Both of them had too much to lose, Bradley said.
Just then, a promoter who worked at a club called Caprice recognized Aaron and invited him in. He offered the men table service. They declined, but entered the club, walked up to the bar, and ordered drinks. Then, turning around, Hernandez told Bradley that the men they had run into at Cure had followed them into Caprice.
“See, see!” he said. “There they go!”
Hernandez was wrong: Daniel de Abreu, Safiro Furtado, and their friends were still at Cure, where they would stay until closing time. But Aaron was sure that he’d seen what he’d seen. Now, Alexander Bradley would have to convince him to leave the second club they had gone to that night.
Chapter 34
Alexander Bradley would say that, after leaving Caprice, he and Aaron got back into the 4Runner and drove it around the block. They parked on a side street and smoked some more weed. Then, Hernandez popped the hood, removed the gun he had stuffed in the engine block, and put it in the glove compartment. Driving back out to Tremont Street, they parked just beyond the garage they had parked in earlier that evening and waited for the clubs to get out.
Destiny Phon, a drag queen in Boston’s theater district, was working that night as the DJ at a club called Underbar. When the club closed, she and a friend decided to run out for Chinese food.
As they were leaving they bumped into Aaron Hernandez, who was “lounging” outside. Destiny was not a sports fan, but her friend followed the Patriots and recognized Hernandez immediately.
“I couldn’t really care less, but I looked and thought, ‘Oh, he’s very handsome,’” Destiny says.
Bradley would say that he and Hernandez were waiting outside to meet women. Instead, they saw Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado exiting Cure.
“There they go, there they go!” Hernandez shouted as he ran back to the 4Runner. Bradley got behind the wheel. Seeing a silver BMW drive past them with de Abreu and Furtado inside, Hernandez said, “Go, go, go!”
For de Abreu and Furtado, the rest of the evening had passed without incident. They had stayed at the club until closing time. Then, at 2:19 in the morning, de Abreu, Furtado, and Aquilino Freire walked toward the garage where they had parked the BMW. The plan, Freire would say, was to circle around and pick up Raychides Gomes-Sanches and Gerson Lopes outside of the nightclub.
A few minutes later, the BMW pulled back around. De Abreu was driving, Furtado sat in the passenger seat, and Freire was in the back. Gomes-Sanches and Lopes joined them there and the five friends pulled off into the night.
Don Gobin and Brian Quon worked security at Underbar. Twenty minutes after closing time, they walked one of the club’s promoters to his car, then walked down Tremont to the silver Saturn they had driven up from Rhode Island that day.
“It was a warm night,” Gobin says. “But it was very quiet. There were no cars. There were no people. It was like a sci-fi movie, with papers blowing around. Usually folks are out, taxis are waiting. But we went down to our car, started it. I was driving. Brian was in the passenger seat. Out of the blue, in the rearview mirror, I see this car come whizzing up on the passenger side of our vehicle. It comes out of nowhere, pulls up to our car. Two or three feet away from our car it stops. I said to Brian, ‘Who is that? Is that someone we know?’ We knew a lot of people. We figured, maybe it’s somebody playing a joke. But Brian looked up at the driver and said, ‘No, I don’t think we know him.’”
Leaning over Bradley in the SUV, Hernandez looked down into the car they had pulled alongside. (From the Saturn’s passenger seat, it would have looked as if Aaron was driving.) He expected to see de Abreu or Furtado. Instead, he saw Brian Quon.
It was the wrong car. The silver car they were looking for was a BMW.
Bradley gunned the 4Runner’s engine and ran the red light.
“He’s in a rush,” Gobin said to Quon.
The men watched the 4Runner speed up and overtake the next car.
“The next thing we heard was gunfire,” Gobin recalls. “My first reaction was to look in the rearview mirror. I didn’t see anything. Then I said to Brian, ‘Where is that coming from?’”
Quon pointed straight ahead, at the SUV that had pulled up beside them seconds earlier.
“It’s coming from that vehicle up there,” Quon said.
As he caught up with the BMW, Bradley would say, he looked over and saw that Hernandez was holding the gun.
“Roll your window down,” Hernandez said as he leaned across Bradley’s seat.
Bradley reclined, Hernandez braced his left hand on an armrest, and stuck the gun out of the driver’s side window.
Inside the BMW, de Abreu and Furtado were both glued to their phones. Hernandez yelled, “Yo!”—but neither man looked up. But when he yelled, “Yo” again, the men turned.
“What’s up now, niggas?” Hernandez said. Then he squeezed the trigger and fired.
There were five gunshots, maybe six. Bradley would say that Hernandez emptied the chamber.
Glass exploded. Somebody screamed. Hernandez told Bradley to drive.
Freire, who was sitting in the backseat between Gomes-Sanches and Lopes, remembers stopping at a red light. Then, he would say, an SUV pulled up close—“right next to us.”
“What up, niggas?” was the first thing Freire heard.
He heard Furtado say “Pamodi?”—Cape Verdean creole for “why?”
Then he heard gunfire.
“We were still at the red light,” says Gobin. “As soon as the red light turned green, we drove toward the car that was sitting there. The SUV had already taken off. And as we pulled up to the car, the first thing we saw was that there was blood all over the side of the car. There was glass in the street. We kind of knew what we were going to find, so we pulled up cautiously. Both the driver and the passenger had been shot. They both had their seat belts on. You could tell that the passenger’s chest was not going up and down for air. Both of their heads were on the headrests and the passenger’s eyes were closed.
“The driver, his eyes were actually open,” Quon adds. “He was still breathing. Labored breathing. At that point, two individuals jumped from the back of the car. One from the left passenger door, one from the right. The first thing they did when they got out was to pat themselves down—probably to see if they got hit by anything. The next thing they did was to start coming toward our vehicle.”
“One of them came toward our vehicle, and I had my window down maybe halfway,” says Gobin. “He was just saying, ‘Can you help us? Help us! Can you help us?’”
Aquilino, Raychides, and Gerson jumped out of the BMW.
“We just went out of the car,” Aquilino would say. “I was trying to see if Safiro and Daniel was all right…And then I was all around the car, waving, like for someone to help.”
Safiro had been shot in the head. Covered in blood, he was already dead in the passenger seat.
Sitting beside him, Daniel was trying to speak.
“He was dying,” Aquilino remembered. “He was trying to say something, but he didn’t. I was trying to tell him, ‘Just keep strong. We’re gonna look for help…’”
Daniel “lasted for two minutes, or maybe a minute” Freire would say.
Destiny Phon and her friend were driving down Tremont when they saw the BMW. “All of the sudden, these guys jumped out of the car and stopped us, asking for help,” Destiny says. “One of them had been shot in the arm. Blood was rushing out. We said, ‘Put pressure on it!’ We didn’t want to get out of the car. We didn’t know what was happening. We just said, ‘Dude, chill, chill, stay away from the car and we’ll call 911.’”
“Did you see that?” Hernandez said. “I think I got one in the head and one in the chest.”
Aaron took off the T-shirt that Bradley had loaned him and used it to wipe down the gun.