back then, before he and Cardell graduated in 2005. But it stuck with him, as any phrase repeated so many times will, and eventually he figured out it was a reasonable guide worth following at any given time.

Cardell remembered it, too. So when his Hummer got tapped on Magazine Street, he did the proper thing, which was to pull to the curb. It was probably nothing—“Bear's so big,” Kevin told me, “and the car's so big, he wasn't even sure we got hit”—but a person governing himself accordingly will stop when he's been involved in a minor traffic mishap. “I thought we'd get out and look at it and there wouldn't be any damage, and we'd just say, ‘All right, forget it, go have a good night,’ ” Kevin told me a few weeks after the fact. There was no need to get the authorities involved. “Black people,” he said, “don't want any encounters with the police.”

But the Mercedes didn't stop. It maneuvered around the Hummer, then accelerated across St. Andrew and onto a short street called Sophie Wright Place.

Cardell had been dinged once already in a hit-and-run. His Hummer had been broken into, too, and his insurance kept ticking up.

He wheeled away from the curb and followed the Mercedes. He figured he'd at least get the plate number. Kevin pulled out his phone to call 911.

There are a few reasons Will Smith might not have wanted to pull in behind Cardell's Hummer, the main one being he didn't think he'd hit him, thought he'd braked soon enough and hard enough to stop short. Another was that he was driving a $140,000 vehicle and if some asshole wanted to carjack him, coaxing him to the curb would be a fairly common way to start. A third might be that he'd drunk himself three times over the limit and didn't need to make any unnecessary stops. Or, finally, it may just have been that he was Will Smith: Queens born, Utica raised, first-round pick out of Ohio State in 2004, at one point among the highest-paid defensive players in the NFL, a reported $70 million with all the options.

He'd spent the day at the French Quarter Festival with his wife, Racquel, and a couple they knew from Kenner, where they lived. Pierre Thomas, another former Saint, and Billy Ceravolo, the retired cop, joined them later at Sake Cafe. At some point, their friend from Kenner called her brother, and he drove over in his Chevy Impala.

Thomas and Ceravolo left first, for the bar at the Windsor Court Hotel, a boutique place downtown. The other five left together at about 11:20: Smith, Racquel, and the couple from Kenner in the Mercedes, the brother alone in his Chevy, a car or two ahead.

After Smith got around the Hummer, he caught up to the Chevy at the corner of Sophie Wright and Felicity Street.

Cardell was right behind him. Taillights flashed, Cardell stomped heavy on the brakes. The Hummer's front end dipped, slid into the back of Smith's SUV, not hard enough to pop the air bags but with enough force to shatter the Mercedes's rear window, spiderwebbed glass held together by the tinting film. The Mercedes, in turn, bumped into the rear of the Impala.

Kevin caught his balance. Already, two white guys were charging toward the Hummer.

Govern yourself accordingly.

Kevin left his revolver when he got out.

Cardell opened the driver's door, stepped onto the pavement. He had his .45 in his right hand, held at his side, pointed at the ground.

In New Orleans, that is a perfectly legal thing to do.

“What kind of person,” Kevin asks one day, “sees a guy like Bear, someone that big, standing there with a gun, and keeps coming at him?”

He was at a sidewalk coffee shop in Treme, Kevin and three of Cardell's other friends, about a month after the shooting. The question was rhetorical. It is agreed by acclamation that the proper response in such a situation is to abruptly stop, back up, and speak as calmly as possible.

The other question, though, is why Cardell was standing in the street with a .45 in the first place. The reflexive answer to that, too, is agreed by acclamation: Would you ask a white man that question? “He was a legal gun owner in an open-carry state,” Kevin says. He lets that hang there for a moment. “Where the fuck is the NRA?”

An armed society, it has been said, is a polite society.

Hayes and his friend Kevin O'Neal traded fender benders with a reportedly intoxicated Smith. Michael Democker Things quickly escalated and a gun was drawn. Michael Democker

In any case, it also is agreed that Cardell did not intend to threaten anyone—only to indicate he was capable of protecting himself. He was not a violent man but rather, at that moment, the proverbial good guy with a gun. If anything, Cardell was aware of how much damage a man his size could inflict, how much conflict he could attract from any meathead with something to prove. He was gentle by nature, but even gentler to compensate for his size. “He was the only person I knew who was logical about everything,” Tiffany told me. “He always thought everything through.” Dwight Harris knew Bear wasn't a tough guy. He was at Lance's before it all happened, and he had his Can-Am, one of those three-wheeled motorcycles, parked behind the chain link around the lot next door. Cardell always wanted to ride it, but he never would. He'd climb on and Harris would start it and Cardell would sit there, pondering. Then he'd shake his head, switch it off. “I ain't about to kill myself today,” he'd always say. “I'm gonna run into something.”

Harris is at the coffee shop, listening to the gun debate, which keeps coming back to the same question because everything that happened after seems to depend on the answer: Why did Cardell have a gun, and why was he holding it? Harris finally lets out a heavy, definitive sigh. “Man, the same reason nuns walk around with guns,” he says. “It's New Orleans.”

Four days after it happened, at the hospital where Racquel Smith was still being treated, a lawyer for her and the rest of the Smith family, Peter Thomson, explained their version of how it came to be that Racquel's femur was fractured and her husband was dead.

Will Smith did not believe he'd bumped Cardell's Hummer, Thomson said, and therefore didn't see any reason to stop. Everything after, in Thomson's accounting, happened because Cardell is a rageful lunatic. He chased Smith, rammed his Mercedes, leapt out “enraged, yelling and cursing,” he said. Racquel, who'd been in the backseat, got out and pleaded with him. “Leave us alone,” she said, according to Thomson. “Go back to your car. We have children. This is not worth this.”

Right about then, in this version, Cardell kneecapped her, put one round in each thigh. “We have evidence,” Thomson continued, “that the killer showed no remorse whatsoever, that he actually stood over Will Smith's dead body, as his wife had crawled away because she couldn't walk and is cowering.” And then some especially gangsta shit: “The killer is yelling over the body of Will Smith after he killed him.”