Following his conference with Hodgson, Hernandez was asked a series of standard questions. He was sent down the hall for a mental health interview, which showed nothing abnormal. Then, he was put into a one-man holding cell. This was standard operating procedure for famous prisoners, as well as for sex offenders—seclusion from the prison’s general population.
After a while, Aaron heard his name called. The cell door opened and he was brought to a property room, where he was ordered to strip. Aaron’s red shorts, underwear, shoes, socks, and XXL white T-shirt were put in a mesh garment bag (prison officials called it “the strap”) and his prison outfit was issued: two pairs of socks and underwear, a T-shirt, a jumpsuit, and a set of shoes, along with a “care kit” that contained one sample-size deodorant, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a bottle of three-in-one wash.
Finally, Aaron was led down Medical Hallway to Cell #1 in Sector C: Health Services. A metal bed welded to the floor in the center of the room took up all but a two-or three-foot ring of floor space. The bedframe had holds for restraints. A thin blue mattress sat on top of it. In the upper left corner, a camera surveyed everything in the room. A safety light hummed from the ceiling, fluorescent, encased in stainless steel, impossible to tear down. In the corner by the door there was a sink–toilet unit that had not been flushed since the cell’s previous resident had used it.
Chapter 68
At two in the afternoon on Thursday, June 27—the day after his arraignment—Aaron Hernandez was driven to the Bristol County Courthouse, in Fall River, for his bail hearing.
Bristol County Assistant DA Bill McCauley described the argument Hernandez had had with Odin Lloyd. He admitted that the police had not recovered a murder weapon, which they believed to be a .45 Glock. Hernandez seemed to be holding a Glock in surveillance footage taken from his house, the police had recovered a clip of .45 ammunition from a Humvee that Hernandez owned, they had found .45 bullets in Hernandez’s apartment in Franklin, and, McCauley said, a photograph had emerged of Hernandez holding a Glock .45.
James Sultan, who was one of Aaron’s lawyers, pointed out that Aaron had no criminal record. But Hernandez did have a home, a fiancée (who was there at the hearing), and an infant daughter. Aaron’s celebrity status would make it hard for him to flee justice, Sultan argued. Moreover, the Commonwealth’s case against his client was weak: There were no eyewitnesses to the murder. The evidence was entirely circumstantial.
“Mr. Hernandez is not just a football player but he is one of the best football players in the United States of America,” Sultan said. “He’s a young man who is extremely accomplished in his chosen profession.”
Aaron would post a large cash bail, and agree to house arrest and a GPS tracking bracelet. “He wants to clear his name,” Sultan assured the court.
Judge Renee Dupuis was skeptical. She pointed out that it was rare for bail to be granted in first-degree-murder cases and called the circumstantial evidence against Hernandez “very, very strong.”
“This gentleman, either by himself or with two other individuals that he requested come to the Commonwealth, basically, in a cold-blooded fashion, killed a person because that person disrespected him,” Dupuis said. “If that’s true, and based upon presentation it seems to be, I’m not confident that type of individual would—he obviously doesn’t adhere to societal rules. The idea that I can release him on a bracelet and he would comply with court rules is not something that I am willing to accept.”
Shayanna burst into tears when bail was denied.
Once again, Aaron betrayed no emotion.
Chapter 69
That evening, Massachusetts police issued a wanted poster for Ernest Wallace.
Aaron’s friend was “wanted for accessory after the fact for the murder of Odin Lloyd in North Attleboro,” the poster read. “Wallace is considered armed and dangerous and was last seen operating a silver/gray Chrysler 300 R.I. Registration Number 451-375.”
It had been several days since Wallace had seen the Chrysler, which had been abandoned outside of a housing complex in Bristol. And it had been several days since anyone in Massachusetts had seen Wallace, who was holed up at his mother Angella’s house in Miramar, Florida.
To get to there, Wallace had hitched a ride with TL Singleton’s aunt, Euna Ritchon.
Ritchon lived with her mother in Bristol but had seven grandchildren of her own down in Georgia. She had already been planning to see them when TL’s wife—Aaron’s cousin, Tanya Singleton—convinced her to move the visit up by a week, taking herself and Wallace along.
The three of them had driven through the night, using back roads. In North Carolina, Ritchon’s car broke down. Euna’s daughter drove eight hours to get them and bring them to Georgia, where Ritchon watched Tanya give Wallace a new cell phone and use her credit card to buy him a bus ticket to Florida.
In Florida, neighbors had seen Wallace swimming in his mother’s pool.
And on Friday, Wallace walked the half mile from Angella’s house to the local police station and told the cops that he wanted to talk, even though his attorney had advised him not to.
Two days later, on Sunday, June 30, Tanya’s husband, TL, drove his Nissan Maxima off of a road in Farmington, Connecticut. After flying through the air for one hundred feet, the car crashed into the side of the Farmington Country Club, where it lodged, six feet up in the air. Miraculously, Tabitha Perry—Singleton’s twenty-seven-year-old ex-girlfriend, and the mother of one of his children, who was riding in the passenger seat—survived the crash, only to die of an accidental overdose later that year.
TL Singleton died on the scene. According to the toxicology report, he had cocaine, PCP, oxycodone, and alcohol in his system at the time of his death.
On Saturday, July 6, the Patriots announced that fans who had bought Hernandez jerseys could swap them out.
By five o’clock in the afternoon, the team’s Pro Shop had processed 1,200 exchanges.
The Hernandez jerseys would all be burned. Aaron’s sponsors, Puma and CytoSport (the makers of Muscle Milk), had already dropped him. And in the weeks and months that followed, the former Patriot’s reputation would suffer other indignities: EA Sports would remove him from their video games; Panini America, a trading card company, would take him out of their sticker books and replace his trading cards with ones that featured Tim Tebow; and the University of Florida would remove his name from the stadium in which he had played—a task that required the use of power tools.
Chapter 70
On Tuesday, July 16, three weeks after Aaron’s arrival at the Bristol County jail, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson held a press conference to discuss his famous new inmate.
“Hernandez is locked in a seven-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-one hours a day,” Hodgson told the assembled reporters. “The rest of his time is spent in the exercise yard, making collect phone calls, or taking a hot shower. He doesn’t have any physical contact with other inmates, but that’s mostly for his own safety.”
Reporters were given a tour of the Special Management unit, where Hernandez was being held in near-solitary confinement.
“We’re assessing how the inmates are reacting to him right now in this smaller unit,” Hodgson said as he ushered the reporters into a gray cell.
General population inmates were allowed outside, the sheriff explained. They could see trees and grass, and interact with other inmates. But for his own safety, Hernandez had been denied these privileges. He was allowed outside for just one hour a day, and during that hour he was alone, in a cement yard that contained three chain-link cages topped with tin roofs and razor wire. He worked out in one of the cages, running extremely short laps and doing push-ups, squats, and sit-ups as a corrections officer watched.
The reporters wanted to know: How did Aaron Hernandez like this arrangement?
“I think he’d like to be out in general population playing basketball,” Hodgson admitted.