The director of security told him to leave, immediately. Aaron’s being there was “bad for business,” Briggs said.
Hernandez took the news well enough. He finished up the phone call he was making, shook Briggs’s hand, and headed for the door.
That afternoon, media outlets began to report that the Patriots had barred Aaron from their stadium. Then, on Saturday, state troopers and North Attleboro PD returned, with yet another search warrant and several police dogs.
“During the search, he just sat there and talked to us like he was talking to any other person,” an officer recalls. “He had no expression on his face. He knew we were there for a murder. But he didn’t show any nervousness. He’d lay on the couch watching TV, playing with his daughter, smiling, laughing. He didn’t care. He thought he was above the law.”
That day, after a four-hour search of the house, the police left with a dozen evidence bags, a 7.62x39mm caliber semiautomatic Hungarian-made AK-47, and a Sentry Safe that contained a box of .22-caliber ammo.
Chapter 63
Keelia Smyth hadn’t thought much about the shell casing she’d found in the Altima that Aaron Hernandez had rented. The days that followed had been so busy, she’d simply forgotten.
“Honestly,” Smyth says, “people leave some of the strangest, weirdest, most ridiculous things in rental cars. I’ve found things that I’ve called the cops about. One town I worked in, I found needles in the car. I know there’s a protocol for the disposing of needles. But when I called the cops, they said, ‘What do you want us to do? Drive it to the state line? Take it and toss it in a dumpster yourself.’
“I’ve lived in Attleboro for a long time. I know there’s a gun range in North Attleboro. At the time that I found the bullet, I didn’t know about a crime. There’s no issue. I’m not going to call the cops for every little thing that I find.
“The only reason I had even noticed it was, there was a chunk of gum on my rug. I was annoyed by that. You can’t get gum out of the carpet. There was a child’s picture back there, too. I didn’t want to touch the gum with my hands, so I used the child’s picture. I moved the seat forwards. I saw what I thought was a bullet. I took all that together—the gum, the child’s picture, the bullet, and tossed it into a dumpster. But a few days later, I thought, ‘Oh, my god. What if this is important? What if it’s not there anymore? I don’t arrange when the dumpster gets dumped. That’s when I called the police.”
“You’re gonna kill me,” Smyth said when Detective Elliott picked up the phone.
“What’s the matter?” the detective asked.
It was Thursday. Aaron Hernandez had just been barred from Gillette Stadium.
“I forgot to tell you: I found a bullet.”
“Say that again?”
“I found a bullet in the car! I put it in this piece of paper with all this coloring on it. It looked like it had been done by a kid.”
“Where is it now?”
“I threw it in the dumpster.”
“Is the dumpster emptied yet?”
“No. I checked and there’s not much in there at all.”
The police had already seized guns and ammunition from Aaron’s house, along with surveillance tapes that showed Hernandez holding a gun on the morning of Odin Lloyd’s murder.
The police believed that Aaron had destroyed several hours of surveillance footage taken by his own security cameras, and had their own surveillance footage of Aaron taking the battery out of his cell phone. They had shell casings recovered from the murder scene. But a shell casing recovered from the Altima would tie the whole case together.
“Hang up,” Detective Elliott told Smyth, “and go to the police station now. Someone will meet you out front.”
It was the sort of break detectives live for. With his police lights flashing, Elliott rushed to Enterprise to secure the evidence.
Chief Reilly and Captain DiRenzo, of the North Attleboro Police Department, and Lieutenant King and Sgt. Paul Baker of the state police, met Elliott on the scene.
Baker jumped into the dumpster and started to root around. Within a few minutes, he’d emerged—not with a bullet—but with a shell casing stuck in a wad of Bubblicious that had been wrapped in the child’s drawing that Keelia Smyth had mentioned.
The drawing looked a lot like a child’s drawing detectives had seen in Aaron’s kitchen—a drawing by Tanya’s young son, Jano, who called Hernandez “Daddy Aaron.”
The shell casing looked exactly like ones that detectives had found at the scene of Odin Lloyd’s murder.
Part Eight
Chapter 64
On Monday, June 24, police officers in wet suits searched a stream in the woods by Aaron’s house. They did not find any weapons. But that same day, acting on a tip, detectives drove to 114 Lake Avenue in Bristol to interview TL Singleton, who had married Aaron’s cousin Tanya.
Singleton was not at home. But the police returned to Bristol the following day to meet with members of Bristol PD, and discovered that Detective Pete Dauphinais’s wife, Jodie, was Carlos Ortiz’s probation officer.
A few weeks earlier, Ortiz had admitted to the officer that he was a daily user of PCP, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. She had put him in a drug program. Ortiz had failed to show up. But Ortiz had bigger problems to worry about: The probation officer knew about his relationship with Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriot who had just become the leading suspect in a murder investigation. Now, detectives knew about the relationship, too.
Ortiz was due to check in with the Jodie Dauphinais on that very same day. He ended up meeting, instead, with the police.
In a basement conference room, Detective Elliott and Sergeant John Moran of the Massachusetts State Police told Ortiz that they wanted to speak with him about what had happened on the night of Odin Lloyd’s murder.
“First,” Elliott said, “it’s just your Miranda rights. You’ve heard them before?”
“Huh?” said Ortiz.
“You’ve heard Miranda before, your rights? You’ve never been arrested or anything?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. It’s just basically that’s all I’m doing. You’re not under arrest or anything. I’ve just got to read them to you.”
Ortiz consented, but denied any knowledge of the shooting.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said.
Sergeant Moran took his turn. He told Ortiz that they were investigating a homicide that Aaron Hernandez and Ernest Wallace seemed to be connected to. He said that the police had text messages and surveillance footage. They knew that Ortiz had gone to Hernandez’s house on Sunday night.
“Hernandez’s like family,” Ortiz explained. Once again, he denied any wrongdoing.
“We know you weren’t the shooter, right?” Moran said. “But you got roped into this fucking thing.”
“That’s bullshit, though,” Ortiz said.
“Someone else is the shooter,” Moran agreed. “And guess who’s going to be left without a chair?”
“I’m the only one in the bullshit.”
“They think you’re going to be the patsy,” Moran said. “That’s what they think. You got eight million for an attorney? [Hernandez has] got eight million. They love him. You’re the throwaway guy, you know. You realize this. I’ve been doing this for twenty years…You’re the guy and you know why—because you’re all fucked up…So you’re in a bad spot here. You’re in a bad spot because they’re going to blame you. We can go to court if we want. Jesus Christ, we’ve got everything.”
Ortiz protested. He didn’t know where Lloyd lived. He didn’t know where the industrial park was located.
“I’m not even a violent person,” he said.
“I know that,” said Moran. “Why do you think I’m talking to you?”
Ortiz told the police, “I never went to the frigging scene.”
What about the towel, the police wanted to know. What about the shell casings?
“I don’t know why you guys didn’t clean the car before you brought it back. There was a shell casing in the car.”