The police had marched Aaron out of the house in handcuffs. The Patriot’s arms were hidden inside a white V-neck T-shirt that stretched over his hulking torso like a giant straitjacket.
Lowery, a twenty-three-year-old reporter for the Boston Globe, jumped up, got dressed, and ran to his car—a Pontiac Grand Prix with a power-steering problem.
As he did, he checked in with his editor.
The Globe had only just hired Lowery, who’d interned at the paper previously and been a reporting fellow at the Los Angeles Times. For the most part, he’d covered local politics, along with general assignments from the metro desk. But, young as he was, Lowery had proven himself to be smart and tenacious. In 2014, the National Association of Black Journalists would name him “Emerging Journalist of the Year.” Two years later, he would win a Pulitzer Prize.
Lowery had staked Aaron’s house out already that week, and interviewed Odin Lloyd’s mother.
He did not want to miss out on Aaron’s arraignment.
“It’s going to be in North Attleboro,” the editor said. “File from inside the courthouse.”
Lowery had been inside the Attleboro District Court building before. He knew that it was a dead zone, as far as communications went. Nothing went in or out of the building. But his editor wanted up-to-the-minute reporting: iPhone video, live tweets.
Less than two hours after Aaron’s arrest, another news bulletin had come in: the Patriots had cut Hernandez.
“A young man was murdered this week and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss,” the team said in its statement. “Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation.”
Now, as he made his way out to Attleboro, the reporter tried to think of the best way to file.
“I pulled up and parked, and there was already a massive stakeout in front of the courthouse,” Lowery recalls. “There were people and cameras everywhere. Fox is there. ESPN. Everyone wants the shot, the video, or still image of Hernandez being driven up and led in. Sitting out there for a moment I thought, this is actually a pretty small courthouse. It’s not equipped for the massive amount of camera equipment, for all the reporters, all the technology. There might not be enough outlets in there.”
The first order of business was avoiding the scrum of reporters who would be caught in the hallway while Aaron was being arraigned inside one of the courtrooms.
Approaching a clerk, Lowery asked for a best guess: Which courtroom would Hernandez be brought to?
“Finally,” Lowery says, “Hernandez arrives. You can feel it, even inside the courthouse. You see all the media members rushing around the building to get the shot of him being driven in. Then, there’s a massive rush back inside.”
The clerk’s best guess turned out to be a good one. By staying inside of the building, Lowery had gotten ahead of the pack. He was in the room when the doors were thrown open and Aaron Hernandez was led inside.
“It was a complete mess,” Lowery says. “It was standing room only. It was the biggest news story of the moment, and I didn’t know if they could get video out of the courtroom.”
Lowery had a front-row seat for the proceedings.
Hernandez was still dressed in the red shorts and white T-shirt he had been arrested in. He betrayed no emotion while charges against him were read.
There were six in all. Five for firearms violations. One for murder.
“Everyone was like, ‘Wait? What!?’” Lowery remembers. “‘They’re actually trying Hernandez for murder?’ The disbelief was palatable.”
Then, the prosecutors began to lay out the evidence: The last text from Odin Lloyd, sent at 3:23 a.m. Surveillance footage of the Nissan Altima leaving the clearing four minutes later.
“They had pictures of Hernandez holding what they believe is the gun moments after the murder,” Lowery recalls. “They walked through a series of text messages between Lloyd and Hernandez.”
Lowery had set his phone up to send tweets out via text. For a moment—“an eternity at a time like this”—he was the only reporter there who could communicate with the outside world.
He did so until the arraignment ended, with Hernandez pleading “not guilty” to all of the charges.
“What just happened?” a sports reporter asked Lowery.
“They just charged him,” Lowery said. “That’s what happened.”
According to Lowery, the feeling in the air was, “There was no way that Aaron Hernandez had murdered someone. He might have been there. He might have been in the wrong place hanging out with the wrong guys. He didn’t kill this guy.”
Lowery was not so sure. He had seen other defendants arraigned. He had seen the full range of emotions, running all the way from defiance to despair. He had never seen a reaction like Aaron’s.
Hernandez “was relatively stone-faced,” Lowery recalls. “He looked in so many ways normal. It was almost as if he was supposed to be there.”
Chapter 67
That evening, a white-and-gold van belonging to the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office passed a press gaggle stationed outside of the Bristol County House of Correction in Dartmouth, paused at an outer gate, and went inside the facility. (Bristol County, Massachusetts, is about 120 miles east of Bristol, Connecticut, where Aaron Hernandez grew up.) A black Ford Explorer and a K-9 unit pulled in behind the van.
There was a second gate on the far side of the first. For security purposes, it only opened when the first gate closed. (Prison officials called this space “the trap.”) When the van had passed through both gates, corrections officers opened the back doors, helped Aaron Hernandez step down, and led him into the jail.
In the processing room, Aaron’s wrist and ankle restraints were removed. He was told to stand with his back to the wall. Then he was ordered to sit in a metal-detecting “boss check” chair.
If Hernandez had anything stuffed up his rectum, the chair would sound an alert.
Then, Hernandez was led to a body scanner. He was told to stand sideways on a short conveyer belt, keeping his arms and his head up.
The belt moved him through in three seconds.
Up to this point, everything Hernandez experienced was standard operating procedure at the jail. What came next—an interview with the warden himself—was a departure.
“I told my staff to notify me when he’s on his way,” says Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. “When he came in, I pulled him aside and introduced myself: ‘I’m the sheriff here. There’s a couple of things I want you to know. First of all, you’re not going to be treated any better or any worse than anybody else. Number two, we have rules here. You are to follow the rules. If somebody’s in the area where you are that does not belong in the area, you need to notify the staff or the supervisor on duty.’”
Given Hernandez’s stature, the sheriff says, “we wanted to make sure our staff wasn’t tempted to hang out with him, because of his notoriety and his wealth, and that he was not using his popularity to try to manipulate the staff.”
The sheriff let Hernandez know that he was going to be held by “special management” in the jail’s medical unit for a week or two.
“He was coming from a seven-thousand-square-foot home to a seventy-square-foot cell, and that in itself was a huge transition, never mind his popularity. He was going from a place where people revered him to a place where he was just another number—and that, in a nutshell, speaks to the drastic difference that he was going to be stepping into.”