Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Dave Hyde column [Sun Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.]

Nov. 24--On a hot summer night in Tucson, Ariz., Don Soldinger fights off stale classroom air and the smell of young men's dreams on the last stop of a tour of national football camps.

Soldinger is surrounded by sweating, high-school kids who want him to reveal the secret. He knows this. He sees their attentive faces, earnest muscles and, most of all, the manner they react to photos of University of Miami players he coached during his speech entitled, "Attitude of a Champion."

There's a photo of Devin Hester on the screen. "He's the story of desire," Soldinger tells the kids, noting Hester overcame bad SAT scores, sat out a year and persevered to the NFL.

There's Frank Gore. "He's the story of courage," Soldinger says, for Gore overcame poverty, grades, two major knee surgeries and made the NFL.

"There's Sean Taylor," Soldinger says.

The veteran coach stops for a beat when this picture appears because the air gets sucked out of the room. Or maybe it's just him. Maybe it's just the way he feels each time this photo of Taylor from the 2007 Pro Bowl is shown, body attacking, arms flexed, ferocious as ever in mid-tackle.

Soldinger first saw Taylor as a youth attending Miami's summer football camp. He saw Taylor grow each year -- 10, 11, 12. At one point in those years, he walked over to Taylor's father, Pedro, and said the kid had a special talent.

Pedro beamed, even if he recognized the talent already. By the time Sean was in high school, Pedro had him doing 700 pushups and running a mile-and-a-half before school. He also took Sean after high-school practice for a workout of their own.

When Sean played on Soldinger's special teams as a Miami freshman in 2001, Taylor was unlike anything the veteran assistant had seen. And he only got better, all the way to the Pro Bowl where, a few days before all the sadness to come, Taylor took Soldinger aside, apologized for some past behavior and said, "Everything is coming together for me, coach."

"Sean is the story of aggressiveness," Soldinger tells these high-school kids. "At least 50 percent of success in football can be attributed to aggressiveness. I never saw a player more aggressive than he was. It's a mindset. It's more than that. He embodied so many qualities you look for in a football player."

He says, "He was as good as I've seen."

The room is quiet. Soldinger is quiet. Everyone knows how this story ends in sadness, with Taylor's murder four years ago. But what they don't know is the sadness never actually ends for those closest to him. It just goes on each day. And on.

"It's a shame what happened," Soldinger tells the kids.

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In Homestead, in a three-bedroom townhouse, in a living room where the bills are piling up again, Donna Junor drops her voice to a whisper and tells of recently ripping up a photo of her son from his Lauderhill youth team.

Other family members have learned to live in pain. Junor is trying. To that end, she took down the air-brushed portrait of Sean hanging in the living room a year ago and gave it to a friend.

"I couldn't take seeing Sean there every day," she says.

But when she came across his youth-league photo in a box of mementos, she couldn't stop herself. It bubbled up a happy memory about his first year playing on that flag-football team. He was, what, age six? Seven?

She worked then, so her oldest daughter, Monika Martin, took Sean to the games. One day, Martin told her mom how everyone at the park cheered for Sean. So Junor went and, sure enough, her boy was faster and more athletic than the other kids. And she saw for herself. Everyone did cheer him.

"That was the start of him playing football," she says.

And there it was in that photo.

"Something snapped," she says.

The next thing she knew, the photo was in shreds.

"I can't explain it."

Like that photo, so much has been torn since Taylor was murdered Nov. 27, 2007. The dream house where he died while his fiance and baby hid under a bed became a haunted house. It sat empty for more than three years, boarded up, then foreclosed, and finally selling in April for $460,000 -- or nearly half what Taylor paid in 2007.

Taylor's family, always fractured as his parents never married, has divided even more. Her side of the family doesn't meet for the regular barbecues, birthdays and football games like it did when Taylor played.

"He was the center of the family, and that center is gone now," says Taylor's younger half-brother, Jamal Johnson. "So, no, we don't all get together much anymore."

The emotional wreckage of losing that center is accentuated in Junor's case by another festering, one of finances. As a child, Sean often told Junor and his grandmother, Augla, he would take care of them. He even had their names tattooed on his arm as a young man to show what they meant to him.

"My mom was his world in some ways," Martin says. "As kids, we didn't have the worst or roughest life. But he saw my mom struggle, work late at night, sacrifice for us. And even as a young boy, he'd say, 'Don't worry, mom, you won't have to work much longer.' "

Sean made good on his promise. With the $18 million contract he signed with Washington, Sean bought his mom this townhouse for $222,000 and his grandmother an equal one.

He was generous with all his family. Clothes. Gifts. He took a large group of them on a vacation to Puerto Rico. He bought cars: a Mercedes with a "Sean21" license plate for his mom; a Yukon truck with a "Sean36" license plate for Jamal.

It wasn't unusual for Taylor to give staggering sums of cash to family, such as the $10,000 in bags he gave to Jamal and their sister, Sasha, who then flashed the money at a party attended by a Fort Myers man named Jason Scott Mitchell.

Today, Mitchell is one of four men awaiting trial for the murder of Taylor in an apparent burglary turned tragic.

"Sean's generosity got him killed," Jamal says.

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In death, a conflict between generosity and responsibility rose again: Taylor left no will. The bulk of his estate -- $5.7 million -- passed to his young daughter, Jackie Taylor, who lives with her mother, Jackie Garcia. Recently remarried, Garcia through family declined to comment.

Records show Taylor's father received $325,000 from a shared bank account with Taylor. Martin received $650,000 from a life-insurance policy. His mother, three other half-siblings and several cousins who enjoyed his generosity for years received nothing.

Martin, a special-needs teacher in Dade, bought a home for herself and children. She helped her mother pay bills. But they both admit Junor became so accustomed to Sean being a financial "lifeline," as Martin said, it was hard to change.

"I didn't accept he was gone," Junor said.

By 2009, Junor couldn't pay real-estate taxes or homeowner association dues on the townhouse. Collection agencies began calling. Then lawyers. Foreclosure proceedings began. She went without TV, then electricity, then phone service.

Word of her plight trickled back to the NFL. A collection was taken up by Taylor's former Washington teammates like Clinton Portis and Chris Samuels.

"That's what saved me," she said. "I would've lost this home if it wasn't for them."

She sighs. "I'm not going to ask anyone in my family for money. But it shouldn't come to that, should it?"

Two years later, she says, the cycle is repeating. Bills are unpaid. Calls are coming. A storm is rolling on the horizon. She says her substitute teacher's salary isn't enough to change this situation.

"I never thought I'd be having these problems at 51. I miss Sean, because I love him. He was my son. And I miss him for how he helped us."

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Somewhere along the way, others found a way to live with grief. A year after his death, Jamal adorned his right forearm with the same "ST" tattoo Sean had. Jamal added "R.I.P." and "11-28-07" for the date of his death.

Nine other siblings or cousins have similar memorial tattoos to him on their arms, shoulders -- even across the back in the case of cousin Nakisha.

Pedro Taylor, the police chief of Florida City, wears a white, "R.I.P," band on his wrist. But if he really wants to remember his son, he just watches his granddaughter. Jackie is 5 now, an age when traits blossom in a child.

Sometimes Pedro will see her kick a soccer ball, dribble a basketball or just turn her head and be taken back in time. That walk. That smile. That lanky frame at this age.

"That's Sean's twin," Pedro says.

"She's got the same long legs Sean had at that age," Martin agrees. "She can't sit still, just like Sean. She picks things up quickly like he did."

There's another young Taylor, too. Pedro's son, Gabriel, is 9 now and attending the same Miami football camps that his late half-brother did at that age. Pedro laughs and says, yes, he's an athlete.

That's backed up by Taylor's former teammate, Vernon Carey, a Dolphins lineman. Carey's son played Gabriel's team this summer in a basketball tournament, and the NFL lineman couldn't help but remember Sean, his amazing athleticism and everything they accomplished at Miami together, including the 2001 national title. He saw so much of Sean in Gabriel.

"He dribbled through our whole team," Carey said at Dolphins camp. "He was amazing. I went up to him after the game and said, 'You keep that up and you'll be playing just like your brother.' "

Pedro only laughs. "We'll see. We'll see."

On the other side of the family, at the other end of the spectrum, Junor sits in her townhouse. She looks at the space on the wall where Sean's portrait hung. And she has a question.

"Do you think if I call the Lauderhill league, they'd have a copy of that photo I ripped up of Sean?"

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