GQ – Was it only last season that Marvin Harrison was still catching TD passes for Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts? Now, in the wake of a brazen but mysterious Philadelphia gunfight—many details of which are reported here for the first time—the man who holds the NFL record for most receptions in a season may yet find himself with a permanent record of a different sort… Robert Nixon had seen everything… Marvin Harrison did not run. He stood on the sidewalk and calmly raised his wiry arms. In each hand, Nixon clearly saw, was a gun. Nixon froze. “YOU A BITCH-ASS NIGGA!” Nixon heard the fat man scream at Harrison. “YOU AIN’T GONNA SHOOT. YOU AIN’T GONNA SHOOT. DO WHAT YOU GOTTA DO.” Nixon was across the street and thirty yards away when Harrison started shooting. Pop pop pop pop pop pop—a great staccato gust of bullets. Steadily, Nixon says, Harrison unloaded both guns into the fat man’s car, stippling the red Toyota Tundra with bullet holes as the fat man ducked in his seat. Eventually, the fat man sat up and sped off… a bullet ripped through the fat man’s hand. Another bullet shattered the glass of a car containing multiple adults and a 2-year-old boy. The adults instantly bailed, abandoning the little boy in the car, the glass flowering into razor-sharp petals and bloodying the boy’s eye…

The real doozy, though, is that Harrison admits to continuous and unbroken custody of the gun.


q. Where do you store this weapon?
a. In a safe at my home in Jenkintown, Pa.
q. Today, you had it at the car wash? Do you know how it got there?
a. I brought it today, twenty minutes before you came.
q. Are you saying that the 5.7-cal handgun that you own was in the safe at your home up until today, when you decided to bring it to your shop in the 2500 blk. of Thompson St.?
a. Yes…

But the prosecutors saw the case differently… During “balls-out fuckin’ arguments” with cops, the Philly prosecutors fixated on the criminal records of the witnesses and slight discrepancies in their statements. They thought it would be hard to win the case on the backs of such blatant pieces of shit.

In all my decades of working for the Stool, I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about a more compelling article or one that was so hard to synopsize. The reporter is named Jason Fagone, and I suggest you read it in its entirety; you won’t regret it. But what the story illustrates is something the rest of the world has known since the shooting of the fat man first occurred. That Marvin Harrison is a “piece of shit” who walked away from prosecution on this case easier than he ever shook loose a rookie cornerback. The cops had an eyewitness who was willing to cooperate, they had Harrison’s own, very rare Belgian handgun, which was in his possession the day this guy got shot and matched the bullet casings at the scene. They’d done everything by the book and had an air tight case but the DA flat out didn’t want to prosecute Marvin Harrison. It’s as simple as that. So I guess if you live in the North Philly area, you’re a pro athlete with a reputation for being “soft-spoken” and “classy,” you play for an organization with a (false) rep for playing by the rules and your coach is a Bible-thumping paragon of virtue, you can basically shoot any hood rat you want and nothing will come of it.

Glad that’s settled. Now the world can get back to talking about that time Randy Moss bumped the meter maid.