All-American Murder Page 10

  Then, the witnesses described the shooting’s aftermath.

  Boston detectives also obtained video footage from Cure Lounge, from a nearby parking garage, and from other locations.

  There was no footage of the shooting itself.

  An appeal was made to the public: Could anyone help the police locate a silver SUV with Rhode Island plates? Detectives had already looked at various vehicles registered with the neighboring state’s DMV, but failed to ID the vehicle in question.

  None of their efforts resulted in an arrest, or even a suspect.

  Chapter 37

  The police made no progress in the weeks that followed, but Aaron’s life changed drastically all the same.

  He found out that his girlfriend, Shayanna Jenkins, was pregnant.

  Aaron and Shayanna had known each other since elementary school and dated, on and off, since high school. Shayanna was beautiful, with high cheekbones, a heart-shaped face, and dark hair that fell beneath her shoulders. She was practically family. And now, she and Aaron would be starting a family of their own.

  That bit of good news was accompanied by another, delivered by the Patriots owner, Robert Kraft.

  On August 27, the Putnam Club at Gillette Stadium was filled with sharply dressed Patriots. It was the night of the team’s annual Charitable Foundation gala and Kraft—an avuncular billionaire who had taken Aaron under his arm—worked the room in a gray suit, a blue banker’s shirt, and a salmon-colored tie. Cameras flashed. Donors, sponsors, and reporters surrounded the players, paying special attention to Aaron Hernandez, who had just given Myra Kraft’s Giving Back Fund a major donation.

  “Aaron came into my office a little teary-eyed,” Kraft told the reporters, “and presented me with a check for $50,000. I said ‘Aaron, you don’t have to do this, you’ve already got your contract.’”

  The reporters laughed.

  “No,” Aaron had said. “It makes me feel good and I want to do it.”

  “I sensed that he was touched in doing that,” Kraft continued. “I didn’t request it. It’s something that he decided. And to flip the switch from living modestly to all of the sudden having a lot of income, I think we have to work real hard to help our young men adjust to that.”

  Hernandez could afford to be generous: On that very day, he had signed a five-year, $40 million contract extension with the Patriots. The agreement was heavily structured toward its later years, with a 2018 base salary, of $6 million, that was almost six times larger than what Aaron would get in 2012. But the extension came with a $12.5-million signing bonus—the largest that any NFL team had ever offered a tight end.

  Earlier that year, Rob Gronkowski had agreed to a six-year, $53 million contract extension—the biggest contract for a tight end in NFL history. But Gronk’s signing bonus of $8 million had been much lower than Hernandez’s.

  “It’s surreal,” Hernandez said, when asked about the extension. “Probably when I’m done with this conversation I’ll get some tears in my eyes. But it’s real, and it’s an honor.”

  Robert Kraft had changed his life, Hernandez told the reporters. And the gesture was all the more meaningful—even extraordinary—because Aaron’s original contract was not ending for some time and no other teams were competing for him at that moment.

  Hernandez embraced Kraft, and kissed him on the cheek.

  “I have a daughter on the way,” he said. “I have a family that I love. It’s just knowing that they’re going to be okay. Because I was happy playing for my $250,000, $400,000. Knowing that my kids and my family will be able to have a good life, go to college, it’s just an honor that he did that for me.”

  Standing a few feet away, Ian Rapoport was struck by the “audible sincerity” in Aaron’s voice.

  “I have a lot more to give back,” Hernandez said. “And all I can do is play my heart out for them, make the right decisions, and live life as a Patriot…I just hope I keep going, doing the right things, making the right decisions so I can have a good life, and be there to live a good life with my family.”

  “I told Aaron on the day of his signing that this was a major accomplishment for him, but also a turning point in his life,” Hernandez’s agent, Brian Murphy, recalls.

  “He wasn’t playing for money anymore because he had his contract. Instead, he was playing for his legacy and that was established on and off the field. He had to decide what that legacy would look like as a player, father, and husband. That is why he made the $50,000 donation to the Myra Kraft Foundation when he signed his contract. He was grateful to Mr. Kraft for drafting him, rewarding him with his new contract, and teaching him the Patriot Way. That was very real.

  “Aaron wanted to be the best tight end to ever play. He was constantly studying film, getting work done on his body—massages, soft tissue work—and practiced as hard as anyone. He had a brilliant football mind and honestly felt that he was the best player on the team. Once Aaron got his big contract, he had a lot of demands from an enormous range of people. This is true of many players after getting big contracts, but in Aaron’s case, he had some people asking him for some really unusual stuff and there were so many requests.

  “Aaron wanted to live life the Patriot Way because it had worked for him. It had gotten him a huge contract and respect throughout the league. Unfortunately, there were powerful forces pulling him in the other direction. That constant pull never stopped and eventually won.”

  Chapter 38

  Aaron and Shayanna got engaged that October. A few weeks later, on November 6, Aaron skipped practice. It was the Patriot’s twenty-third birthday, but he and Jenkins had something much more important to celebrate: the birth, on that day, of their daughter Avielle Janelle.

  DJ Hernandez took to Twitter to express his joy: “I’m an uncle!”

  Then, on the very next day, Aaron put on his white jersey and went back to work.

  When a reporter asked him—“Why are you wearing your game-day uniform to practice?”—Hernandez replied: “Game time, that’s it!”

  “I’m engaged now,” Aaron explained. “I have a baby. It’s just going to make me think of life a lot differently and doing things the right way. Now, another one is looking up to me. I can’t just be young and reckless Aaron no more. I’m going to try to do the right things, become a good father and [let Avielle] be raised like I was raised.”

  Aaron and Shayanna bought a house at 22 Ronald C. Meyer Drive in North Attleboro, just off of Homeward Lane. Located less than ten miles away from Gillette Stadium, the 7,100-square-foot contemporary colonial mansion, which had been built for Patriots defensive tackle Ty Warren, had three stories, five bedrooms, six baths, a three-car garage, an in-ground pool, a movie theater, and a basement sauna and ice bath.

  Piece by piece, the young couple were putting together a home to replace the one shattered by Dennis Hernandez’s death and Terri Hernandez’s marriage to Jeffrey Cummings. Family mattered to them. Aaron was still tight with his cousin Tanya and Shayanna was close to Shaneah, one of her two younger sisters.

  Shaneah was more sober-minded than Shayanna, and more serious. She worked long hours, putting herself through Central Connecticut State University, where she was majoring in criminology, with an eye toward becoming a lawyer. Shaneah carried herself so maturely, she looked like the older sibling—although, in fact, Shayanna was two years older. But the two sisters were close, and on weekends, Shaneah would drive out to visit Shayanna in North Attleboro.

  On most of the visits, she’d bring along her new boyfriend, a man named Odin Lloyd.

  Lloyd had dark skin, a winning smile, an athletic physique. He had been born in Saint Croix, but raised in Dorchester—the same town that Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado had lived in. He had been an excellent football player in high school, good enough to get into Delaware State. But Odin did not have the money for college. When his financial aid fell through, he dropped out and moved home. Still, Odin held on to his dreams: on days off from his job, at a Dorchester la
wn fertilizer company, he played defense for a semi-pro team called the Boston Bandits.

  Odin and Aaron had met in Foxborough, in August of 2012, when Hernandez had gotten Shaneah a skybox at Gillette Stadium for a birthday present. They had hit it off immediately. Hernandez was a bona fide football star. Lloyd was a stone-cold fan.

  Better yet, it turned out that he loved to smoke marijuana.

  Aaron himself had not broken the habit. He had not stopped associating with his friend and weed dealer, Alexander Bradley. He was still spending time with Charlie Boy Ortiz, Bo Wallace, and TL Singleton. And, according to Bradley, Hernandez had stuck to his old ways in other respects.

  For one thing, he was still paranoid, and still had difficulty trusting people. People were trying to use him, Aaron would say—strangers as well as old friends who were ungrateful for all that he had done for them.

  Soon after moving into the house, he installed an extensive surveillance system, with cameras inside and out.

  Hernandez also convinced himself that he was being tailed by the feds, that helicopters were following him, and that iPhones could be hacked to record his conversations.

  Hernandez warned Bradley not to use his iPhone when he came around. But, before long, Bradley’s iPhone became the very thing that came between the two men.

  Chapter 39

  On January 20, 2013, the Patriots hosted the Baltimore Ravens in the AFC Championship Game and lost.

  It was the end of Aaron’s third season in the NFL.

  Three weeks later, Aaron and Alexander Bradley flew to Miami. The Ravens had gone on to win the Super Bowl and Deonte Thompson and Pernell McPhee, who played for Baltimore, were hosting a Super Bowl party in West Palm Beach.

  Deonte Thompson and Aaron were tight. They had started for Florida at the same time, and Aaron was close enough to Deonte to call him “D.” But when Thompson and some of his friends picked Hernandez and Bradley up at the airport, Bradley realized that he did not know any of them:

  A man named “Papoo.”

  D’s nephew, Max “Black” Brown.

  Two men, Tyrone Crawford and Je’rrelle Pierre, who had grown up with D in Belle Glade, an hour west of West Palm Beach.

  A man who simply said “Soldier” when asked for his name.

  They were all strangers to Bradley, who was not sure how he’d be received. More and more, he was uncertain around Aaron, and around Aaron’s acquaintances. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been hanging out in Aaron’s kitchen when Shaneah and her boyfriend, Odin, had come in. They were there to see Shaneah’s sister, and as they passed through the kitchen, Shaneah said “hello.”

  Odin—who had met Bradley before—did not acknowledge him at all. Even Aaron had said, “That was rude.”

  Bradley agreed that it was.

  Locals called Belle Glade “the muck,” or “muck city,” because of the dark color of its soil. But the town had another distinction: it produced more NFL athletes than any other place in America.

  Papoo’s house in Belle Glade was where the pre-party would be.

  Papoo’s government name was Oscar Hernandez, but he was not related to Aaron. Although he had been D’s roommate in Gainesville, he was one of the few men who’d gathered that day who did not play football. But Papoo was in awe of the players, especially Aaron and D. When D asked Papoo if he could borrow a handgun, “for protection,” Papoo had handed his own gun over immediately.

  Down in Belle Glade, football players tended to get what they wanted—and what Aaron wanted was to get wasted. Before long, all of the players were wasted. They stayed that way, too, for several days of partying.

  During those days, the men made several trips to Miami. A cavernous Miami Gardens strip club called Tootsie’s Cabaret became their favorite after-hours destination. The group caravanned there on February 11, and again on February 12, staying deep into the night on both nights and drinking enough to get sloppy. But the drinking did nothing to dispel Aaron’s paranoia.

  During their first visit to Tootsie’s, Hernandez told Bradley that two customers at the strip club were undercover cops.

  According to Bradley, Hernandez thought they were following him.

  “If they are,” Bradley told him, “it’s because of the stupid shit you did in Boston.”

  On their second night at the strip club, as Bradley sat in a top floor VIP room with Aaron, Je’rrelle, Tyrone, and Soldier, he asked one of the waitresses for a cell phone charger. The waitress said she would look, but never came back. Bradley ended up leaving his phone on the table, and forgot it was there when something else caught his attention: the check. It was for $10,000, or something close to that amount. Hernandez asked Bradley to split it.

  “I don’t even know these people,” Bradley replied.

  Why should he have to pay five grand to buy drinks and dances for Hernandez’s friends—a bunch of guys he did not even know?

  Hernandez was less than thrilled with Bradley’s response, but ended up paying the bill himself. Then, Aaron and his friends piled back into the SUV they’d taken to the club. Bradley recalls riding in the back, beside Soldier. Hernandez was up front, in the passenger seat. Je’rrelle was driving. It was late—almost dawn—and he was tired. But, before they had gone more than a couple of blocks, Bradley realized that he had left his phone in the club.

  “Let’s go back,” he said.

  “Nah,” said Hernandez.

  Hernandez and Bradley argued about it. The car’s other occupants took Aaron’s side.

  “I’ll buy you a new phone,” Hernandez said.

  “I don’t want a new phone,” said Bradley. “I want my phone. It’s got my kids’ pictures in it.”

  Hernandez did not want to turn around. Bradley was outraged, and told Aaron so. But Hernandez did not turn around, and Bradley stewed, in the backseat, until he finally fell asleep.

  He woke up as soon as he felt the SUV stop moving.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw Aaron.

  Hernandez was pointing a semiautomatic pistol at Bradley’s face. Just as Bradley threw his right hand up to cover it, Aaron pulled the trigger.

  The blast was deafening. The bullet tore through Bradley’s hand, blew off part of one finger, passed through the bridge of his nose, and exploded his right eye in its socket. Soldier leaned across and started to push Bradley out of the car.

  Hernandez got out on the passenger side, grabbed Bradley from the other side, and pulled.

  There was light in the sky now. It was 6:30 a.m.

  Chapter 40

  Kevin Riddle bent over his computer, a mug of coffee steaming beside him on the countertop.

  At six thirty, it would be time for Riddle to open up his John Deere Landscapes lot.

  “Mingle,” he said. “You want to go out and get the back gate?”

  Mingle Blake, the company truck driver, went out the back door. A moment later, Riddle heard what sounded to him like a gunshot. Worried for Blake, he ran out back. Together, the two men set out to investigate.

  “Maybe it was a just a car backfiring,” said Riddle.

  “I’ll unlock the gate,” said Blake.

  A few minutes later, Blake rushed back toward Riddle. He was out of breath. “There’s a body,” he said.

  Riddle followed him back, sprinting toward a scrubby spot west of the building. When he got there he saw a man, curled up in a fetal position on the far side of a chain-link fence.

  The man’s hands and face were covered in blood. Both of his eyes were swollen shut.

  To Riddle, it looked as if the man had been beaten, shot in the head, maybe the hand, too, and left for dead. But the man was alive.

  “Call 911,” the man managed to say. “Tell them to hurry—I’m gonna bleed out.”

  The 911 dispatcher told Riddle to ask the man his name.

  “Alex Bradley,” the man replied.

  “Do you know who shot you?” Riddle asked.

  “No.”

  “Why would somebody do
this to you?”

  “I don’t know,” Bradley said. “I’m done talking, it hurts too bad.”

  The 911 dispatcher told Riddle to make a compress and put pressure on the man’s wound. Riddle ran back inside the landscaping shop for a towel. When he came back, a few moments later, the police were already there.

  The police asked Bradley the same question Riddle had: “Who did this to you?”

  “It hurts,” Bradley said. “It hurts too much to talk.”

  “Paramedics are on the way. What’d they look like?”

  “They looked like, uh…big…”

  “Big what?”

  “Big black males.”

  “Do you know what they were driving?”

  “I have no information for you, sir, with all due respect.”

  “You don’t want us to investigate it, or you just don’t know?”

  “I don’t know…there’s very little that I know…but…with all due respect, you do what you got to do. I just ain’t got no info for you, man.”

  Mingle Blake told the police that he had seen an SUV in the area just before hearing the gunshot. Dark green. A Ford Explorer. Maybe a Ford Expedition. Blake said there were cameras trained on the area where Bradley had been, but didn’t know if they were set to record.

  The police checked and found, to their dismay, that they were not.

  Chapter 41

  Hernandez called Bradley’s baby mama, Brooke Wilcox, that morning from the Miami airport.

  He wanted to know: Had Brooke seen Alex? They had been in Miami together, Hernandez said, and were supposed to meet at the airport. But now Aaron was at the airport and Alex was not.