Aaron’s agent, Brian Murphy, believes in Aaron’s innocence to this day. But he, too, sees no way around the fact that Aaron was there, on the night of Odin Lloyd’s murder.
During the call Aaron had made, on the day after Father’s Day, with the police stationed outside his house, Murphy had asked him if he’d seen Odin Lloyd.
“Well, I partied with him a couple nights ago, but I hadn’t seen him since then,” Aaron had said.
“Is he missing?” Murphy had asked. “Is something wrong?”
“I guess they can’t find him. I don’t know.”
“All right. If your friend’s missing, why would they wait outside your house?”
“I don’t know, man,” Aaron had said. “They’re tripping. But I think they’re waiting for a search warrant.”
“I have to tell you,” Murphy says today. “That conversation, I’ve never repeated it to anyone. He was so unbelievably crystal-clear to me that he had done nothing wrong—which obviously wasn’t true, because he admitted he was there. And as I told Aaron, ‘I believe in my heart that you did not shoot Lloyd, but what the hell were you thinking leaving? And going back to your house?’ I never understood why he did that.
“Aaron’s smart as hell. He’s super-smart. He’s a survivor. A hustler. If he was going to kill someone, he would never drive up to Boston, pick the guy up, come back to a clearing a mile from his house, shoot him, and leave him where he would be found. That’s the clumsiest murder of all time. That’s why I personally don’t believe that he did it. Because if he wanted to kill Lloyd, and I can’t imagine why he would…It’s insane. He got the best blunts of his life from Lloyd. And even the homosexual angle, which I don’t buy—I’m not saying whether he was or not, but I don’t think he’d kill Lloyd over that.
“I don’t see it happening. I don’t see a motive. But even if he did, even if he wanted to kill him, he’d do it in a much smarter way. What I believe is that Carlos Ortiz was high as a kite on angel dust, showing off for Aaron—some argument ensued—and Ortiz shot Lloyd. At that point, Aaron’s code kicked in and, as much as I disagree with it, Aaron lived and died with that code. He would never rat someone out.”
DJ said that he had been open with Aaron about his distrust of certain characters Aaron had gathered around him. He also described Aaron’s reaction to the concerns that he voiced about each of those characters.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Aaron had told his brother. “He’s my friend.”
“I don’t know,” DJ explained. “I just know he cared about people. And some of the people he cared about, I wasn’t too fond of. I didn’t think they were the best for him at that stage in his life. But he cared so much. He really did. It’s very interesting, how much he cared.”
If not for a few crucial choices, Aaron’s life might have turned out differently. If only he’d accompanied DJ to UConn. If only he had managed to pull away from the bad elements in Bristol. If only Dennis Hernandez had lived to see his son succeed in college, and the NFL, and keep him on the straight and narrow.
“That’s the million-dollar question, how my father—if he was still alive, how everything would have changed,” DJ told Sports Illustrated. “I think it would have been completely different.
“But,” he added, “I don’t know. That’s a fairy tale.”
Chapter 93
On January 9, 2017, Alexander Bradley was sentenced to five years in prison and five on parole for his role in the 2014 nightclub shooting in Hartford.
Bradley had copped a plea: no contest to criminal possession of a firearm, first-degree criminal endangerment, and third-degree criminal mischief.
“I’m not the same person I was three years ago,” he told the judge. “It was a tumultuous time in my life. I was going through some dramatic events.”
Months earlier, prosecutors had granted Bradley immunity for the 2012 double murders in Boston in exchange for testifying against Hernandez. They had already indicted Hernandez for witness intimidation in connection with the 2012 Bradley shooting (the witness in question being Bradley himself). That, too, had given them leverage during the run-up to Aaron’s next murder trial.
Now, after several delays, that murder trial was set to begin.
This time around, Hernandez had hired Jose Baez.
The high-profile Florida lawyer was famous—some would say infamous—for having represented an Orlando woman, Casey Anthony, in her sensational murder trial.
On or around June 16, 2007, Casey’s two-year-old daughter, Caylee, had gone missing. Casey did not report the disappearance. A month later, on July 15, Casey’s own mother, Cindy, finally called 911.
“There’s something wrong,” Cindy told the dispatcher. “I found my daughter’s car today and it smells like there’s been a dead body in the damned car.”
Casey lied to detectives: the babysitter had taken her daughter, she said. When Caylee’s body was found, several months later, Casey was charged with first-degree murder. Prosecutors pushed for the death penalty. Time, NBC, and other media outlets called it the “Social-Media Trial of the Century.” Jose Baez was criticized for his defense, which seemed to change on a regular basis. Along with his client, he was savaged in the press. But in the end, Baez won. Casey Anthony was cleared of all serious charges.
Against all odds, Baez believed that he could pull off another miracle on Aaron’s behalf.
On March 1, 2017, the lawyer delivered his opening statement in Hernandez’s second murder trial.
Chapter 94
Sometimes,” Baez said, “you want something so badly, that you’re willing to make a deal with the devil just to make it happen. That is exactly what the Commonwealth did in this case.”
The devil that Jose Baez had in mind was Alexander Bradley.
“It takes a lot of nerve to put that man on the stand and ask you all to believe him beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggen had less physical evidence to work with than Hernandez’s prosecutors had had in 2015. The murders themselves had taken place five years earlier. The investigation had stalled, up until Aaron’s arrest for Odin Lloyd’s murder. And if Aaron’s motive, in that case, was murky, the motive in this one was inexplicable: After playing in the Super Bowl, Aaron Hernandez had gone out and killed two men, simply because one of them had spilled a drink?
“There is no science that will connect Aaron Hernandez to this case,” Baez told the jury. “What you do have is Bradley’s story. An unbelievable, fantastic tale of lies.”
If the jurors had known about Odin Lloyd’s murder—if they had known that Aaron was already serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole—they might have been more inclined to buy Bradley’s story. But, ostensibly, despite the wall-to-wall coverage that Hernandez’s 2015 trial had generated, none of the jurors knew about his previous conviction.
Aaron’s lawyers in that case, James Sultan, Michael Fee, and Charles Rankin, had been solid, even exceptional. But Baez brought style and star power to the proceedings.
“Alexander Bradley is a three-legged pony,” Baez would say, hopping up and down as if he were riding a horse. “You can’t trust this man. You can’t ride him home.”
And in many respects, Baez had an easier case to argue. In 2012, investigators had not paid as much attention to the murders of two obscure African men as they might have, had they known that an NFL player was involved.
Now, the prosecution’s entire case rested on the testimony of an admitted drug dealer.
Patrick Haggen called the usual array of witnesses: first responders, detectives, forensic experts. Brian Quon, the security consultant from Underbar, testified. So did Ugochukwu Ojimba and Jaime Furtado, who were bouncers at Cure.
Aquilino Freire and Raychides Gomes-Sanches, who had been in the car with Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu, described the shooting.