One of the several reasons that Aaron had not been put into general population was that Sheriff Hodgson was trying to determine whether rumors about his gang ties were true.
“My gang investigators went in and interviewed him,” Hodgson says. “When they came out, they said, ‘We think he probably is tied into the Bloods. But we can’t be absolutely positive.’”
Hodgson, who prided himself on his skills as an interrogator, decided that he would investigate the matter himself. On Saturday, his day off, he arrived at the jail in shorts and a golf shirt and sat down to speak with Hernandez.
“I started talking casually to him,” the sheriff recalls. “About life and his family. Then I said, ‘I want to talk to you about those tattoos.’”
“Oh, no, it’s not the Bloods,” Aaron said. According to Hernandez, the tattoos advertised a local gang from Bristol, Connecticut.
Then Aaron said, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” the sheriff replied.
“Did you wear those shorts in here to get me to relax?”
“What are you, an idiot?” Hodgson said. “I’m on my day off. You think I’m going to get dressed up in a suit and tie to come and talk to you? You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Hernandez laughed, the sheriff remembers.
“Let me tell you something,” Aaron said. “I pay attention to what goes on. And I’m the best at reading people.”
“I bet you are, but you’re not the best,” Hodgson said. “You’re not better than I am.”
“Oh, yeah, I am.”
“Really? Do you know about the key motivations in people?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are three different types of motivations in people: kinesthetic, auditory, and visual.”
Hernandez looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“You’re a visual type.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because every time I talk to you, you’ll say, ‘That looks good.’ If you were an auditory type, you’d say, ‘That rings a bell.’ If you were kinesthetic you’d talk about your feelings: ‘That feels good to me,’ you would say.”
Aaron was impressed. He said “Wow,” and Sheriff Hodgson felt encouraged to continue.
“You know how to overcome your behaviors?” he asked.
“No,” said Aaron.
“Let’s say that you’re overweight, and go by a Burger King. You’ve already lost ten pounds, but now you’re thinking about hamburgers. You haven’t had one in a while. And now your body’s reacting to what you’re thinking. You argue with yourself, but you lose. So you get your hamburger and some French fries, and you’re driving down the road eating them, thinking ‘Son of a bitch. I should not be eating these.’”
Aaron appeared to be paying close attention to the story.
“The way you overcome that,” Hodgson said, “is to shatter the picture you have and create a new one. Take a picture of yourself, from when you were twenty pounds lighter. Stick it up on your visor. And whenever you think about breaking your diet, pull the visor down and look at that picture. It will reframe you, and teach you to refrain from the things you want to refrain from.”
Aaron nodded. He said “wow” again. The sheriff may not have established the matter of whether he had ties to the Bloods, but Hodgson had taught Hernandez something about impulse control. And, of course, Aaron’s issues with impulse control were the very thing that had landed him in jail in the first place.
Chapter 71
As the summer wore on, and the days and nights he spent alone in his cell bled into one another, Aaron wrote letters, worked out, and read, requesting books from the jail library: Michael Connelly, Dan Brown, James Patterson.
Hernandez was especially fond of Patterson’s Alex Cross novels.
Aaron also made phone calls, and some of his friends made calls of their own. Taken together those calls told a story:
July 12, 2013:
Aaron Hernandez: Hey, [watch] what you say. The phone is recorded. What you up to?
Tanya Singleton: I know, I know, I know. Hi, honey.
Hernandez: You got my letter?
Singleton: Yeah, I did. I—of course I did. I got you one. I got you a card and a letter.
Hernandez: Watch what you write. They read that shit.
Singleton: I—no, no, like I don’t know that.
Hernandez: Well, I got to get going. I will probably call you, um, probably like once a week or something like that.
Singleton: Yeah, that’s perfect.
Hernandez: Yeah, and—I’ll also help you out with that, too. Obviously don’t say nothing, but I love you.
Singleton: I know. I’m not saying nothing. I love you so much.
July 28, 2013:
Tanya Singleton: Um, I’m going back up there Thursday.
Ernest Wallace: What, to go visit?
Singleton: No. I have to be up there to be in front of the grand jury whatever ’cause they’re fucking dumb, but I got a good lawyer.
Wallace: Wait up, wait up, wait up. You gotta go to court for what?
Singleton: They subpoenaed me to go in front of the grand jury and I got a lawyer. That’s why I got, uh, a real nice lawyer, a good lawyer from over there.
Wallace: Yeah, my nigga.
Singleton: Yup.
Wallace: My nigga got you with that?
Singleton: You already know.
Wallace: All right. Say no more.
August 1, 2013:
Shayanna Jenkins: Um, Tanya’s in jail.
Aaron Hernandez: Tanya?
Jenkins: Yeah.
Hernandez: For what?
Jenkins: I don’t know. Yup. So she’s in jail. She got arrested today.
Hernandez: They picked her up by her house?
Jenkins: No, she went for—she was—I don’t know. You probably should talk to your lawyer about it.
Hernandez: Oh.
Jenkins: But she told me to tell you that she’s gonna be just fine and to keep your head up and to know that she love you.
Hernandez: Oh, my God. Let me call you right back.
[15 minutes later.]
Hernandez: Hey.
Jenkins: Yeah.
Hernandez: I knew about…
Jenkins: Huh?
Hernandez: I knew about that. I thought it was [inaudible]
Jenkins: I’m just letting you know.
Hernandez: Yes, they just being asses about it, but they get—they got to go out of their way to be assholes and, like, the longest she’ll do is, like, probably less than a month or a month until the grand jury is done, investigation, do you know what I mean? The only good thing about Tanya being locked up is she’s gonna lose weight.
August 7, 2013:
Ernest Wallace: Trust me, man, if I was in here for something that I know I did wrong…But this just came right out of the blue, out of nowhere. This is the last thing I thought was going to be happening to me.
Angella Wallace: Oh, my God.
Ernest: [He] had a fucking career. Forty-million-dollar football career.
Angella: Everything’s gone.
Ernest: Why would he jeopardize his life to go kill somebody a mile from his house?
“You have a big mouth,” Aaron told his mother, in the course of one call. “There’s so many things I’d like—I would love to talk to you so that you can know me as a person, but I never could tell you and you’re going to die without even knowing your son.”
“Well, if you feel like you can’t talk to me…” Terri Hernandez said.
“How could I? How could I? You are not trustworthy at all…It’s so sad…I wish I could be closer to you but it can’t and it kills me, but I can’t.”
“You would always tell me the bad things,” Terri said. “Oh, my God, such bad things. Why would you tell me these things?”
Hernandez bristled.
“Don’t even talk on the phone like that,” he said. “It is what it is. Why do you think me and Tanya are so close?”
Chapter 72
Everyone involved with Aaron Hernandez had had a bad year. But Tanya Singleton’s year had been especially rough. Her husband, TL, had died a month earlier. A cancer that doctors had found in her breast was spreading to her other organs. And now, she had been held in contempt, and incarcerated, for refusing to testify before Aaron’s grand jury.