I was at the Combine in 2013,” says Albert Breer, the sports reporter. “I went out to dinner with Aaron and asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ An obvious question, because it’s not common that veteran players are at the Scouting Combine. He told me he was there to meet with Belichick. He was going to tell Belichick that he was planning to spend the off-season rehabbing in California—that he’d got an apartment out there. His story at that point was, ‘I’m doing it to be closer to Brady.’ That was during a period when Brady was spending a good chunk of his off-season in LA, at the house that he and Gisele had in Brentwood.
“What I found out later was that his reason for staying out of Massachusetts was that he was too close to Connecticut—and the heat was on. But I remember, on that night he had his hood over his head and was nervous and darty.”
According to Ian Rapoport, Hernandez “came to Indy to meet with Belichick and ask to be traded. Basically, to tell Belichick, ‘I’m in trouble.’ Like he was getting heat back home. At that point, he was dealing with gangs and gangsters and starting to get really paranoid—maybe for a reason. He wanted to get traded. The Patriots ended up saying that the best way to do it was for him to train—to rehab—in California, where Brady was. To do his rehab and get away from Bristol.
“At the Combine, I went out with a bunch of buddies. Aaron’s agent, Brian Murphy. Albert Breer. Greg Bedard, who at that point worked at the Boston Globe. A couple of other people. We’re having drinks. That’s what happens at the Combine—everyone has drinks with everyone. Agents, players, personnel people, coaches. Murph says, ‘Hey, a friend of mine is going to show up.’ It turns out to be Aaron. He hangs out with us, has a bunch of beers.”
Afterward, Hernandez went out with Breer, Rapoport, and Bedard. “We went to an Irish bar close by,” Breer says. “There was a friend of mine who’s a scout for another team and this guy—his team had had Aaron off the draft board. When we bought shots, the scout raised his glass to Aaron and said, ‘Man, we were wrong about you.’ Think about that stuff in retrospect. It’s mind-blowing. We didn’t know anything about the double murder in Boston. I lived down the street from where those murders happened and didn’t even hear about them—they weren’t a big news story in Boston. Someone who was working with Aaron in Florida told me, ‘He’s the most talented liar I’ve ever been around.’ But the thing about Aaron was, he was a total chameleon. He was just as comfortable walking with executives as he was walking to the corner in Bristol, Connecticut. He could blend into whatever environment you put him in. I think that was why he was able to get away with a lot of this stuff. But on that one night, while we were there, he seemed fidgety.”
“We went to one bar,” Rapoport says. “We went to another bar. We got fairly drunk and had a good time.”
Breer recalls drinking Irish Car Bombs. Rapoport does not remember Aaron being especially fidgety. But as the evening wore on, Rapoport saw Aaron’s mood turn.
“He walks outside to get a cab, and we look out there he’s peeing on the cab. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, Aaron, what are you doing? You can’t do that!’ Greg Bedard had to go out there, shake him loose, and say, ‘You can’t do these kind of things.’
“Aaron got very angry, but sort of didn’t understand why he couldn’t do that. He was just doing what he wanted. It was interesting.”
“The thing with Aaron fit into this mosaic of a guy who thinks he’s above the law,” Breer says today. “A guy who operates outside the law, or the rules, or whatever they are. That’s the way I would look at it. With Aaron, it was just part of a larger picture.”
Chapter 44
Hernandez may have told Belichick that spending the off-season in California would bring him closer to Brady. Brian Murphy may have thought that Hernandez had moved out west to get away from bad influences in New England. But Hernandez did not see a lot of Tom Brady in the months that followed, and he did not keep himself out of trouble.
The cement house that he and Shayanna rented in March, at the corner of Lyndon and Hermosa Beach Avenue in Hermosa Beach, looked out over the Pacific Ocean. The idea was to spend two months in paradise: he would relax, spending time with Shayanna and their baby daughter. Instead, he found himself flying old friends, like Bo Wallace, out from Bristol—and, eventually, fighting with Shayanna.
On the evening of March 25, a call came in to the 911 dispatcher in Hermosa Beach. Shayanna was calling. Aaron had just hurt his hand.
“I need an ambulance,” Shayanna said. “Immediately. He’s losing a lot of blood, he cut himself.”
“Where did he cut himself?” the dispatcher asked.
“On his wrist.”
“Did he do this on purpose?”
“Yes,” Shayanna said. “Are you sending someone?”
“Ma’am, I’m making up the call right now. You need to be calm.”
The dispatcher asked Shayanna if her fiancé had ever threatened to hurt himself in the past.
“No,” Shayanna said. “No, no, no.”
She and Aaron had simply gotten into an argument.
Moving down her checklist, the dispatcher asked Jenkins if alcohol or drugs had been involved. “No,” Shayanna said, emphatically.
After a bit more prodding, the dispatcher finally got Shayanna to admit that Aaron had put his fist through a window. “You didn’t say that before,” she told Shayanna. “You made it sound like he cut himself.”
“He’s bleeding!” Shayanna yelled. “I don’t know…”
If the dispatcher couldn’t help her, Shayanna said, she should put somebody nice on the line. Then, before the dispatcher could say anything else, Shayanna hung up.
On several occasions, Aaron’s neighbors were the ones who called the police.
At around the time of the 911 call, Aaron and Shayanna visited a tattoo parlor in Hermosa Beach and got a set of matching tattoos.
Remind me that we’ll always have each other, Aaron’s read, referencing a lyric by the band Incubus.
Shayanna’s tattoo completed the verse: When everything else is gone.
But a few days later, on April 2, the police were called out to Aaron and Shayanna’s rental. When they arrived, they heard fighting and saw that furniture had been thrown around the room.
When the police asked Shayanna to file a report she declined.
Nine days later, on April 11, Aaron drove to a Bank of America in Hermosa Beach to make some deposits. One check, from the Patriots, was for $1,835,809.97. Another, from Puma, added $30,000 to Aaron’s balance. After depositing the checks, Aaron asked the teller to wire $15,000 to a Florida bank account belonging the parents of Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez.
According to charges prosecutors would file in District Court in Massachusetts, Papoo passed the money along to Bo Wallace and two other men, who used the funds to buy two pistols, a Colt AR-15, a Hungarian-made AK-47, and a used Toyota Camry—which was used to ship the pistols and the AK-47 from Florida to Aaron’s home in North Attleboro, where Shayanna Jenkins ended up signing for it.
Aaron liked the tattoos that he and Shayanna had gotten well enough to return to the shop.
This time, he wanted a tattoo that depicted the smoking muzzle of a semiautomatic handgun, like the one that had been used to shoot Alexander Bradley. He asked the artist to ink a spent shell underneath it.
Above his wrist, Aaron got a tattoo of a revolver with five bullets in its chamber, and had the phrase “God Forgives,” written backward so that it could be easily read in the mirror, tattooed beside it.
Subsequently, prosecutors would argue that chambered bullets symbolized the five shots that were fired on the night of the double murder in Boston.
All the while, Aaron was receiving a steady barrage of text messages from Alexander Bradley—who had not forgiven Hernandez at all.