In 2012, Junior Seau, who had played for the Patriots as recently as 2009, committed suicide in the same manner.
Seau, Duerson, and Belcher were all found to have been suffering from CTE—chronic traumatic encephalopathy—a degenerative brain disease caused by multiple blows to the head.
Other scandals had hit close to home in New England: Spygate. Deflategate was just over the horizon. If Bill Belichick had shown himself to be a coach who won, at any cost, it seemed fair to ask: What had the Patriots known about Aaron’s past when they drafted him? Had they turned a blind eye to the violent acts he’d committed while playing for the team?
The families of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado had already expanded their wrongful-death lawsuit against Aaron Hernandez to include the Patriots and the team’s owner, Robert Kraft Enterprises. What would a guilty verdict mean for that lawsuit? And if Aaron Hernandez was found to be not guilty, how would the verdict affect the millions of dollars still left on his contract, at the time of his termination from the team?
Aaron’s trial would fuel the feeling that the NFL was its own world, with its own rules—rules that had long since gone out of alignment with core American values.
Hernandez believed he could get away with anything, up to and including murder. He’d gotten away with so much, for so long. He’d been rewarded with fame and riches. A verdict of not guilty would also prove that his sense of impunity had been justified all along.
In effect, it would prove that organized football had encouraged a monster—or even created one.
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Because the DA’s office had decided to try Hernandez for first-degree murder, which called for premeditation, Assistant DA Bomberg would have to make the jury believe that Aaron had planned to kill Odin Lloyd before murdering him.
Putting Hernandez at the scene of the crime would not be enough.
But the prosecution had a mountain of circumstantial evidence, including the text messages that Odin Lloyd had exchanged with Hernandez before he was murdered. Those went a long way toward establishing premeditation, while surveillance footage that seemed to show Aaron holding a gun indicated that he was the shooter.
It took Bomberg fifty minutes to lay out his case.
In his own opening statement, Michael Fee dismissed that case out of hand: “You just heard quite a story,” the lawyer said. “A dramatic story. An exciting story…It’s just a story. And it’s not true.
“We are here,” Fee continued, “because the police, and the prosecutors, targeted Aaron from the very beginning. As soon as they found out that Aaron Hernandez, the celebrity football player, the New England Patriot, was a friend of Odin Lloyd’s, Aaron never had a chance. It was over. They set out on an investigation, ladies and gentlemen, collected evidence, in order to support the story they just told you, even when that evidence they collected should have led them in another direction. They locked on Aaron, and they targeted him, even when they developed evidence that two other men—who, unlike Aaron, were not friends with Odin—were with Aaron and Odin that night. The evidence will show that the investigation was sloppy and unprofessional.”
In a sense, Aaron’s defense strategy was akin to the one OJ Simpson’s lawyers had used: A famous football player, framed. A botched investigation.
But OJ Simpson’s lawyers had had Detective Mark Fuhrman’s history of racist outbursts to work with, while Aaron’s investigators—Michael Cherven, Michael Elliott, Eric Benson, Daniel Arrighi, and several other officers, all appeared to be solid, even exemplary, cops.
Aaron’s defense would depend on his lawyers’ ability to convince the jury, and the judge, otherwise.
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On February 1, 2015—three days after the start of the trial—the Patriots won Super Bowl XLIX.
Hernandez, who had no TV privileges, missed a good game, dominated by his former teammates Brady and Gronk. Soon, the Patriots would be going to the White House to meet with Barack Obama. But on that day, and most other weekdays, Aaron would be woken at six and asked to put his feet and hands through openings in his cell door. Then, he would be cuffed and loaded into the van that carried him to and away from the courthouse in Fall River.
This was Aaron’s life now: off to the courthouse, then back to Special Management—a small, triangular unit, which prison officials had painted blue, yellow, and white. There were only eight cells in the place. Each one could hold two men, but Aaron was always imprisoned alone, bunking by himself and moving, at the whim of prison officials, between Cell 1 and Cell 2 on the unit’s ground floor.
Both cells had tight, vertical windows, offering a view of the space corrections officers called no man’s land—a panorama of razor wire, tarmac, and glass, which could not compare with the view from the courtroom. Once a day, Aaron was allowed to work out in the 8’x12’ cage in the jail’s recreation area. There were always more books to request from the jail’s library. And going to court had become a daily diversion.
On February 5, the sixth day of the trial, prosecutors called the first of several law enforcement officers to the stand. Captain Joseph DiRenzo was an imposing man, with close-cropped hair and wide shoulders. He had spent twenty-six years on the force in North Attleboro. Second in command in the department, he ran the patrol division, supervised the chief of detectives, as well as internal affairs, and handled the department’s day-to-day duties.
DiRenzo described his arrival at Corliss Landing, where he had knelt down by Odin Lloyd’s left flank to inspect the body.
He described the bullet wounds: “A hole, with some ripped shirt, blood around it. There were flies around it. There were flies around his nose, also.”
Step by step, he walked the jury through the measures that he and his officers had taken to protect the crime scene as a strong storm blew in. He described how State Trooper Michael Cherven had gone, methodically, through the dead man’s pockets: “He would go through the pocket and announce what he was doing to the other troopers and officers that were there, so that they could mark it down. He went through one pocket, inventoried what was there. Went through the other pocket, emptied it, inventoried what was there, and announced it.”
DiRenzo himself was methodical and calm as Aaron’s lawyer James Sultan tried, aggressively, to convince the jury that he and his men had somehow contaminated the crime scene, rushing their investigation because of the storm that was coming, even though that storm was still far away.
Sultan did not succeed. But he had another opportunity six days later, when North Attleboro police officer Edward Zimmer took the stand. Zimmer, a nine-year veteran on the force, had also worked the crime scene, setting up a perimeter, and logging arrivals.
Zimmer had stayed on the scene for hours, carefully documenting the movement of evidence.
Within three minutes of his cross-examination, James Sultan succeeded in getting Zimmer to admit to an error in his logbook.
“Is that log accurate?” Sultan asked.
“Yes,” Zimmer said. “There is one typo.”
“There’s a mistake on the log. Correct?”
“Yes. There’s one.”
Within a few minutes, Sultan had scored one more point: Why did Zimmer’s logbook describe the shell casings and the towel, but not the baseball cap and the blunt?
Zimmer had only recorded what was reported to him, he said.
These small points may have opened a modicum of doubt about notes that the North Attleboro police had taken from the scene. On the one hand, they seemed to point to the fact that, if the police had made errors in their investigation, those errors were inadvertent and small.
On the other hand, they were still errors.
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