In Javon Walker’s home in suburban Houston, there are reminders of the wide receiver's playing days with the Broncos from 2006-07. He has a jersey, a helmet and a bronze statue of a horse head that sits on his desk.
Inside the closet in his bedroom is another reminder, one that is anything but routine.
Early in the morning on Jan. 1, 2007, after a New Year’s Eve party in downtown Denver, Walker was riding in a limousine with Broncos teammate Darrent Williams. The limo was sprayed with bullets by a gang member, killing Williams, a promising cornerback and beloved teammate who had just finished his second season.
In an interview with HBO’s “Real Sports” in August 2007, Walker revealed that Williams, spouting blood, had died in his lap and that he still had the blood-stained clothes the receiver was then wearing. More than 17 years have passed since the tragedy and Walker in his Cypress, Texas, home continues to hold onto the long-sleeve white shirt and jeans stained with Williams’ blood.
“If I walk into my closet right now, I still have them in a specific spot,’’ Walker told The Denver Gazette. “They’re in a bag and they’re folded nice and neat. It’s always going to be in my closet. If I’m moving, I take it with me.
“I touch them every now and then. It’s something that I’m always carrying with me. I remember when his mother (Rosalind) hugged me (after Williams’ death) and said, 'You’re the last person my son saw alive.' So I have the feeling that having been in these clothes still means something to me that I never want to get rid of.”
Walker was close friends with Williams, and what happened always will be on his mind.
“It still touches me,’’ he said. “That’s always something that crosses your mind from that night. I always think about what Darrent could have been because he was a young rising star. ... We were going into the New Year and I can vividly remember him laying in my arms, blood and everything squirting out of his neck, and I’m not sure what was going on until after I lowered the music (that had been playing in the limo). That’s a memory that will never leave me.”
At that time, Walker, two years after catching 89 passes for 1,382 yards and 12 touchdowns for Green Bay, was coming off another impressive season, one in which he caught 69 passes for 1,084 yards and eight touchdowns for Denver. But things would go downhill after the Broncos concluded the 2006 season with a 26-23 overtime home loss to San Francisco on Dec. 31 that knocked them out of the playoffs.
Less than 10 hours after that game, at 2:10 a.m., Walker’s close friend would be dead. The following season, Walker suffered a right knee injury in the third game that limited him to eight games and he caught just 26 passes for 287 yards. That led to the Broncos releasing him after the 2007 season.
Walker soon signed a six-year, $55 million contract with the Oakland Raiders, but it didn’t turn out well. He was robbed and badly beaten while in Las Vegas in June 2008. With Walker saying his right knee never felt like it had before, he ended up catching just 15 passes in two years with the Raiders and then was out of football after eight seasons at the age of 31.
“It was a tough stretch for him for a couple of years,’’ said Nate Jackson, a Broncos wide receiver and tight end from 2003-08. “His career was going great and then his friend dies in his arms and then you have an injury and leave the team and then move and then you get robbed and beaten in Vegas.”
Walker, 45, said he is now at peace with his career not finishing how he had planned.
“At least I gave a glimpse of what I could be before those injuries,’’ he said. “People will say, ‘It wasn’t like you were a slouch.”’
After football, Walker moved on to have success as a professional bodybuilder and now as a businessman. Walker, who took good care of his money when he played, owns several apartment complexes and two Menchie’s frozen yogurt franchises in the Houston area.
Walker hasn’t been back to Denver since he sold his home in Centennial in 2012. But he now would like to reconnect with the Broncos.
“I’ve always been a fan of Denver, football or no football,’’ he said. “Denver was always one of my favorite cities. … Being with two great organizations, the Packers and the Broncos, helped prepare me for the business world. … I need to get back to Denver.”
Walker hasn’t seen a Broncos game since he was finishing out his career with the Raiders. But he would welcome attending one for the first time as a fan and perhaps talking to “some of those young up-and-coming entrepreneurs” on the Broncos.
Former Broncos safety Nick Ferguson would like that to happen. Ferguson, the Denver chapter president for the former player division of the NFL Players Association, wants Walker to return when the Broncos host the Las Vegas Raiders on Oct. 6 during Alumni Weekend at Empower Field at Mile High.
“Broncos Country should definitely appreciate him for that 2006 season and even though he wasn’t the same in 2007, he did add to the growth and development of a young wide receiver, Brandon Marshall,’’ Ferguson said of the mentoring by Walker that helped Marshall become a star. “He should be loved and appreciated. I’m going to work to try to get him back here.”
Ferguson, who played for Denver from 2003-07 and is a local media personality, remembers the excitement from when the Broncos acquired Walker from Green Bay in 2006 for a second-round pick. Walker, taken with the No. 20 selection out of Florida State in the 2002 draft, had played his first four seasons with the Packers.
“I remember that Monday Night Football game against the Raiders when (Green Bay quarterback) Brett Favre’s father passed,’’ Ferguson said of the Dec. 22, 2003 game at Oakland when Walker had four catches for 124 yards and two touchdowns in the Packers’ 41-7 win. “Javon was fighting through double and triple coverage to free himself to make the catch and I said, ‘Man, we could use a guy like that.’ He was a special talent."
In Walker’s second season of 2003, he caught 41 passes for 716 yards. Then he erupted in 2004 for the Packers and made the Pro Bowl while being regarded as a rising star.
“It was a good year for me and I was right up there with those other top receivers in the league,’’ Walker said.
In 2005, though, Walker was lost for the season in the first game when he suffered a torn ACL. And he ended up asking the Packers to trade him when they wouldn’t give him a contract extension to his liking.
After going to the Broncos, Walker looked in 2006 to be all the way back from his injury. He had three games with more than 100 yards receiving, including on Nov. 5, 2006, when he caught six passes for 134 yards and two touchdowns at Pittsburgh and also had a 72-yard touchdown run on an end-around.
“He was a really dynamic player for us that season,’’ Jackson said. “He had some monster games, like the one in Pittsburgh. He had some pretty phenomenal individual efforts in that game.”
The season ended, though, in disappointment when a 36-yard field goal by the 49ers’ Joe Nedney with 1:56 left in overtime eliminated the Broncos from the playoffs. Later that day, Walker went out on New Year’s Eve with several Broncos players, including Williams and Marshall, and a dispute arose.
Witnesses at the murder trial said the defendant, Willie Clark, exchanged words with Marshall and that the confrontation escalated when someone in a group that included Broncos players sprayed champagne. Clark later fired at Williams’ limousine from another vehicle.
Sports Illustrated reported that Clark targeted Marshall, but he didn’t realize he was riding in a different limousine. Clark eventually was sentenced to life in prison.
“We really bonded,’’ Walker said of his close friendship with Williams. “We were relatable to each other with food, music and culture. We had a lot of similarities that connected us.”
Walker was up all night talking to police and arrived at the Broncos practice facility on the morning of Jan. 1. Players were previously scheduled to be there to clean out lockers and Walker showed up in the same bloody clothes he had been wearing in the limousine. Photographers captured photos of his arrival.
“We all had known Darrent was dead,’’ Jackson said. “It was shocking to see how close (Walker) was to dying himself, to watch your friend die in your arms and he has blood all over his shirt like that.”
Ferguson said he believed the death of Walker continued to affect Walker in the 2007 season.
“In my mind, he was never mentally the same,’’ Ferguson said.
Walker, who wore a “fro-hawk” hairstyle during the 2007 season in the same manner Williams once did, claimed the death of his friend did not affect his play on the field. He started the season with games of nine catches of 119 yards at Buffalo and eight receptions for 101 yards against Oakland. But in the third game against Jacksonville he hurt his right knee.
“I had a very serious knee injury and still to this day it affects me,’’ Walker said. “That’s probably when it started going downhill (for him as a player). It was a torn meniscus and they said I would be out four to six weeks. I had surgery and came back during the year but it was never the same. When you have that type of injury, I should have shut it down (for the season), especially being a receiver where your job is planting and cutting.”
After his injury, Walker missed seven straight games and eight of the next 10. In five late-season games that he did play, he had just seven catches for 57 yards. With Walker out much of that season, Marshall, in his second year, blossomed and finished with 102 receptions for 1,325 yards. That was first of Marshall's three straight 100-yard catch seasons for Denver.
The Broncos, rather than pick up a $5.4 million option bonus on his contract, released Walker on Feb. 29, 2008. Looking back, Walker said he is “kind of sad” his time in Denver “wasn’t long enough.” But the archrival Oakland Raiders soon signed the free agent to the lucrative deal that included $16 million guaranteed.
Before Walker played in a game with the Raiders, he was out with some friends in Las Vegas on June 16, 2008. He eventually was separated from them and ended up being robbed by two men of jewelry and cash that was said to have a total value of $75,000. According to reports, an extremely intoxicated Walker was beaten badly and found unconscious on a Las Vegas street.
“I was in the hospital for a week and then I had my mouth wired shut for eight weeks,’’ said Walker, who suffered two broken bones in his face and a concussion. “After something like that happens, you just take a step back and you reflect, ‘Why are all these things happening to me?’’’
One of the men who attacked Walker, habitual criminal Deshawn Lamont Thomas, was sentenced to life in prison. The other, Arfat Fadel, took a plea bargain and was sentenced to a maximum of eight years.
Walker said he changed his ways after the robbery. He made it a point to no longer stay out late at night, no longer carry lots of money and expensive jewelry, and he sought to make himself less accessible to fans.
Walker said the injuries sustained in the robbery didn’t affect his tenure with the Raiders but that his knee did. During training camp, with his knee ailing, he offered to return his signing bonus of about $10 million and retire.
“I went into the office and sat down with (then-Raiders coach) Lane Kiffin, and I said, ‘I can’t give you what I obviously got paid for and I’ll just give back the signing bonus and just retire,’’’ Walker said. “But (then-Raiders owner) Al Davis kind of talked me out of it. He said, ‘Hey, just keep on trying,’ and that’s what he I did.’’
Walker had a poor 2008 season, catching just 15 passes for 196 yards. In 2009, he got into just three games without a catch and was inactive for the other 13 before being released.
Walker did sign with Minnesota during training camp in 2010 but was released two weeks later. And that was it for his NFL career.
“After my football career, I went on just a big, health-nut binge,’’ Walker said. “I transformed my body.”
Walker became involved in bodybuilding and won some amateur competitions. Midway through the last decade, he turned professional and had some finishes in contests as high as eighth and ninth.
Before competitions, Walker said he would undergo a “peak week” in which he would eliminate carbohydrates from his diet and get down to as low as 1% body fat.
“That was harder than football,’’ Walker said. “There’s nothing harder than a ‘peak week.’ Basically, you’re drying out your body and you want no fat, so that every vein, every muscle pops out symmetrically for the judges.”
The 6-foot-3 Walker retired from bodybuilding when the coronavirus pandemic began to shut down competitions in 2020. But he has continued to work out 2 hours each day and has maintained about 7% body fat while saying he now rarely drinks alcohol. He weighs 205 pounds, about 10 less than his playing weight.
“Some of the people that I played with, they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. You look like you could still play,’’’ Walker said.
Walker said one of his keys after football has been to learn how to eat in a healthy manner. He looks back at his playing career and wishes he would have been doing so then.
“When I was 22, 23, 24, young and living on athletic ability, I could eat a bucket of chicken and go play in a game,” he said. “If I was eating like I am now, I’m wondering back then if I had 150 yards in a game, maybe it could have been 170.”
Walker also has become savvy in real estate. He lived in Centennial until 2012 before he sold his house for $1.2 million to a random buyer who knocked on his door. He figures the house now would be worth more than twice that amount.
“That’s when I was still learning about real estate,’’ he said. “I was a newbie at that time.”
Walker has learned plenty since then, with his ownership of various properties in the Houston area. He had owned four Menchie’s stores but recently sold two for a good price. Now, he’s looking into some other investments.
Asked if he might want to buy a Menchie’s in Colorado, Walker said he only has a franchise license for the Houston area. But he still would like to get back to Denver for the first time since he sold his house.
“I’m telling myself I need to get back to Denver and just enjoy a game,’’ he said.
That might happen in October.
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