“Big black males.”
“Do you know what they were driving?”
“I have no information for you, sir, with all due respect.”
“You don’t want us to investigate it, or you just don’t know?”
“I don’t know…there’s very little that I know…but…with all due respect, you do what you got to do. I just ain’t got no info for you, man.”
Mingle Blake told the police that he had seen an SUV in the area just before hearing the gunshot. Dark green. A Ford Explorer. Maybe a Ford Expedition. Blake said there were cameras trained on the area where Bradley had been, but didn’t know if they were set to record.
The police checked and found, to their dismay, that they were not.
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Hernandez called Bradley’s baby mama, Brooke Wilcox, that morning from the Miami airport.
He wanted to know: Had Brooke seen Alex? They had been in Miami together, Hernandez said, and were supposed to meet at the airport. But now Aaron was at the airport and Alex was not.
Wilcox was alarmed by the news. She called hospitals in the Miami area. She called the Miami police, who told her to file a missing person report at her local precinct in Hartford.
All the while, she kept texting with Aaron: Have you heard from him, she would say.
Have you heard from him yet?
The bullet had ripped apart Bradley’s right eye. Miraculously, it had not gone into his brain. The next day—Valentine’s Day—Detective Kenny Smith from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital to interview Bradley, who was recovering from surgery, and found him to be conscious and cogent, if not quite cooperative.
“Where were you the night before?” the detective asked.
“Sir, I’m from Connecticut, so that could tell you how much I know.”
“Okay,” said the detective. “So, what can you give me to try to find the people that did this to you? I mean, it’s up to you, you’re a big boy, if you won’t…”
“He’s a fucking asshole, whoever did this to me!”
“Well obviously! You’ve got a big enough hole in your head!”
“Fuck yeah, I do.”
“It’s up to you,” said the detective. “You can help me. You know where you were, you know what happened, you can tell me, or you can tell me to, just what you said, F-off.”
“I’m not saying F-off to you, man, that’s the part I’m trying to get you to understand. I’m not disrespecting you by any means. I’m not saying F-off and fuck you, I’m just saying I ain’t got the means, I ain’t telling on nobody.”
“You don’t want to cooperate with the investigation. But if I don’t have a victim, I don’t have a crime. That’s up to you…That’s your choice, not mine. But you have to understand, next time they may not screw up. They may shoot better, you got it?”
Bradley took the detective’s card. He had no intention of calling and sharing what he knew with the Palm Beach police, or with anyone else.
But he did call Hernandez from his hospital bed.
“What’s up?” Bradley said when Aaron picked up.
“Who’s this?” Aaron said. He sounded surprised.
“You know who this is,” Bradley sneered. “It‘s me, it’s your boy.”
Aaron hung up on him before he could say anything more.
Bradley called Hernandez back two more times. “I don’t know why you keep hanging up,” he said when Aaron finally picked up the phone. “I didn’t tell the police on you.”
Then Bradley said something else: “You know what time it is when I get back.”
Hernandez hung up on him once again. Bradley ended up sending a text: I really do love you, my boy, but you won’t get away with that.
Chapter 42
A week later, Aaron Hernandez flew to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis and surprised Bill Belichick by telling the coach that his life was in danger.
“It’s not safe for me to be in New England,” Hernandez said, and asked Belichick to trade him—to get him out of the area. The coach told Hernandez that the Patriots would not agree to a trade.
Instead, he offered to help Hernandez with security issues in Boston.
Hernandez was nursing a shoulder injury at the time of this meeting. If he couldn’t be traded out of the area, he told Belichick, he would spend the spring rehabilitating in Southern California. That way, Aaron said, he would be closer to Tom Brady, who was spending his off-season on the West Coast with his wife, Gisele Bündchen.
The Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, has denied that any such conversation took place. Belichick, who rarely grants interviews and declined requests to be interviewed for this book, has refused any comment. And while the timeline suggests that Hernandez had good reason to be afraid of Alexander Bradley, Aaron’s agent, Brian Murphy, has a different read on Aaron’s request to be traded.
For Murphy, the request had nothing to do with Bradley and the Florida incident, and everything to do with Aaron’s need to put some distance between himself and his friends in Boston and Bristol—with troubles that Aaron had gotten himself into at home.
“From the day I met him, Aaron was constantly trying to get better as a player and as a person,” Murphy says. “He was always asking me about what books to read. Always asking what movies to watch. Always asking me, ‘How should I handle this? How should I handle that?’ He truly wanted to get better. But that’s when he was in California, three thousand miles away from Boston. When I would go to visit him in Boston during the season, he wasn’t nearly as focused on getting better. He would revert to his immature ways. He had a lot of friends from back home. And, once he got his big deal, that struggle became real for him. He was now a very wealthy NFL player—which is different than just being an NFL player. He was very high profile. He had had a lot of success. He was treated differently, both poorly and better, by his friends back home and by the people he was hanging out with back home, and he found a certain fame off the field that he enjoyed. He enjoyed being Aaron Hernandez from Bristol, Connecticut. That struggle became more real for him. It became harder and harder for him to keep trying to improve. So we sat down and I told him, ‘Listen, you have to figure out who you want to be. I can’t help you be someone you don’t want to be, and I can’t tell you who you want to be.’
“At the end of the day—and I wasn’t the only one in his life saying this—at the end of the day, he said he wanted to go all in on being a good dad, a good fiancé, a good ball player, a good teammate, and he thought that would be easier and, quite honestly, safer to do away from Foxborough. He didn’t think he could make that change in Foxborough. He thought that would be dangerous, in the sense that there’s too many old habits to fall back into, along with people would wouldn’t be very happy with his decision.
“At that point, he decided to change his life. It was a little late—right?—because he had signed his new contract, they’d paid him all the money, and he had sworn to play on the Patriots. So we said, ‘Listen, you have to have an honest conversation. Go in there and talk to Coach Belichick. Tell him how you feel, what you want to do, why you want to do it, and see what he says.’ I was going to go to the meeting with him, but Coach Belichick wanted to do it with just Aaron, which made a lot of sense to me. Nothing wrong with that. And when he came out he felt very good about the meeting. They weren’t going to trade him, but he had their support. He knew that the Patriots were going to try to help him accomplish those goals as well.”
Chapter 43