For Dee Anderson, March 11, 2008, was the apex of his young life. In a Diddle Arena packed with a few thousand screaming fans that included the rabid student sections of heated rivals Greenwood and Bowling Green, Anderson scored 15 points and grabbed 12 rebounds to lead Greenwood to a 57-49 victory and a Fourth Region basketball championship.

He’ll never forget the chaotic post-game celebration.

“That was the best experience I ever had, seeing all the fans going crazy,” Anderson recalls. “I loved seeing the smiles on other peoples’ faces.”

Few faces were smiling more broadly than Anderson’s that night. Only a sophomore, he was already a big man on campus as a two-sport star.

Anderson first gained notice at GHS as a freshman football player, a running back and defensive back who flashed signs of brilliance (110 yards and three touchdowns in a victory over Ohio County, 129 yards and three more scores in a loss at Christian County).

He followed that debut in football with a freshman basketball season that saw him consistently scoring in double figures for a Gator team that won 25 games and reached the regional championship game.

An injury wiped out Anderson’s sophomore football season, but he bounced back to lead the GHS basketball team to only its second-ever trip to the Boys’ Sweet Sixteen tournament in Rupp Arena.

In that moment, Anderson’s future seemed clear, with the only question being which uniform he would wear. He would either be running to daylight for some college football team or filling the basket with layups, dunks and 3-pointers as a next-level hoops star.

“He had that aura about him,” said Mark Nelson, Anderson’s football coach at GHS. “Dee’s name started coming up when he was a sophomore. Other coaches talked about how good of an athlete he was. There was a lot of talk about Dee going to college. He was probably a (NCAA) Division I kid. There were a lot of schools asking about him.”

‘Some nights, you can’t sleep’

Today, though, as he looks back on those glory days, Anderson is wearing a decidedly different uniform. As Warren County Regional Jail Inmate Dederic Anderson, he’s decked out not in athletic gear but in an orange jumpsuit, serving a lengthy sentence for what happened on another defining date: Jan. 10, 2021.

In the wee hours of that freezing-cold morning, Anderson used a .40-caliber handgun to shoot and kill 23-year-old Tayveon Bibb in front of the Three Brothers Bar on Bowling Green’s East Main Avenue.

It was the culmination of a disagreement between Anderson and Bibb that was serious enough to lead the former star athlete to purchase the pistol and use it when confronted by Bibb.

Just as his touchdown runs and rim-rattling dunks had defined a teenage Anderson, his pulling of the trigger that night was both defining and determinative. He ended the life of a father of two children and also ended his freedom for years to come.

After at first denying that he shot Bibb, Anderson pleaded guilty last October and was sentenced to 23 years in prison on charges of murder, first-degree wanton endangerment, tampering with physical evidence, possession of a handgun by a convicted felon and second-degree fleeing or evading police.

These days, as he awaits eventual transfer to a state prison, Anderson has plenty of time to reflect on that fateful night as he’s housed in the cramped county jail.

“It’s not good at all,” he says. “He (Bibb) had kids, I have kids. Sitting in this place here is hard. It ain’t easy. Some nights you can’t sleep, thinking about it.

“I read the Bible a lot, and I hope to get my forgiveness one day from the Lord. I try to be the best person I can.”

‘He was a game changer’

“Trying to be the best” might be an apt description of a young Anderson. Born to Bowling Green High School two-sport athlete Corey Cook and cheerleader Maria Anderson, he showed athletic promise as early as elementary school and became a star at Drakes Creek Middle School.

Raised primarily by grandmother Teresa Woodson, Anderson led his youth-league football team to a Toy Bowl championship and was good enough in basketball to earn a spot on travel teams made up of promising young players.

“Even as a little boy, he was really good at football,” Cook said of his son. “He was pretty fast, and he caught on quick.”

Once Anderson reached seventh grade, the coaches at Drakes Creek Middle School and Greenwood High quickly realized they had a special athlete on their hands. At 5-foot-11 as an eighth-grader, Anderson was already dunking the basketball.

“He was a game changer for both Drakes Creek and Greenwood,” said Jef Goodnight, who coached Anderson in basketball at DCMS. “We always had good teams at Drakes Creek, but Dee was next-level. Without a doubt, he was the best athlete I ever coached at Drakes Creek. He just brought us to a different level.”

That level led to an undefeated season in football and a middle school conference championship in basketball. Such accomplishments, though, are not what Goodnight remembers most about Anderson.

“When my son Mason passed away seven years ago, one thing I remember is that Dee came to the visitation,” Goodnight said. “That meant more to me than anything. Dee is a good person. He just made some bad choices.”

‘Perfect role model’

Blane Embry, who coached Anderson in basketball at Greenwood, has a similar recollection.

“He was one of the hardest-working players I’ve ever coached,” Embry said. “Dee never took a practice, game or play off. He was the perfect role model for the older and younger kids. To have a kid that talented to do everything you asked was a program changer.”

Embry recalls some of the many “special plays” that Anderson made: coming up to the GHS varsity as an eighth-grader and making an immediate impact, demanding to guard an opposing team’s best player and then shutting him down, and pouring in 35 points in a Senior Night game against Allen County-Scottsville.

But it’s a moment that had nothing to do with scoring a basket or snaring a rebound that Embry remembers most vividly.

“My fondest memory was immediately after I told the team about my wife’s breast cancer in February of the regional championship season,” Embry recalled. “Dee put his arm around me and said, ‘Coach, we got this. We’re gonna win it for Mrs. Embry.’ ”

That sophomore-year championship was hardly Anderson’s last shining moment at Greenwood.

As a junior, the 6-foot-1, 170-pound Anderson led the Gator football team’s offense in rushing and the defense in interceptions as Greenwood advanced to the second round of the Class 6A state playoffs.

“He was dynamic as a junior,” coach Nelson said. “At times, we snapped the ball straight to him in a wildcat formation. We would get him the ball and let him go.”

‘I shoulda stayed with football’

Anderson followed that big junior year in football with an equally successful basketball season, leading Greenwood in scoring, rebounding and steals. But it was a decision made after that season that Anderson now believes may have started him down the wrong path.

In the summer after that junior year, Anderson quit going to football practice, leading him to miss the entire season.

“I shoulda stayed with football,” he says now. “I had more college offers for football than basketball. But being young and dumb, that’s what I did. I had actual offers from some big schools. Kentucky really wanted me to come. (Kentucky coach) Joker Phillips really wanted me to come.”

His father agrees that dropping football was a life-altering fumble.

“He had a couple of scholarship offers for football,” Cook said. “If he had just stuck to it and put his mind to it, he probably could’ve played in college.”

Instead, Anderson concentrated on a senior basketball season during which he would have to go up against such future college standouts as Bowling Green’s Chane Behanan (Louisville) and Warren Central’s George Fant (Western Kentucky).

He more than held his own, scoring 630 points for the season and leading the Gators to a 21-9 record. He finished his Greenwood career with 1,831 points, second in school history only to Daymeon Fishback, who went on to play at Auburn University.

That’s the kind of resume that often leads to college offers, but it wasn’t in the cards for Anderson.

“We talked about it some,” Embry remembers. “He was talented enough to play, but I’m not sure he liked school enough. His sport was really football, and he definitely could’ve played college football.

“I wish I would have pushed him more towards trying college basketball, at least for a year.”

‘Just went in the wrong direction’

Despite squandering his football potential, Anderson hardly seemed destined for a life behind bars. He got what he calls “decent grades” and even served as a peer tutor, helping GHS special education teachers work with special needs students.

“Dee was always just a great kid,” said Cheryl Tipton, a former GHS special education teacher. “He’d do anything you asked him to do. I never had any indication that he was involved in anything bad. He was good working with the kids, and they liked him.”

Lane Embry, one of Anderson’s Greenwood teammates, recalls him as “humble and laid back.”

“It was hard not to like him,” Lane Embry says.

Likewise, Embry recalls Anderson as a likable student-athlete.

“It’s not for me to judge what went wrong,” he said. “I like to think he just got in with the wrong crowd and made some really bad decisions along the way. The Dee I knew in high school would have never done anything to this magnitude. I refuse to believe he is a bad person. He just made some bad choices.”

Anderson himself grows pensive when asked where his path diverged.

“Right out of high school, I just went in the wrong direction, just hanging with the wrong people,” he said. “It was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I guess it has been downhill since then.”

The downhill slide began in 2012, when Anderson and two of his cousins — Daurion James Ray and Tevin Allen Anderson — were arrested and charged with first-degree arson and second-degree criminal mischief.

“I tried to stress to Dee that everybody who says they’re a friend isn’t always a friend,” said Woodson, his grandmother. “You can’t trust everybody. These were guys who were relatives, cousins. Sometimes family can be your worst enemy.”

Anderson’s worst obstacle proved to be the criminal record stemming from that initial crime and others that followed.

“Having a criminal record makes it hard,” said Cook, Anderson’s father. “A lot of people don’t want to look past that.”

Especially potential employers. Anderson found it hard to hold down steady employment, although he did find work at Woodcraft Industries, Dollar General and in food service.

Then, Anderson says, his choice in friends again led to problems, this time the kind that prompted him to be carrying a gun on that fateful January morning.

In a written statement presented at his December sentencing, Anderson said: “I was friends with Antwan Britt at a time when he and Tayveon were having problems with each other, and I did not mean to get involved, but my connection to Antwan led to Tayveon believing that when Antwan was targeting him that I must be too.”

Anderson said he started getting threats from Bibb but “didn’t really take the threats all that seriously until he threatened my grandmother. He sent me a picture of her house, and we had a telephone conversation immediately after where it was clear that he wanted me to believe my grandmother was in danger.”

Anderson said the threats then extended to the mother of his two children.

“I felt I had to do something to protect my family, so I got a gun and began carrying it,” he said.

Still, Anderson insists that he wasn’t looking for trouble on the night he shot Bibb.

“I was not looking for Tayveon that night,” he said in his statement. “I was carrying the gun to protect myself, but I was not expecting to see him. When I did, everything happened so fast. As soon as I realized he was there, he was already punching me.

“In the split second that I had to make a decision, I made the decision to shoot. I didn’t know if he had a gun. Now knowing that he didn’t, I know it was a mistake, but I didn’t know that night. I wish Tayveon had known the truth about me, that I wasn’t coming after him. I had no intention of hurting him. I wish none of this would have happened.”

‘I looked at Dee as a brother’

Troy Halcomb has an aging photo of the Warren County Wildcats AAU basketball team from about 20 years ago. He’s in it, along with Anderson and a 5-year-old Bibb, Halcomb’s younger stepbrother. Halcomb now looks at the photo in disbelief.

“Once upon a time, I looked at Dee as a brother,” said Halcomb, who played with or against Anderson in football and basketball from elementary school through high school. “In this picture, Tayveon has a big smile on his face. We were his role models.

“Never in a million years would I think that someone I looked at as a brother would take my brother’s life. Seeing how it affected my sister and my mom has been really hard. I know his children were everything to Tayveon. He wanted to be a good dad to his kids.”

The tragedy of Bibb’s death is worsened for Halcomb because he believes it could have been avoided.

“The Dee that I knew wasn’t that type of person,” Halcomb said. “If he had thought about it, he wouldn’t have done that.”

And, Halcomb reasons, if Anderson had simply reached out to his childhood friend maybe Bibb would still be alive and Anderson would still have his freedom.

“I didn’t know that Dee and Tayveon had any issues,” Halcomb said. “That was a surprise to me. To this day, I don’t know what the issues were.

“I thought that me and Dee had a better relationship and that if he had a problem with my brother he could’ve reached out to me. If he had, it could’ve been different.”

‘There’s still light at the end of the tunnel’

Like Halcomb, Anderson’s grandmother still struggles to understand what happened.

“I never dreamed of anything like this,” Woodson said. “But what has happened doesn’t make me love him any less.

“I truly hate that this happened. I feel so bad for the family in their loss. I remember seeing Tayveon’s mother in court. I wanted to go up and give her a hug. To this day, I would love to give her a hug.”

Anderson’s father still regrets that his son didn’t parlay his talent for sports into a college degree, but he believes the deal he got through the guilty plea gives him hope for some type of future.

“I hope this is a lesson learned for him,” Cook said. “I tell him that this is time you can use to think about what you need to do to turn your life around.”

Although he at first resisted pleading guilty, the 32-year-old Anderson now believes the sentence negotiated for him by public defender Alyson McDavitt gives him hope.

“The day before my trial was to start, my lawyer said they offered 23 years and that was the lowest they would go,” Anderson recalls. “She said if we lost at trial I could get 70 years.

“I had to pray about it and think about it. I have two kids out there. I’ll still be able to get out and be a part of their lives. There’s still light at the end of the tunnel. My kids will be older, but I’ll still be able to spend time with them.”