The police didn’t know what to make of the case. North Attleboro was Patriots Country. Aaron Hernandez was a local celebrity. What’s more, in every passing encounter they’d had with him, over the years, Aaron had shown himself to be polite, deferential, and outgoing.
Every encounter, that is, that led up to the point of Detective Arrighi and Trooper Cherven showing up on his front door.
“Hey,” a local cop said, at the start of the investigation. “I have a helmet that Hernandez signed!”
“Lose your fandom,” the cop’s partner replied. “You realize we might have to shoot this guy, right?”
Despite all the evidence they had collected—despite the rental car keys they had found in Odin Lloyd’s pocket—there were still cops in town who looked up to Hernandez.
Detective Elliott had stayed at the station until well past three. Monday night had turned into Tuesday long before he went home.
After a few hours of sleep, he’d woken up, put on his sport coat and tie, and headed back in to work. In the parking lot, he ran into State Police Lieutenant Michael King.
King had stayed at the station until five or six in the morning, left for two hours, and returned at eight.
No one else was due in to the station at that hour. But the local Enterprise Rent-A-Car office was already open. King and Elliott drove down, and discovered that Aaron had returned an Altima the day before and checked a Chrysler 300 out of the lot.
They found that the Altima had already been cleaned—and that it had been damaged: the driver’s side mirror was gone and there were scratches down the car’s side.
King and Elliott secured the Altima, inspecting it and taking photographs. Then, Elliott drove down to Corliss Landing, where Odin Lloyd’s body had been found.
First, he went to Metalor—a gold refinery with barbed wire around it, and 24/7 security, that stood at the entrance to the park. Detective Elliott knew the company well: North Attleboro PD kept a close watch on the premises. If there was video of an Altima going into the park, Metalor would have it.
It turned out that Metalor did. So did the North Attleboro Electric Department, on the far side of the clearing. Paul Belham, who owned Bell’s Powder Coating, was a selectman in town. His daughter was a dispatcher for North Attleboro PD. He was happy to cooperate.
Belham told the investigators that Bell’s had video, too, in high resolution.
All in all, there were seven videos of a Nissan Altima pulling in, and then out of, the clearing.
Piece by piece, the case against Aaron Hernandez was starting to come into focus.
Chapter 61
On Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after Detective Elliott’s visit to the industrial park, Trooper Michael Cherven, Sergeant Paul Baker, Assistant DA Patrick Bomberg, and several other police officers drove down to Aaron and Shayanna’s house.
Shayanna answered the door. Aaron was inside, on the couch. He did not bother to get up when the police entered.
This time, they had brought a search warrant with them.
Rumors about the murder had already gotten around. “The Patriots tight end isn’t believed to be a suspect in a murder investigation near his home in North Attleboro,” CBS Sports had announced. For the moment, other media outlets were playing the news the same way.
Now, while the police were searching his house, Hernandez went down to the basement—the “man cave” as Shayanna called it—and started to play pool with Shayanna’s uncle, Littleman. The television was on. Game six of the NBA finals was about to start. During a commercial break in the pregame, Aaron turned to Littleman and said, “My endorsements are gone.”
When they left the house, the police took several evidence bags with them. Those bags contained a white iPhone 5 with a bedazzled case, one BlackBerry, one iPad tablet, two iPad Minis, a DVR with surveillance footage from fourteen cameras Aaron had installed around the house, and a one-terabyte hard drive.
On Wednesday morning, Hernandez drove to Gillette Stadium. There were news trucks parked in the parking lot. News helicopters hovered overhead. But Aaron made his way to the weight room, where he stayed until Robert Kraft came down to meet with him.
In an office adjoining the weight room, the Patriots’ owner voiced his concern and asked if Aaron was involved in any way with the murder. Hernandez gave Kraft a hug and a kiss and said he’d had nothing to do with it.
Aaron also met with Mike Briggs, the team’s director of security, who wanted to hear from Hernandez himself that he was not involved in the murder.
Hernandez assured Briggs that he was not, swearing on Avielle’s life he was telling the truth.
Hours later, a car drove up toward Aaron’s house and parked next to the news vans that had started to gather. The man who got out spoke to a state trooper, then made his way to the front door. He’d come from a law firm, and carried a manila envelope. A reporter called out to him: “Who’s it for?”
“Mr. Hernandez himself,” the man said. Inside the envelope there was a summons: “A lawsuit has been filed against you.”
The summons was from Waks and Barnett, a Miami firm known for representing passengers injured in cruise ship accidents.
Waks and Barnett was the law firm that Alexander Bradley had retained.
Bradley had not cooperated with the police investigation. Hours before Odin Lloyd’s murder, he had agreed to withdraw the civil lawsuit he’d been threatening. But in the wake of Odin Lloyd’s murder, he had gone ahead and filed it.
That same evening, the results of Odin Lloyd’s autopsy were released. The death had officially been ruled a homicide, and reporters were telling their editors that Hernandez had “ties” to Lloyd.
Now, the media outlets began to report that Hernandez “‘hasn’t been ruled out as a suspect.” TMZ broke the news of Alexander Bradley’s civil suit. Several reporters dug up Hernandez’s 2010 NFL Scouting Report and wrote articles with headlines like “Aaron Hernandez’s NFL entry: What did scouts know back then?”
As the day drew to a close, Ted Daniel of Boston’s Fox affiliate took to Twitter with a series of breaking announcements:
9:26 PM: LAW SOURCE places Hernandez and victim in two locations.
10:12 PM: LAW SOURCE: Aaron Hernandez was driver of a vehicle Odin Lloyd and 2 others in. Lloyd found dead one mile from Hernandez home.
10:15 PM: 2 LAW SOURCES: Homicide victim Odin Lloyd sent text to a friend that included a reference to Aaron Hernandez.
10:18 PM: LAW SOURCE: 4 men together in vehicle. Only 3 return to Aaron Hernandez’s home. Odin Lloyd NOT one of them.
Chapter 62
By daybreak on Thursday, the streets around 22 Ronald C. Meyer Drive were packed with news vans from Boston, Providence, and Hartford. National media outlets were present, along with ESPN, which had its headquarters in Aaron’s hometown of Bristol.
Camped out across the street with cameras, large reflectors on C-stands, umbrellas, and coolers, the reporters looked like they were having themselves a tailgate party.
By now, the news stations were saying that Aaron was directly tied to the homicide.
The police had their own questions for Aaron. They wanted to know why his security system looked like it had been destroyed intentionally. They wanted to know why Aaron’s cell phone had been “in pieces” when his attorneys had finally given it to investigators. They wanted to know why cleaners had been called out on June 17 to scrub the house down.
None of Aaron’s actions seemed to be those that an innocent man would have taken.
But, for the moment, Aaron was still a free man. Climbing into Shayanna’s SUV, he drove past the reporters and headed out to Gillette Stadium. From the air, a news helicopter traced his movements, reminding viewers of OJ Simpson in his white Bronco.
Upon his arrival at the stadium, at 11:23 in the morning, Aaron ran into Mark Briggs.