Members of the victims’ families, who had filled the courtroom’s first two rows for the duration of the trial, cried on the stand.
But Jose Baez did not dispute the fact that Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado had been murdered. He simply argued that Bradley had murdered them, over a drug deal gone wrong.
On March 20, the thirteenth day of the trial, Bradley himself took the stand.
Chapter 95
Jose Baez had studied the testimony that Bradley had given, in the Odin Lloyd murder trial, carefully.
“I thought he could hurt us,” the lawyer would say. “This was no ghetto superstar. He was going to come across well.”
Bradley did come across well. He made no bones about having been a professional drug dealer. He described the night of the murders in great detail. He described the night Aaron Hernandez had shot him.
Bradley was wearing a button-down shirt and square, rimless glasses. The prosthetic eye in his right eye socket seemed to stare straight ahead, eerily, as he went, point by point, through the text messages that he and Hernandez had exchanged in the wake of that shooting.
When the prosecutor asked Bradley why he had refused to tell police in Florida who the shooter had been, he said, “I didn’t want to tell. That’s not the route I wanted to take. I didn’t want to tell on Mr. Hernandez, I wanted revenge…I wanted to make it even.”
Watching him testify, it was easy to understand Hernandez’s anxiety and paranoia.
“I didn’t want to talk to the police,” Bradley said. “I wanted Mr. Hernandez. I wanted his life.”
When it came to Alexander Bradley, Hernandez’s paranoia had been justified.
Jose Baez began his cross-examination by calling Bradley a liar.
“Mr. Bradley, this whole spilled drink incident is something you’re completely making up, isn’t it?” he asked.
Bradley did not rise to the bait. He remained calm and polite, addressing the lawyer as “Mr. Baez” and “Sir” as he denied each and every allegation.
Hernandez pulled on his lip, nervously, as he followed along.
“Now,” Baez asked, “after being shot in Florida, you did not cooperate with the police?”
“Correct,” Bradley replied. “Correct.”
“And that’s because you didn’t know who shot you.”
“That is incorrect.”
“You know who shot you?”
“Most certainly.”
“And you knew the details of who shot you, and how?”
“Extensively.”
“Okay. And you refused to cooperate with the police…You then consulted with a lawyer…and then you sent all those text messages that we went over, right?”
“At some point, yes.”
“And your intent was to get money from Aaron Hernandez.”
Bradley hesitated for a moment, then said, “At a point that became my intent, yes.”
“And I know—we know—you wanted to kill him, too, right?”
Bradley hesitated again before he leaned into the microphone.
“Yes,” he admitted, and Baez pounced.
“Because you’re a killer,” the lawyer said.
The DA objected.
The judge said, “Sustained.”
But Baez had made his point.
According to Baez, the Florida shooting was another example of yet another drug deal gone bad. Bradley denied it. But, he went on to concede, death was an occupational hazard in his line of work.
“Dealing drugs is a very violent business, is it not?” Baez asked.
“It can be,” Bradley admitted.
All in all, Bradley spent three days on the stand. Before letting him go, Baez scored one more point that would resonate with the jury.
Had Bradley sent his lawyer a text: Now u sure once I withdraw this lawsuit I wont be held on perjury after I tell the truth about me not recalling anything about who shot me?
Bradley did his best to explain: There were no circumstances under which Bradley wanted to bring criminal charges against Hernandez. But how could he appear before a grand jury, and deny any knowledge of the shooting, after filing civil charges that contradicted the very same claim?
“I’m not perjuring myself,” Bradley insisted. But a shadow of a doubt would linger over the drug dealer’s testimony.
The prosecution called Bradley’s baby mama, Brooke Wilcox, next. She told the jury that, in the wee hours of the morning, on the night of the double murder in Boston, Bradley and Hernandez had come to her door.
In the privacy of Brooke’s bedroom, she said, Bradley had told her, “This crazy motherfucker just did some stupid shit.”
“Could you tell who he was referring to?” the DA asked.
“Yes. To Aaron.”
On March 30, Shayanna Jenkins took the stand.
“I played my role,” Shayanna Jenkins told the jury. “I learned to keep my mouth shut.”
Though she seemed to remember even less than she had at Aaron’s trial in 2015, Shayanna did recall that she had never asked Aaron about Alexander Bradley being shot.
“I pick and choose my battles,” she said.
A man named Robert Lindsey testified the next day. He described a phone call he’d gotten on Valentine’s Day, 2013—the day after the Florida shooting.
“It was my cousin…” Lindsey said. “Alexander Bradley. He told me—excuse my language—he told me that, ‘This faggot-ass nigga Aaron shot me in the eye.’”
In the few days that followed, more forensics experts were called to the stand. So were a slew of witnesses who had come up from Belle Glade: Tyrone Crawford, Deonte Thompson, Je’rrelle Pierre.
They recalled even less than Shayanna had.
Chapter 96
There is absolutely no evidence,” Jose Baez assured the jurors on April 6, “that Aaron Hernandez committed this crime. What is scary, is how easy it appears to be charged with such crimes.”
It was the last day of Aaron’s second murder trial, and Baez had just launched into his closing argument.
Alexander Bradley was “a three-legged pony,” Baez said. A pony the DAs were going to ride to the finish, despite the lies he had told.
Every few minutes, the lawyer would break away to review another piece of evidence the prosecution had offered. But, every time, he circled back around to his main point: Who was the jury going to believe? The drug dealer?
“Lies from beginning to end, ladies and gentlemen. Lies from Boston to Florida. But they’re going to ride him,” Baez said, hopping in front of the jury as if he was riding that three-legged pony. “They’re going to ride him all the way home!”
Bradley was a perjurer, a parasite in designer clothes. “We all have to get up sometimes and go to work…But this man can prance around in designer shirts and not earn a penny…They cleaned him up. He’s got a nice Burberry shirt on. The glasses are a really nice touch.”
It wasn’t a legal argument, per se. But it was effective. And, in any case, that text that Bradley had sent to his lawyer? “You need not any more information than that alone,” Baez told the jurors. “That is your reasonable doubt for the entire case!”
“You can’t trust this man,” Baez concluded, as he pointed to a photo of Bradley. “You can’t ride him home. That’s not justice.”
Patrick Haggen began his closing statement by admitting that Aaron Hernandez’s actions were senseless, illogical. If there was a motive, in the killings of de Abreu and Furtado, it would not have been one that the jury could have understood.
“No matter how many pieces of evidence we put before you, it will never make sense,” the assistant district attorney said.
Haggen did have a murder weapon: the .38 Special that police had recovered from Jailene Diaz-Ramos’s trunk. But Bradley had confused matters there, as well: the way he remembered it, the .357 Magnum that he had gotten for Aaron was the gun that had been used in the drive-by.
It wasn’t. But Bradley’s faulty memory cast doubt on the matter.
Haggen was not a theatrical lawyer. He did not hop around the courtroom as if he were riding a pony. He stuck to the evidence, putting one photograph after another up on the screen.
He ended with a close-up of one of the tattoos Aaron had gotten in Redondo Beach.
“‘God Forgives,’” Haggen said. “What is he asking God to forgive?”