“At that time did you ask to speak with him?”
“Yes. There’s an office connected to the weight room that I brought him into…I understood there was an incident that had transpired and I wanted to know whether he was involved. Any player that comes into our system I consider part of our extended family, and I wanted to get him help.”
“Did you say this to the defendant?” the DA asked.
“Yes,” said Kraft. “He said he was not involved. That he was innocent. And that he hoped that the time of the murder incident came out. Because, I believe, he said he was in a club.”
There were gasps in the courtroom: jurors had already seen video surveillance footage of Hernandez, Wallace, Ortiz, and Lloyd, taken just before the murder. They had been at a gas station, not a club. No testimony the jurors had heard had placed Aaron at a club on the night of the murder.
Moreover, how did Aaron know when the murder had been committed?
It was obvious to everyone in the room that, if Kraft was telling the truth, Aaron had lied to him on June 19.
Lied stupidly, in a manner that actually seemed to implicate him now.
Afterward, Kraft said, Aaron “hugged and kissed me and thanked me for my concern.”
“And after that,” the DA asked, “did you see the defendant again?”
“No.”
Kraft had been on the stand for ten minutes, about the length of his conversation with Aaron. But ten minutes was all it took to do lasting damage to Aaron’s case. And on the following day, April Fool’s, Alexander Bradley took the stand and drove several more nails into his former friend’s coffin.
Chapter 86
Judge Garsh had ruled against telling the jury about Bradley’s claim that Hernandez had shot him, and about the civil lawsuit that Bradley had filed.
The jury did get to hear about Bradley’s own rap sheet: the drug busts, the shooting in Hartford. Within two and a half minutes of taking the stand, Bradley admitted to being a drug dealer.
Nevertheless, his testimony proved to be damning.
Bradley told the jury that Aaron had purchased as much as four ounces of weed from him, at a cost of $1,200 to $1,500, on a weekly basis starting in 2010.
According to Bradley, Aaron smoked as much as an ounce a day.
Hernandez was paranoid, and believed that he was being followed by helicopters, and the police, Bradley said.
Bradley also told the jury that, when he stayed at Aaron’s house in North Attleboro, which he did “quite often,” he slept in a room in the basement.
During the course of one visit, two years earlier, in November of 2012, he’d gotten a look at a “small, black” lock box that Aaron kept by the bar area in the basement, or in a closet next to a trophy case.
Aaron’s defense team hoped the jury had the conclusion, from Shayanna’s testimony, that the box she had gotten rid of contained nothing more than forty pounds of marijuana. They had also tried to block Bradley from testifying, filing a motion that claimed that the risk of a mistrial was “unacceptably high.”
But the motion had failed, and what Bradley said next helped to undermine the idea that Shayanna had only helped Aaron get rid of some weed.
“This black box,” Bradley was asked. “Did you ever see it in an open condition?”
“Yes,” Bradley said.
“And who opened it?”
“Mr. Hernandez.”
“And when it was in an open condition, did you ever see any of the contents inside?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you see inside?”
“There was a firearm. Money. Marijuana joints.”
Bradley described the firearm: it had been a semiautomatic pistol, he said, “silver-grayish colored, with a brown handle.”
Bradley also said that, in the course of a trip to Miami, he had seen Aaron holding a Glock pistol.
Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez had been in the room at the time, Bradley said, tying Aaron to a gun prosecutors believed to be the murder weapon, and to the man prosecutors believed had furnished him with that gun.
Chapter 87
By the end of the trial, prosecutors had all but proven that Aaron had been in the clearing on the night of the murder.
With closing arguments approaching, Aaron’s lawyers felt that they had no choice but to admit it.
Aaron had been present, James Sultan explained, shocking everyone in the courtroom—but only as a witness to Odin Lloyd’s murder.
Ernest Wallace or Carlos Ortiz had killed Lloyd while out of their minds on PCP, the lawyers claimed. But neither Wallace nor Ortiz had been called to testify. In the end, Aaron’s defense lasted less than one day, with only three witnesses called to the stand: Dr. David Greenblatt, a professor of pharmacology at Tufts, who described the behavioral effects of PCP. (Aaron’s cousin Jennifer Mercado had testified, previously, that she had seen Wallace and Ortiz smoking PCP.) Eric Carita, a forensic consultant who had swabbed the Bubblicious chewing gum that one of the shell casings had stuck to, and sent to Texas for processing.
Jennifer Smith, the forensic analyst who had processed the sample and established a link to Aaron’s DNA. Smith explained that DNA can be transferred from one object, then onto another, then onto a third object—a process known as “secondary transfer.” It was “extremely likely,” Smith said, that DNA on the gum could have been transferred onto the shell casing.
On the following day, April 7, James Sultan presented his closing argument in Aaron’s defense.
The approach that the lawyer adopted now was low-key, but eloquent. Sultan’s late father, Stanley, had been a writer, a college professor, and a colleague and close friend of Sylvia Plath’s.
Now, Stanley’s son brought the measured tones of the seminar room into Judge Garsh’s courtroom.
“It’s been a long trial,” Sultan told the jury. “We started back in January. Slogged through those mountains of snow. And now, it’s spring.”
“There’s plenty of evidence,” Sultan said. “You heard from more than 130 witnesses. There are more than 430 exhibits, some of them voluminous. I submit to you, there are really two ways you can go about analyzing the evidence: The right way. And the wrong way.”
The right way, Sultan said, was to start with the presumption that Aaron Hernandez was innocent.
Hernandez and Lloyd had been friends, Sultan said. “Aaron and Odin shared a passion. A passion for marijuana. Odin was very skilled at rolling blunts. Odin would roll blunts for Aaron and they’d smoke together…On the first weekend of June 2013, Aaron and Odin were together at Club Rumor in Boston, where they went for Shayanna’s birthday party…The following weekend, Aaron and Odin were together at a club in Providence. And on Friday night, June fourteenth—a night you’ve heard a lot about—Aaron and Odin went, again, to Club Rumor in Boston. Were they friends? Obviously, they were friends. They were future brothers-in-law. But the prosecution wants to deny the obvious. The prosecution has presented, through its evidence, a number of possible theories of why Aaron would want to murder Odin. Let’s go through those, and see if they make any sense.”
Theory #1, Sultan said, was that Aaron had killed Odin because Odin had been rude to his friend Alexander Bradley.
The lawyer did not even bother to point out how ridiculous this theory was.
Theory #2 was that Aaron and Odin had argued at Rumor.
But, according to Sultan, this theory rested entirely on the testimony of a single, unreliable witness.
Theory #3 was that Aaron was worried about Odin telling Shaneah about their misadventures with Jennifer Fortier and Amanda DeVito.
But hadn’t Aaron already told Shayanna about their trip to his “other spot”?
“What about infidelity?” Sultan asked. “Is Aaron worried that Shayanna’s going to find out that he was out chasing after other women? What did Shayanna tell you? She told you she knew all about Aaron’s interest in chasing other women. She didn’t like it. But she hoped he’d outgrow it.”