“Fuck the Patriots,” one man said. “I’m a Jets fan!”
Once again, Hernandez decided to walk away. There were too many hecklers to deal with. Splitting from Wallace, he walked north, passing the Avon Cinema’s old, historic marquee. But the crowd from Viva followed him, heckling loudly.
For once, Aaron was glad to see the police, who arrived quickly to break up the crowd. The cops were concerned that Hernandez was going to be assaulted—and a few men from the crowd did manage to break away and follow Aaron as he walked toward his car. But the police scrambled and detained them, too.
As they did so, a Brown University police officer patrolling a few blocks away saw a man toss a small handgun under a parked car. The campus cop yelled after the man, who ran up the block, crossed the street, and disappeared from sight.
The cop never got close enough to identify the man, with any certainty, as Ernest Wallace. But he did retrieve the handgun.
It was the Jimenez .22 that Wallace had purchased down in Belle Glade.
The gun was fully loaded.
Part Six
Chapter 47
Aaron had been manning the grill all day. Three days earlier, on May 29, Shayanna had turned twenty-four.
Now that the weekend had come, she and Aaron were going to party all the way through to Sunday.
If Aaron had spent the past few weeks arming himself, preparing for an all-out war with Alexander Bradley, he’d done an excellent job of concealing his fears from his friends.
Dozens of friends and family members had spent the afternoon at his place, jumping in and out of the swimming pool, drinking, eating off the grill. Shayanna’s sister Shaneah was there, along with her boyfriend, Odin.
Once again, his mask was firmly in place.
DJ Hernandez was at the house, too, along with Shayanna’s uncle, Azia “Littleman” Jenkins, and Aaron’s friend and henchman, Bo Wallace. Slowly, as the day progressed, people left, until only a dozen remained. Now, with nighttime approaching, that dozen piled into a party bus Aaron and Shayanna had booked for the occasion.
They were headed to Rumor, a nightclub in Boston. The trip would take an hour each way, but inside the party bus the music was blasting and booze was flowing freely.
When they arrived, Aaron and his friends found that Rumor was packed.
This was no surprise—the club was one of Boston’s most popular nightspots. But Aaron Hernandez was a VIP, and the staff at Rumor made sure that he and his friends got a good spot to continue their party.
The club closed at two. Aaron’s bus made its way back to North Attleboro. Odin Lloyd split off for home.
Lloyd lived just a few miles away, in Dorchester. Unlike Aaron, who only played football, Odin played football and worked for a living. Like his girlfriend, Shaneah, Odin had dreams, and was willing to do whatever it took to realize them.
But, Odin had to admit, hanging with Aaron Hernandez was fun.
A week later, he, Aaron, Shaneah, and Shayanna were partying again, at South Street Café in North Providence. Odin and Aaron went outside, several times, to smoke marijuana. Hernandez’s nickname for Lloyd was “Blunt Master”—Odin was just that quick, rolling his blunts. Aaron went through blunts almost as quickly as Odin could roll them. And when a waitress stepped outside to ask Aaron and Odin to smoke somewhere else, Aaron laughed her off.
The truth was that marijuana had never been a big deal for Aaron. The promises he had made before signing with the Patriots had all been forgotten. As time went on, an acquaintance recalls, Hernandez became brazen about it.
“First of all,” the acquaintance says, “Aaron was always into drugs. Obviously, he had failed drug tests. But the crazy thing was, he became so flamboyant about what he was doing with drugs. I know for a fact that there was a player’s phone that he would take and do drug deals on. A phone right there, in the Patriots’ locker room.”
It was as if Aaron was making the point, yet again, that everyday rules did not apply to an Aaron Hernandez.
Another work week went by and then, on June 14, Odin was back at Rumor, along with Aaron Hernandez and Aaron’s barber and friend, Robby Olivares. A friend of Odin’s—a man named Kwami Nicholas—was also at the club that night.
Along with other witnesses, Nicholas would later say that it looked as if Aaron and Odin were not getting along. Outside of the club, Nicholas said, Aaron and Odin got into an argument. Surveillance videos taken that night back Nicholas up: It shows Hernandez waving his arms angrily. Afterward, he and Odin gravitated toward different groups in the club. They remained apart for the rest of the evening.
Some witnesses would say that Aaron was angry at Odin for talking to people, inside of the club, that Aaron had not wanted Odin to talk to.
Some said that those people were friends of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado—the Cape Verdean men who had been gunned down outside of another Boston nightclub, a year previously.
It’s also possible that Lloyd was talking to West Indian cousins of his at the club, and that Hernandez took those men to be Cape Verdean.
Whatever the conflict had been, Aaron and Odin seemed to have resolved it by the time the club closed. They left together, with Aaron picking up a couple of women on their way home.
One of those women, Jennifer Fortier, was the on-again-off-again nanny for Aaron’s daughter, Avielle.
Chapter 48
Like many NFL wives and girlfriends, Shayanna had come to accept the fact that Aaron would not—or could not—be faithful to her.
A few years earlier, Shayanna had caught Aaron cheating and moved out for several weeks. When they reconciled, it had been on Aaron’s terms. “I made a decision that if I was going to move back with Aaron, I would have to kind of compromise on his behavior—and that included infidelity and everything that came along with it,” Jenkins would say on the witness stand.
But Aaron did not go out of the way to flaunt his indiscretions. That was one of the reasons he’d gotten himself an apartment in Franklin.
Located ten miles away from Gillette Stadium, the apartment was a crash pad for Aaron and his friends (Bo Wallace stayed there on several occasions), as well as a place to smoke weed. The Patriots’ director of player development, Kevin Anderson, had helped him to rent it in May.
It was Aaron’s destination on the night that he and Odin Lloyd argued, and Aaron took Odin, Jennifer Fortier, and Fortier’s friend, Amanda DeVito, along for the ride.
Jennifer Fortier was young and attractive. With her dark hair and high cheekbones, she looked a bit like a lighter-skinned Shayanna Jenkins. On the witness stand, she would say that she and Amanda had just left the club when they spotted Hernandez, who was sitting in an SUV with Odin Lloyd and Robby Olivares, the barber.
“I just looked over and there he was,” she explained. “I walked by and I saw him, and I looked in and he saw me and said, ‘hello’—and then he said, ‘get in.’”
Fortier says that she had asked Hernandez for a ride to her car, parked a few blocks away. Aaron said yes. She and Amanda climbed in the back, where Robby was sitting, and Aaron drove off in the opposite direction.
Surprised, Fortier asked Hernandez to turn around. “I kept telling him I needed to leave, because I was the babysitter and I wasn’t comfortable.”
Several times, Fortier asked Hernandez to bring her back to her car. But Aaron was already out on the highway. “There’s a rest area,” he told Fortier. “Do you want me to drop you off here?”
The nanny refused. She had no idea where they were, it was the middle of the night, and the battery on her cell phone had died.