Then, shifting gears, the lawyer asked the jury to consider whether Aaron could really have been stupid enough to kill Odin Lloyd himself.
“If Aaron planned in advance to murder Odin, why would he do so in his own town…in an open location less than a mile from his home? If Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin, why would he leave keys to a car he had rented in Odin’s pocket? Along with Odin’s cell phone and wallet? And for that matter, why did Odin still have his cell phone? If Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin Lloyd, why would he bring along two witnesses? And if Aaron had planned in advance to murder Odin Lloyd, why was a blunt found at the scene? A blunt shared by none other than Aaron Hernandez and Odin Lloyd, two friends who shared an interest in marijuana?”
As for the box that Shayanna had removed from the house: Had the police found any marijuana during their searches of Aaron’s house? Given how much Aaron smoked, didn’t it stand to reason that they had not because the heavy box that Shayanna had placed in a black bag and removed from the basement, after the murder, was full of marijuana, and nothing but marijuana?
“Is it possible that the murder weapon was inside that bag that Shayanna removed that day?” Sultan asked. “Of course it’s possible. Of course it’s possible. Anything is possible. But a murder charge, a murder conviction, can’t be based on possibilities, on guesswork, on speculation. That’s not good enough.”
Had Aaron made all the right decisions? Sultan readily admitted that Aaron had not. “He was a twenty-three-year-old kid,” the lawyer said. “Who had witnessed something. A shocking killing. Committed by somebody he knew. He really didn’t know what to do, so he just put one foot in front of the other. Keep in mind, he’s not charged with being an accessory after the fact. You couldn’t even find him guilty of that if you wanted to. He’s charged with murder. And that he did not do.”
Chapter 88
James Sultan used the full ninety minutes that he had been given to deliver his closing statement.
Now, William McCauley took his turn.
There were no witnesses to the murder. There was no clear motive, or murder weapon. But the DA took his time sorting through the evidence that he did have, step by step.
Hours after the murder, McCauley told the jurors, Ernest Wallace, Carlos Ortiz, and Aaron Hernandez had all been captured, on video, lounging around Aaron’s swimming pool, drinking smoothies that Shayanna brought them.
If Wallace or Ortiz had just killed Odin, the DA asked, would it make sense that Aaron would be hanging out with them, so casually, so soon after the murder?
Again, and again, the DA pointed out that, in every piece of video evidence that they had seen, Aaron had “controlled” the actions of everyone around him.
“The defendant controlled every aspect of that trip,” McCauley said, referring to the drive that culminated in Odin Lloyd’s murder.
Then, switching from a scalpel to a blunter instrument, McCauley started to hammer away.
“He’s the one,” the DA said. “He’s the one…He’s the one.”
The jury deliberated for more than six days before they returned with their verdict.
Sitting next to each other in the courtroom’s front row, Terri Hernandez and Shayanna Jenkins embraced each other and burst into tears.
It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the courtroom.
The jury had convicted Aaron Hernandez of murder in the first degree.
“Madam foreperson,” the clerk asked. “By which theory or theories—deliberate premeditation and/or extreme atrocity or cruelty?”
“Extreme atrocity or cruelty,” the foreperson said.
Sitting across the aisle from Terri and Shayanna, Shaneah wiped tears away.
Odin’s mother, Ursula Ward, cried and started to rock back and forth.
Standing between Sultan and Fee, dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt, and a polka-dot tie, Aaron licked his lips and mouth the word “unreal,” but betrayed no outward emotion. He sat down while the jury convicted him of the additional charges—none of which mattered, as he would already be sentenced to life.
Judge Garsh took a few moments to thank the jury.
“This truly is a people’s court, with you, the people, ruling,” she said.
As she did so, a court bailiff knelt down and placed shackles around Aaron’s wrists and his ankles. Then, Aaron was made to stand again.
Turning to his mother and his fiancée, he mouthed the words, “It will be okay.”
“Stay strong,” Hernandez told Shayanna as he was led out of the courtroom.
Chapter 89
Later that day, Judge Garsh heard impact statements by Odin Lloyd’s uncle, one of his sisters, and Ursula Ward.
“It doesn’t feel like Odin is not here,” Odin’s sister Olivia Thibou said in her statement. “It feels like just a bad dream and I’m stuck between living and reality and this dream world where he’s just not here and I haven’t had a chance to speak with him.”
“A lot of people won’t see from outside the value and riches he had,” said Odin’s uncle. “It wasn’t material, the wealth he possessed.”
Ursula Ward, who had dressed Odin up all in white for his funeral, and had the words GOING HOME stitched into the side of his casket, said, “The day I laid my son to rest, I felt my heart stop beating for a moment. I felt like I wanted to go into that hole with my son…I’ll never get to dance at his wedding. He will never get to dance at my wedding. I will never hear my son say, ‘Ma dukes. Ma, did you cook? Ma, go to bed. Ma, you’re so beautiful. Where are you going, Ma? Did you get my permission to go out? I love you, Ma.’ I miss my baby boy, Odin, so much. But I know I’m going to see him someday again. That’s giving me the strength to go on. We wore purple in this courtroom every day because it’s my son’s favorite color. I forgive the hands of the people that had a hand in my son’s murder, either before or after. I pray and hope that someday everyone out there will forgive them also. May God continue to bless us.”
Then, less than five hours after the jurors had delivered their verdict, the court handed down its state-mandated sentence: “You’re committed to MCI–Cedar Junction for the term of your natural life, without the possibility of parole.”
Hernandez stood, stoically, throughout his sentencing. He knew the word on Judge Garsh: Remarkably, no case that had come before her had ever been overturned on appeal. He knew that his finances were dwindling: His salary was gone; his lawyers had been expensive; Ursula Ward and her lawyer, Doug Sheff, were still pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit against him.
But Aaron’s spirit had not been broken.
“They got it wrong,” Hernandez said, as he was transported from the courthouse to the state prison. “I didn’t do it.”
Part Eleven
Chapter 90
During Aaron Hernandez’s first week at Cedar Junction, the Department of Corrections learned that he had five enemies (“keep-aways,” in DOC terminology) at the prison. As a result, Hernandez was kept in isolation. Before the week was out, he was relocated.
This time, he ended up Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security facility in Shirley, Massachusetts.
Souza-Baranowski was the state’s newest prison. It was also crowded, with ninety inmates crammed into cell blocks designed for sixty, and extremely violent.
“Fights, slashing, and suicide attempts cause the whole institution to freeze up on a regular basis, if not daily on a bad week,” says Leslie Walker, who runs Prisoners’ Legal Services, a nonprofit in Massachusetts.
At first, Hernandez was housed in the prison’s Orientation Unit. Corrections officers conducted hourly rounds, but there was time to interact with other inmates.