All in all, in the course of ten months that he spent in the Bristol County jail’s segregated unit, Hernandez racked up 120 days in solitary confinement.
He seemed to hold Officer Pacheco in special contempt. Once, while Aaron was in the middle of one of his workouts, he told the officer that he had a peculiar dream:
Thanks to a disciplinary report that Pacheco had given him, Aaron had dreamed that an upcoming visitation with his daughter had been canceled.
“But,” Aaron told the officer, “the dream changed locations. You and your family were on vacation and I was chasing you.”
Hernandez was glaring hard at Pacheco as he said this. The only weapon at Pacheco’s disposal was a canister of Mace. He was thinking of reaching for it when Aaron said, “then the dream ended,” and turned back to his workout.
Pacheco reported the incident as a threat to his family. Aaron denied this: “It was just a dream,” he explained. “Was not meant to be threatening and was taken out of context.”
Hernandez got off with a verbal warning. But a month later, in July, he had another run-in with Pacheco.
Lunch for the Special Management inmates arrived in Styrofoam containers. The stench of the gray food inside crept into every corner of the unit. On July 5, it was Officer Pacheco’s turn to deliver it. As Hernandez saw the officer approach, he yelled: “I need to be your father figure and show you how to be a man! Show you how to have your balls drop! I didn’t know the Army created little boys and not men!”
When Pacheco left the unit, Hernandez called out again: “I haven’t had any more dreams about you,” he hollered.
Chapter 76
Fatherhood, and father figures, came up often in Hernandez’s conversations with Sheriff Hodgson.
“There’s a saying my father used to always use with my twelve brothers and sisters,” the sheriff recalls telling Aaron. “He used to say, ‘Always remember, God writes straight with crooked lines.’”
“What does that mean?” Hernandez had asked.
“That there are certain things that are going to happen, you’re not going to know why or how, but they’re going to happen. Do you read the Bible?”
“I used to. My coach in Florida used to get me into the Bible stuff.”
“Did you find it useful?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Well, you’ve got a Bible in your cell. When you get back there, I want you to read it, and talk to your father, and think about what I told you about crooked lines.”
“I can’t talk to my father,” Hernandez said.
“If you don’t, then you won’t be able to access all of the things that he taught you.”
“I’ve only gone to my father’s grave once.”
“That’s something you’re going to have to do,” the sheriff said. “You put an emotional wall up because you were so hurt by the loss of your father. All of the lessons he taught you are on the other side of that wall. The only way you’re going to pull the wall down is to talk to him.”
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Okay,” said the sheriff, and left it at that. But when he saw Aaron again, he brought the matter back up.
“I didn’t talk to my father,” Aaron said. “But I did read the Bible. The weirdest thing happened: I opened it, randomly, and it was all about me.”
“You remember what I told you about crooked lines?” said the sheriff. “Opening that book randomly, and finding something about yourself, is what I was talking about.”
On yet another occasion, Hernandez told Hodgson that reading the Bible had caused him to cry.
“My father told me never to cry in front of another man,” Aaron said.
“Really? Why would he tell you that?”
“I don’t know. My father cried about everything. And he had an ugly cry.”
“When would your father cry?”
“At my football games.”
“Because you lost?”
“No. Even when we won.”
“You know why that is?”
“No.”
“It’s because your father was sitting there watching you, feeling so proud about what a great player you had become.”
“Aaron’s father was thirteen when his father died,” Hodgson explains. “I said to him, ‘Your father is sitting there, thinking, not only how proud he is, but how sad it is that his father couldn’t be there to see you play. That’s what your father was crying about. He wasn’t telling you not to cry in real life. He was telling you not to cry out on the football field.’”
Aaron seemed to take it all in. He told the sheriff that he felt himself changing. Even Shayanna had remarked, during a phone call, upon how calm he seemed, and how nice he was being to her. Maybe, Aaron said, the sheriff had had something to do with it.
Chapter 77
By the start of 2014, the police had effectively wrapped up their investigations into the murder in North Attleboro. “We had learned about the incident in Providence,” Trooper Donovan says. “We had learned about the incident in California. We had tracked the guns from Hermosa Beach to Massachusetts. We were tracking down the armored car in New York. With every rock we turned over, more rocks appeared—2014 was shoring up the evidence we had, combing through it, and preparing witnesses for the prosecution. Witnesses like Bill Belichick, who never got called, as well as all of the witnesses who did.”
“If they had people in Bristol they wanted to interview or anywhere in Connecticut through the prisons, they would come down, we’d facilitate,” says a law enforcement official in Bristol. “Just background knowledge because we knew all these people. They’d come down, we’d hook up with them, find the people, bring them in and they would use our interview room. There’s probably a couple hundred interviews they did that don’t really have relevancy at the end of the day. They were ruling things in, ruling things out, seeing if there was anything out there that they were missing. It was very thorough—as thorough as anything I’ve ever seen, the distance they went to in order to loop in Hernandez. The distance was incredible. And they had other things going on elsewhere, Florida and California.”
If the DAs were unusually thorough, it was because the police in Bristol, North Attleboro, and Boston had gone to unusual lengths in their own investigations.
Eric Benson, Michael Cherven, Michael Elliott, and Special Agent Michael Grasso of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had made several trips to Florida to trace guns that were shipped up to Aaron. They had zeroed in on Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez in Belle Glade—Papoo was subsequently indicted—and traced a pipeline that TL Singleton had used to send drugs, as well as guns, up from Georgia to Bristol and North Attleboro.
According to a source close to the investigation, Singleton had been “famous” among drug dealers in Central Connecticut. “Virtually never been caught. A couple of nickel and dime things but nothing of substance. He’d never held a straight job in his life but always had money.”
It turned out that the police in South Carolina had had better luck than the cops up in Bristol: On February 12, 2013—the day before Aaron Hernandez shot Alexander Bradley, down in Miami—Singleton and another man, named Johnny Booze, had been pulled over for driving 80 on a 70 miles per hour stretch of I-95.
When the police searched the car, they found large quantities of cash, cocaine, and heroin.
Both men had been charged with trafficking, though charges against Booze would later be dropped.
“TL would bring pills and weed up,” a person close to the investigation recalls. “He’d bring stuff up for himself and Aaron would get that stuff. Aaron was throwing money at him.”
“The path for the guns? TL is sort of that path,” another law enforcement official explains.
Chapter 78