“I fell to the floor. I said, ‘Someone just took my heart out.’ Then I jumped right up and said, ‘First of all, why you are coming here talking foolishness to me? How do you know that was my son?’ He said to me, ‘Ma’am, he had his wallet in his pocket with his driver’s license.’ And I just fell right back down again.
“You know throughout this whole thing—it taught me so many lessons about life. How people pretend to be one kind of person, but you find a monstrous person underneath. I never met the young man before. I can’t tell you he was a nice guy coming into the house. I can’t tell who he was. But I know who my son is, and I know that if my son knew anything negative about this individual, he would not have stayed around him.”
Chapter 55
Shaneah Jenkins’s first thought had been, “Odin’s calling.”
It was late: just past one in the morning on Tuesday, June 18. Shaneah had tried Odin several times on Monday, without hearing back. She didn’t know where her boyfriend was. But, now, as she looked at the phone, she realized she did not know the incoming number.
Trooper Benson was on the other end of the line.
Benson had been out at the clearing where Odin’s body had been discovered. He had seen the storm roll in, watched the detectives as they scoured the crime scene for evidence. Back at the station, he had called Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and traced the keys Odin had had in his pocket to Aaron Hernandez. Then, he had placed the call to Odin Lloyd’s mother.
A few hours later, the task of calling Shaneah had also fallen to him.
Jenkins cried when Benson told her that Odin was dead. She recalled meeting him, at the Comfort Suites hotel she’d worked at in Southington. That front desk job (which Shaneah had gotten through Shayanna, who had worked at the Comfort Suites herself) was one of three jobs Shaneah had held down at the time, while putting herself through college.
Shaneah was smart and ambitious, as well as hard-working. She’d planned ahead for her future with Odin.
Now, she was alone in Dorchester and Odin would never be coming home. The only place Shaneah could think to go was her sister’s house. She arrived, along with her uncle Littleman and one of her nieces, just before six in the morning, entering through the garage and walking up into the living room.
Shayanna greeted her there with a long, strong hug. Shaneah sobbed and Shayanna listened, sympathetically. Finally, Shaneah lay down on her sister’s sofa and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, from which she woke crying. She checked on her niece, who was sleeping beside her.
Then, at around eight in the morning, she watched Aaron come through the front door.
“I’ve been through this death thing before,” Hernandez told Shayanna’s sister. “It will get better in time.”
Part Seven
Chapter 56
While Shaneah slept, Shayanna ran all over the house. First, she took a large, black garbage bag down to the basement, out of view of the home’s surveillance cameras. Moments later she came back up with the same black bag and left the house, taking her sister’s car.
Inside of the bag, there was a box that Aaron had told her to get rid of.
It was still morning and Shayanna drove around “aimlessly,” as she would put it, until she found a dumpster that called out to her. She tossed the garbage bag inside, along with the box that Aaron had given her.
“I’d learned not to ask questions,” she would say.
Aaron Hernandez had also been busy. Upon waking, he’d called for a cleaning crew to come to his house. Before long, three women had arrived and gone straight to work. (Prosecutors would later accuse Shayanna of threatening the women with deportation if they talked about anything they had seen.)
That afternoon, Hernandez, Wallace, and Ortiz left the house. With storm clouds looming on the horizon, they drove to an Enterprise rental location to return the Altima he had used the night before. As they were driving, Matthew Kent, the high school student, jogged through Corliss Landing and stumbled upon Odin Lloyd’s body.
At the Enterprise, Aaron told the location’s branch manager, Keelia Smyth, that the Altima had been damaged: A broken mirror, the dent in the driver’s side door.
Aaron was polite—he offered Smyth a piece of chewing gum.
What’s a twenty-three-year-old man doing with a pack of Bubblicious, Smyth thought. Aren’t you a little old for that?
“I’m good,” she told Aaron.
Hernandez told Smyth that he didn’t know how the car had been damaged.
“I could tell he was lying,” Smyth says, today. “But he had full coverage on our vehicle.”
The manager offered Hernandez a Kia Soul.
Hernandez wouldn’t be caught dead in a Kia, he said.
“I know, I know,” Smyth replied. “I’m just kidding you.”
She gave Hernandez a Chrysler 300 instead, and Hernandez, Wallace, and Ortiz drove back to North Attleboro. It was just past five in the afternoon. Before the hour was up, North Attleboro police would be at the clearing.
At five fifteen, Wallace climbed into the driver’s seat of the Chrysler, Ortiz climbed into the passenger seat, and the two men headed up to the apartment Hernandez had rented in Franklin. While they drove, police secured the crime scene, setting up the tent and tarps they would use to keep the rain from washing evidence away.
Down at the station, North Attleboro PD traced the rental car keys that they had found in Odin Lloyd’s pocket back to Aaron Hernandez. They searched Odin’s cell phone and saw the last batch of texts that Odin had received and sent.
But “at that point,” an officer involved with the investigation remembers, “we didn’t know any more. We thought that Aaron might be dead, too.”
That evening, at twenty minutes to ten, Massachusetts State Trooper Michael Cherven and Detective Daniel Arrighi took their unmarked Ford Escape down to Aaron’s house and parked in the driveway. Lights were on all over the house—downstairs, upstairs. From the front porch, Cherven could see into Aaron’s living room. The large, flat-screen TV was on. There were half-full glasses on the coffee table. A bottle lay on its side on the couch. But when Cherven knocked on the door, and rang the bell several times, no one answered.
Cherven ended up walking over to the garage, where Arrighi gave him a boost so that he could peek through the windows, which were high off the ground.
There was a car inside. It was the Toyota Camry that Papoo Hernandez had used to ship guns up from Florida. But the police did not know that, and nothing about the car looked suspicious.
Then Cherven and Arrighi went around to the backyard. Taking out their flashlights, they looked for signs of forced entry.
“We progressed to the side of the home,” Detective Arrighi would say. “Then we walked towards the back area…There’s a large pool. A cabana. We looked inside the back quarters. There were windows in that location. We looked through.”
They were no signs of a break-in.
Aaron’s next-door neighbor happened to be the Patriots special teams coach, Joe Judge.
When Detective Arrighi and Trooper Cherven knocked on his door, the coach told them he hadn’t seen Aaron since June 13, at a practice. He confirmed that Hernandez played for the Patriots, but said he did not have contact information. Judge had no idea when Aaron would be home, but offered to call the team’s head of security.
Once he had done so, leaving a message on the security director’s voicemail, Cherven and Arrighi went back to their SUV, pulled it out of the driveway and into the street, parked across from the house, and waited.
Chapter 57
Inside the house, Hernandez called Brian Murphy.
“Hey, Murph,” he said. “There’s a cop car outside of my house, just kind of sitting there?”
“Okay, Aaron,” Murphy said. “Let me ask you a question. Did you do anything wrong?”
“No. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Okay, then. Why is there a cop car out there?”
“Well, I don’t know. You just never know what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t understand,” Murphy said. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, why would you be concerned?”
“Well, I don’t want them thinking—I think they’re waiting to get a search warrant.”