In the weeks and months that followed, police officers in and around North Attleboro would take it for granted that Jennifer Fortier had made up her story. As far as they were concerned, it was obvious that “Hernandez had been banging the babysitter.”
If Fortier’s cell phone was dead, why did she wait until the very end of the night to use DeVito’s? And what was DeVito herself doing, during the duration of this ordeal?
Whatever the answers were, the cops reasoned, Fortier’s trip to Franklin gave Aaron Hernandez a reason to be suspicious of Odin Lloyd, and anything Odin might have said to Shayanna’s sister.
In truth, any number of things could have caused Aaron and Odin to argue, earlier that evening or afterward. Aaron could have told Odin about the double murder, then had second thoughts. Odin might have overheard something about the shooting of Alexander Bradley. Or, Aaron might have seen Odin speaking to friends of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu, and grown suspicious.
Law enforcement officers would also come to believe that (despite his supposed affair with the nanny) Aaron was bisexual. If so, the possibilities shifted: The police wondered if Aaron had made a pass at Odin. If Aaron was bisexual, their reasoning went, he had gone to great lengths to conceal it. If Odin had rebuffed him, there was no telling what Aaron would have done.
Of course, there were other possibilities: Aaron and Odin had gotten drunk, gotten stoned, and had some stupid, drug-induced misunderstanding. Or, Aaron was so paranoid that he had picked an argument over nothing. In the past, Alexander Bradley had reined Aaron in, to an extent. But now, Alex Bradley was gone—or, not quite gone.
If anything, Bradley’s refusal to quite go away might have set the stage for Odin Lloyd’s murder.
The fact of the matter is, no one knows. What we do know is that, within twenty-four hours, Odin Lloyd was dead.
Chapter 51
That Sunday—Father’s Day, June 16, 2013—Aaron Hernandez texted Brian Murphy. He caught the agent just as Murphy was sitting down in church.
Murphy knew about the threatening texts from Alexander Bradley. He had advised Aaron not to reply. He’d been in the room for a phone call between Mark Humenik, general counsel for Athletes First, and Bradley’s lawyer.
Murphy and Humenik had discussed the possibility of a monetary settlement—Bradley was asking for $1.3 million—with the lawyer. But the phone call had failed to produce an agreement.
Aaron’s agent had also directed him to Ropes & Gray, a law firm with offices in Boston.
Murphy had been a lawyer himself. After graduating from Harvard Law, in 1995, he’d spent a few years working at Ropes & Gray. He knew the firm’s lawyers in Boston well, and had flown there, after the texts from Bradley began to come in, to discuss the matter with them and with Aaron.
Despite their best efforts, the texts kept on coming.
Don’t understand why if you was man enough to shoot me you ain’t man enough to compensate me, Bradley had written.
And: I guess I’m a bitch cuz when I think about what you did I cry.
And: How I felt when you did me like that in front of them niggas was heartbroken and ego-torn. Dog, niggas in my hood was saying ‘this nigga let this Bristol ass nigga smoke him.’ Thought I was retarded till I started coming through and hitting niggas up for spreading rumors about me or my kids.
And: I’m not going to allow you to go on living this high life without compensating me for that bum sucker shit.
Despite Murphy’s advice, Aaron couldn’t help but engage. Time and again, Hernandez told Bradley he loved him. That there was no one else he could trust. And, at times, Bradley adopted the same affectionate tone: If you really loved me and then you’d want to settle this. And whatever is in store for us is in store. If we’re going to be cool again that’s what it’ll be but it gotta start with resolving this incident that went down.
Listen, Bradley told Hernandez, again, I hate that it comes to this but you can’t go through life consequence free when you do certain shit. You should want to do this if you really miss and love me. It’s crazy enough in itself that I really don’t even feel a way toward you, in the sense that I don’t even think about trying to hurt you or anyone you love. It’s really like I have forgiven you, but you gotta do what you gotta do, meaning you know this conversation thing is inevitable. I hate the fact that I even gotta handle this like this. You shoulda been offering this to me. But just like it was real when it happened to me, it’s real. It’s going to happen to you if we can’t resolve this. And I know you know that I don’t lie about this shit. You were my brother, best friend, and a lot of things to me…
But, for all of Bradley’s pleading, Aaron had not offered to compensate him. If Bradley was trying to game him for evidence, Aaron would simply deny having shot him. But, of course, Bradley knew who had shot him. He knew that Aaron knew. This made Aaron’s denials all the more infuriating. And so, Bradley finally took action.
For months, Bradley had been threatening to file a civil lawsuit against his former friend.
“You’re the closest thing to the police without being the police,” Hernandez had told him.
(“The matter of me trying to sue him, he was trying to equate that to me being a snitch,” Bradley would say.)
Nevertheless, on June 13, Bradley had finally filed the lawsuit.
Now, with Bradley backing him into a corner, Hernandez was texting his agent.
Maybe the lawyers could get him out of this jam.
Chapter 52
The sun was sinking slowly in Boston. Odin Lloyd’s football team, the Boston Bandits, had just arrived at a high school football field for a Father’s Day scrimmage against the Eastern Mass Seminoles.
Lloyd’s coach, Mike Branch, was unloading gear in the parking lot when he saw a brand-new black Chevy Suburban roll in.
“Nice car,” the players said. But it wasn’t the SUV that had the coach’s attention. It was the driver.
“Odin?” Branch said.
The coach knew that Odin did not own a car. If anything, Odin was known for his habit of showing up to football games on a BMX bike.
“Whose car is this? You ain’t got no goddamn car!”
Lloyd told Branch that he shouldn’t worry, but Branch did not let the matter drop.
“I’m just going to go to the glove box and see whose car it is,” he told Odin. “Odin was like, ‘You know whose car it is!’ That’s all that he had to say.”
“How’s it hanging with that dude?” Branch asked.
“He’s all right,” Lloyd said. “He’s cool. He dropped some money at the bar the other night.”
Lloyd had played for the Bandits since 2007—the year that Aaron began playing for Florida. Since then, Coach Branch had seen Odin lose his job as an electrician and go to work as a day laborer for a landscaping firm. The coach knew that the work was hard. “He was busting his ass with the landscaping,” Branch remembers. He would ride Odin’s ass about getting onto a better career path: “I know he didn’t want to be a police officer,” Branch says. “I’m like, ‘Why not go into firefighting? You’re big. You’re strong. You care about people.’”
Branch worked as Chief Probation Officer at the district court in Brockton. He took his coaching role seriously. His players thought of him as a big brother, and he took an interest in their off-field lives. When Odin fell in love with Shaneah Jenkins, he took notice.