All-American Murder Read online

  Although he refused requests to be interviewed for this book, DJ did spend several days with Michael Rosenberg, a writer for Sports Illustrated. In July of 2016, SI published a long profile.

  By then, DJ had given up on the coaching career and started a roofing company in Texas. Now going by “Jonathan,” DJ came off as responsible, sober, and thoughtful. Photographs that accompanied the profile underscored his physical resemblance to Aaron. But the similarities seemed to end there.

  DJ/Jonathan did not have his brother’s freakishly outsized talent—or his dark side.

  “No one but Aaron Hernandez will ever fully grasp how a millionaire tight end came to gun down a friend three summers ago,” the tagline that ran with the article read. “But Aaron’s older brother Jonathan was there from day one, and witnessed all the little moments, all the poor choices, all the unwise associations that led to murder. That perspective cost Jonathan his way of living—but that’s O.K. He understands.”

  DJ/Jonathan really did seem to understand. The profile described the tattoo over his heart—

  D&A

  THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FOR A BROTHER

  THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FROM A BROTHER

  —and went on to describe that love in detail.

  “He had a very big heart,” Jonathan said. “That’s what’s craziest about all this. There is a disconnect. He would open up his arms to anyone.” But Aaron’s brother admitted that, although Aaron had sworn to him that he was innocent, he had been “involved,” at the least, in Odin Lloyd’s murder.

  “Drugs, and people who don’t have the best intentions for you,” DJ explained.

  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.

  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 fro
m 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.