At first, Meyer did not see anything special in Aaron. “That was more our staff,” he says. “I’m the ultimate decision maker, but I didn’t know enough about him. He looked like a very athletic guy. But to say that I saw something special—I did not.”
Nevertheless, in April, the Gators had flown Aaron down for a meeting. Aaron told his brother that he was only going down for a vacation. But down in Gainesville, the Gators’ freshman quarterback, Tim Tebow, showed Aaron around the campus and football stadium. Sitting beside Heisman Trophy candidate Chris Leak, Aaron took in a spring game. He met with the team’s other coaches, who had done their best to convince Urban Meyer that Aaron truly was special.
Aaron had spent his whole life in Central Connecticut. Florida might as well have been a different planet.
He made his intentions known then and there. In a video posted on the GatorCountry.com website, he said, “I’m going to be a Gator. This is what I want. They can compete for a national championship, and that’s what I want to be in.”
“It was hard,” Aaron said of his decision. “I was close with Coach Edsall, the coaches, and the UConn players. They’re a great building program. It was something I thought I wanted to be around. But then I became the number-one tight end in the country, so I wanted to play at a top school against the top kids. My dad always said to be the best you have to play against the best.”
DJ had become an integral part of Randy Edsall’s organization. He tried everything he could think of to get his brother to reconsider. “I think it’s still up in the air a little bit. He talks about Florida and everything, but it’s not over until it’s over,” he told the Hartford Courant. “I think when it comes down to crunch time he’s going to really think about the family and put everything in perspective and just really realize that maybe Florida is a little too far. We’re such a close family. If I put myself in his shoes, I know that would be really tough for me to do. I just see him doing the same, in the end finding it really difficult to go there.”
But Aaron felt that, short of winning a national championship, there was nothing UConn could do to get him to change his mind.
Aaron had grown up watching the Patriots quarterback, Drew Bledsoe. He had his sights set on the NFL.
Playing for the Gators would give him the opportunity.
“I really did always want to play with my brother,” he told the Courant. “But I also have to think about what’s best for me and my career, and what’s best for me I think is Florida.”
Down in Gainesville, Gators were treated like royalty wherever they went. Hernandez found that appealing. But there were also compelling reasons for him to move far away from Bristol.
According to a family friend, “Aaron started to get mad at the dumb things that Terri was doing.” The desire to get away from his mother is “what really drove the Florida decision. He wanted to get the fuck away from her. She’d been a problem for a long time. And a lot of people were very disappointed with how Terri carried herself after Dennis passed—even shortly before. Her affair with Jeff Cummings. People did not like the decisions that she was making at the time. They felt as though she had started to tarnish the Hernandez name. Even friends who were tight with the family got to a point where they wouldn’t invite her to things anymore, because of the things she was doing or what they had heard about her.”
If Terri had been more of a steadying influence—if Urban Meyer and Tim Tebow had been less persuasive—or if DJ had succeeded in changing his brother’s mind, everything might have turned out differently for Aaron. Like their father, who had done all he could to keep his sons on the right course, DJ wanted nothing more than to keep Aaron close and keep him safe.
But Aaron had settled on another path. Up in Bristol, he’d kept up his friendship with people like TL Singleton, Carlos “Charlie Boy” Ortiz, and Ernest “Bo” Wallace.
Down in Florida, he would begin to act like a thug.
Part Two
Chapter 8
Aaron graduated from Bristol Central a semester early, in December of 2006.
In January, the University of Florida’s second-ranked football team trounced the top-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes in the BCS National Championship game.
When Hernandez arrived in Gainesville that month, the Gators were being feted all over town. Aaron had only just turned seventeen. According to Urban Meyer, he was still deeply affected by Dennis’s death.
“Everybody was walking around on eggshells,” the rangy, plainspoken coach explains. “I knew he’d lost his father. I didn’t realize how sudden it was. And when Aaron got to us that spring, I realized the impact that loss had on him.”
“He was very young, coming out of high school. We tried to counsel him through that. He tried to quit at least a dozen times. My wife’s a psychiatric nurse. She met with him. I would talk to his brother at least every other week. I felt like he was trying to grab hold of something. And I wanted to make sure that he was going to grab hold of the right thing.”
Meyer recalls that Aaron would pull himself together, seem “to get everything under control.” Then he would have visions—“visions of his dad,” Aaron would say—and try to quit, yet again, and go home to Bristol.
“Decimation,” Meyer says, when asked about the impact of Dennis’s death. “I mean, it just destroyed him. There were times he would melt down in my office—break down and start sobbing about his dad. How much he missed him. It happened so fast he never had a chance to say good-bye.
“I lost my father when I was forty-eight years old. I was a grown person when my mom passed away. For me to give advice on something I’ve never walked in those shoes—but I did walk in those shoes, a little later in life. My relationship with my mom was very similar to Aaron with his father. So we would talk about that nonstop. And it seemed like it would comfort him. He would often ask me about that: ‘Tell me when you lost your mom…’ And uncomfortable as that was, I understood. That was his grieving. His opportunity to release a little bit and talk about it.”
If Aaron was in pain, he took care not to show it outside of Urban Meyer’s office. Despite his age, he was quick to find his place on campus. Friends Aaron made as a freshman describe him, today, as kooky, outgoing—a class clown.
“First time I met Aaron, he was on campus with a long pink T-shirt all the way to his knees, blue gym shorts, and bedroom shoes,” Aaron’s friend Markihe Anderson remembers. “He always wanted to be around people. Hang out. Do anything for fun. Anything for excitement. He was always goofing off, making everybody laugh.”
When Anderson went home to Fort Meyers, Aaron would tag along.
“He brought the energy like he already knew my family,” Anderson says. “First time he met them. Ask him for a handshake, he’d give you a hug. He called my ma ‘ma.’ He called my grandma ‘grandma.’ He called my brother ‘brother.’ He had that personality. He swept everyone off their feet.” But a few months after Aaron’s arrival in Florida, an ugly, off-campus incident provided a glimpse of the demons that lurked behind the mask.
Chapter 9
It was midnight on the last Friday in April. Aaron was upstairs at a campus restaurant and bar called the Swamp, drinking lemonade with Tim Tebow and hanging out with his new friend Shaun Young—a tennis player who was the only one of the three who was old enough to drink alcohol.
Classes were over. Finals were set to begin the following week. The Swamp—which was packed to the gills every weekend—was full to overflowing.