All-American Murder Page 9

  Furtado, who worked as a tour guide in Cape Verde, had been in the US for less than a year. He’d come to visit his mother and sister, who lived in Dorchester, and earn a bit of money before returning to Africa. In Massachusetts, he worked the overnight shift, cleaning offices with one of his cousins from ten at night until two in the morning. On Sundays, Furtado cleaned a local YMCA, alongside Daniel de Abreu.

  De Abreu, who also had family in Dorchester, had arrived in the US in August of 2008. “He served five years as a police officer in Cape Verde and migrated here, looking to better his life and provide for his family,” de Abreu’s widow, Auriza, would say.

  According to family members, neither man had wanted to go out that evening. Both of them had worked long weeks. Both were tired. But Sunday was the one night when de Abreu and Furtado got to see friends. They had changed into their club clothes and rallied, piling into a silver BMW that belonged to de Abreu’s sister and driving to Cure Lounge. There, out on the dance floor, Daniel de Abreu bumped into an already agitated Aaron Hernandez.

  When Cure was crowded, Hernandez and Bradley would order their drinks two at a time—“a shot of something and another mixed drink,” Bradley would say. That’s what they did on this night. Then, after downing the shots, they brought the cocktails out onto the dancefloor.

  The music was pounding. The dancefloor was packed, and de Abreu had to hold his drink high as he danced his way out from the bar. As he did so, he bumped Hernandez with his hip. Bradley would say that the bump was intentional: “He bumped him in rhythm,” as if it was part of the dance. But intentional or not, the jolt caused Aaron to spill his drink. As a few drops splashed onto his borrowed shirt, the Patriot became enraged.

  According to Bradley, Hernandez turned and eyeballed de Abreu: “He turned angrily, in a manner in which he was going to make a confrontation out of the issue.”

  De Abreu, who was not a football fan and did not recognize Hernandez, smiled at the Patriot. That made Aaron even more angry. Playing the peacemaking role he’d grown used to, Bradley “got on top of it, fast.” Grabbing Aaron’s shirt, he said, “Nah, let’s just get out of here.”

  “I knew something was brewing,” Bradley would say. “His temper, the way he was…I just knew what would happen.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he told Hernandez. “It’s nothing.”

  Hernandez allowed himself to be convinced. He and Bradley left the club less than ten minutes after they had entered it. But, outside, Aaron started to vent. “I hate it when people try me, try to play me,” he said as they walked back down Tremont Street, toward the garage.

  Bradley heard him out, then told him they couldn’t get into that type of trouble.

  Both of them had too much to lose, Bradley said.

  Just then, a promoter who worked at a club called Caprice recognized Aaron and invited him in. He offered the men table service. They declined, but entered the club, walked up to the bar, and ordered drinks. Then, turning around, Hernandez told Bradley that the men they had run into at Cure had followed them into Caprice.

  “See, see!” he said. “There they go!”

  Hernandez was wrong: Daniel de Abreu, Safiro Furtado, and their friends were still at Cure, where they would stay until closing time. But Aaron was sure that he’d seen what he’d seen. Now, Alexander Bradley would have to convince him to leave the second club they had gone to that night.

  Chapter 34

  Alexander Bradley would say that, after leaving Caprice, he and Aaron got back into the 4Runner and drove it around the block. They parked on a side street and smoked some more weed. Then, Hernandez popped the hood, removed the gun he had stuffed in the engine block, and put it in the glove compartment. Driving back out to Tremont Street, they parked just beyond the garage they had parked in earlier that evening and waited for the clubs to get out.

  Destiny Phon, a drag queen in Boston’s theater district, was working that night as the DJ at a club called Underbar. When the club closed, she and a friend decided to run out for Chinese food.

  As they were leaving they bumped into Aaron Hernandez, who was “lounging” outside. Destiny was not a sports fan, but her friend followed the Patriots and recognized Hernandez immediately.

  “I couldn’t really care less, but I looked and thought, ‘Oh, he’s very handsome,’” Destiny says.

  Bradley would say that he and Hernandez were waiting outside to meet women. Instead, they saw Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado exiting Cure.

  “There they go, there they go!” Hernandez shouted as he ran back to the 4Runner. Bradley got behind the wheel. Seeing a silver BMW drive past them with de Abreu and Furtado inside, Hernandez said, “Go, go, go!”

  For de Abreu and Furtado, the rest of the evening had passed without incident. They had stayed at the club until closing time. Then, at 2:19 in the morning, de Abreu, Furtado, and Aquilino Freire walked toward the garage where they had parked the BMW. The plan, Freire would say, was to circle around and pick up Raychides Gomes-Sanches and Gerson Lopes outside of the nightclub.

  A few minutes later, the BMW pulled back around. De Abreu was driving, Furtado sat in the passenger seat, and Freire was in the back. Gomes-Sanches and Lopes joined them there and the five friends pulled off into the night.

  Don Gobin and Brian Quon worked security at Underbar. Twenty minutes after closing time, they walked one of the club’s promoters to his car, then walked down Tremont to the silver Saturn they had driven up from Rhode Island that day.

  “It was a warm night,” Gobin says. “But it was very quiet. There were no cars. There were no people. It was like a sci-fi movie, with papers blowing around. Usually folks are out, taxis are waiting. But we went down to our car, started it. I was driving. Brian was in the passenger seat. Out of the blue, in the rearview mirror, I see this car come whizzing up on the passenger side of our vehicle. It comes out of nowhere, pulls up to our car. Two or three feet away from our car it stops. I said to Brian, ‘Who is that? Is that someone we know?’ We knew a lot of people. We figured, maybe it’s somebody playing a joke. But Brian looked up at the driver and said, ‘No, I don’t think we know him.’”

  Leaning over Bradley in the SUV, Hernandez looked down into the car they had pulled alongside. (From the Saturn’s passenger seat, it would have looked as if Aaron was driving.) He expected to see de Abreu or Furtado. Instead, he saw Brian Quon.

  It was the wrong car. The silver car they were looking for was a BMW.

  Bradley gunned the 4Runner’s engine and ran the red light.

  “He’s in a rush,” Gobin said to Quon.

  The men watched the 4Runner speed up and overtake the next car.

  “The next thing we heard was gunfire,” Gobin recalls. “My first reaction was to look in the rearview mirror. I didn’t see anything. Then I said to Brian, ‘Where is that coming from?’”

  Quon pointed straight ahead, at the SUV that had pulled up beside them seconds earlier.

  “It’s coming from that vehicle up there,” Quon said.

  As he caught up with the BMW, Bradley would say, he looked over and saw that Hernandez was holding the gun.

  “Roll your window down,” Hernandez said as he leaned across Bradley’s seat.

  Bradley reclined, Hernandez braced his left hand on an armrest, and stuck the gun out of the driver’s side window.

  Inside the BMW, de Abreu and Furtado were both glued to their phones. Hernandez yelled, “Yo!”—but neither man looked up. But when he yelled, “Yo” again, the men turned.

  “What’s up now, niggas?” Hernandez said. Then he squeezed the trigger and fired.

  There were five gunshots, maybe six. Bradley would say that Hernandez emptied the chamber.

  Glass exploded. Somebody screamed. Hernandez told Bradley to drive.

  Freire, who was sitting in the backseat between Gomes-Sanches and Lopes, remembers stopping at a red light. Then, he would say, an SUV pulled up close—“right next to us.”

  “What up,
niggas?” was the first thing Freire heard.

  He heard Furtado say “Pamodi?”—Cape Verdean creole for “why?”

  Then he heard gunfire.

  “We were still at the red light,” says Gobin. “As soon as the red light turned green, we drove toward the car that was sitting there. The SUV had already taken off. And as we pulled up to the car, the first thing we saw was that there was blood all over the side of the car. There was glass in the street. We kind of knew what we were going to find, so we pulled up cautiously. Both the driver and the passenger had been shot. They both had their seat belts on. You could tell that the passenger’s chest was not going up and down for air. Both of their heads were on the headrests and the passenger’s eyes were closed.

  “The driver, his eyes were actually open,” Quon adds. “He was still breathing. Labored breathing. At that point, two individuals jumped from the back of the car. One from the left passenger door, one from the right. The first thing they did when they got out was to pat themselves down—probably to see if they got hit by anything. The next thing they did was to start coming toward our vehicle.”

  “One of them came toward our vehicle, and I had my window down maybe halfway,” says Gobin. “He was just saying, ‘Can you help us? Help us! Can you help us?’”

  Aquilino, Raychides, and Gerson jumped out of the BMW.

  “We just went out of the car,” Aquilino would say. “I was trying to see if Safiro and Daniel was all right…And then I was all around the car, waving, like for someone to help.”

  Safiro had been shot in the head. Covered in blood, he was already dead in the passenger seat.

  Sitting beside him, Daniel was trying to speak.

  “He was dying,” Aquilino remembered. “He was trying to say something, but he didn’t. I was trying to tell him, ‘Just keep strong. We’re gonna look for help…’”

  Daniel “lasted for two minutes, or maybe a minute” Freire would say.

  Destiny Phon and her friend were driving down Tremont when they saw the BMW. “All of the sudden, these guys jumped out of the car and stopped us, asking for help,” Destiny says. “One of them had been shot in the arm. Blood was rushing out. We said, ‘Put pressure on it!’ We didn’t want to get out of the car. We didn’t know what was happening. We just said, ‘Dude, chill, chill, stay away from the car and we’ll call 911.’”

  “Did you see that?” Hernandez said. “I think I got one in the head and one in the chest.”

  Aaron took off the T-shirt that Bradley had loaned him and used it to wipe down the gun.

  The two friends had no particular destination in mind. According to Bradley, they were “in a state of shock.”

  They talked about going to Aaron’s place in Plainville, but ended up driving to 47 Newbury Street in Hartford. It was the house where Bradley’s “baby mama,” Brooke Wilcox, lived.

  It was five, or just after five in the morning, when Hernandez and Bradley got there.

  Wilcox lived on the third floor of a three-floor walk-up, in a small, two-bedroom attic apartment. As soon as she and Bradley were alone in one of the bedrooms, Bradley told her, “This crazy motherfucker just did some stupid shit.”

  Aaron was hanging out in the living room. At some point, he knocked on the door and asked to use Brooke’s laptop. Bradley handed it over, along with a blanket and pillow for Aaron to use. Before doing so, Aaron ran a few searches on Brooke’s computer, checking to see if the news outlets were reporting a shooting in Boston.

  Brooke woke up at eight and got into the shower.

  By the time she got out, Tanya Singleton was standing in her kitchen. She and Aaron were whispering. Brooke had never met Tanya before, but she and Aaron seemed so intimate, Brooke assumed that she was Aaron’s fiancée. When Brooke left for work, Tanya was still there.

  When she got home, a few hours later, Alexander Bradley was there, but Aaron, Tanya, and the Toyota 4Runner were gone.

  Chapter 35

  Danny was born on Fogo Island, Cape Verde,” says Daniel de Abreu’s widow, Auriza. “He was infatuated with the law and became a police officer. He was his mother’s son, the man of the house, his siblings’ provider. My main attraction to him was that, even though he was young, he was responsible, mature, and intelligent. He knew what he wanted and he would do what it took to get there.

  “We met at a mutual friend’s house in the summer of 2011, exchanged numbers, and started to date right away. I guess you could call it love at first sight. We’re from the same country, the same community. We dated for several months and got married.

  “That Sunday in July had already been a very sad day. I’d lost a coworker—a nurse—and we had a funeral service that day. Originally, it was the day that we were going to reveal to his family that we were married. He has half brothers and sisters here. He has his father here, who we really didn’t see much of. He saw some family, many weren’t from the same mother and father. They had their issues. I understood and respect that. But our marriage took place without his family, and on that day, we were going to tell them.

  “Daniel worked on the weekends, but on Sundays he worked less. If there’s anything he can do for fun or with his friends to enjoy himself—anything to go out, nightlife or something like that—it would be a Sunday night. That day, he said he was tired, but as I was speaking to him, I could hear that somebody else was around. Someone he needed to attend to. Danny calls me ‘Iza’—the last three letters of my name. Only people who are dear to me call me that. He said ‘Iza, let me call you back.’ I went to sleep. If he tried calling me back I don’t know.

  “I woke up even sadder in the morning. I dropped my girl off at school, right around the corner, but I was feeling so down and depressed—so in need of my mom’s presence, of my mom’s hug—that I decided to visit her.

  “My mom was very happy to see me. As I sat with her I received a phone call from Danny’s sister, Patricia. She told me that Danny had been shot.

  “I called Tufts. They verified that Danny was not there. Then I called Boston Medical Center. BMC couldn’t give me any information because it had been a homicide. They had already determined that Danny had passed, and told me to call the local police. I called the local police not knowing my head from my arm. I tried to be as cool as possible. They questioned me to determine who I was. Then they said to come down to the station.

  “Danny’s cousins were calling me the whole time. I thought it was something minor. A stray bullet. Maybe he had been shot in the leg. Danny’s cousin Americo—named after America—called and told me to come meet him at his house. Danny and Americo grew up together. Danny and I got married in Americo’s house. So here I am thinking that Danny and Americo are together—that once I walk into that house, Danny will be there. That he’s out of any kind of risk. That he’s gone home with his cousin.

  “It was a very short distance to Americo’s house, but it was horrible. I drove nervously, shaking, like I would never get there. It was something I had never experienced before—the fear of not knowing, the anxiety…But I got to the house and a young man opened the door. I asked, ‘Where’s Danny?’

  “He answered, ‘Danny died.’

  “Everything went dark. I kept asking, ‘Where is Danny?’ I wanted to see him. I was not myself. I don’t know who I was at that time. The ride to the police station was the longest ride of my life. I was crying, screaming, and cold.

  “The detective was very polite. He didn’t think my questions were stupid or make me feel that I was aggravating him, not knowing my left from my right. He guided me through and told me that I needed to go somewhere else to identify the body.

  “I thought I could see him. I thought I could see his body. I thought I’d actually be looking at him. I wanted so much to touch him and to hold him, but it was only pictures that I looked at. It was the hardest thing of my life. It still is. I’m trying. I’m learning to cope but it’s really hard. I’ve waited so long to try to understand, to see the reasons why.


  “So many years have passed. We had plans. He had a future ahead of him. There are so many questions, but I never had closure with him. Never a last word. Never ‘hello,’ ‘good-bye,’ or ‘I love you.’ Never anything.”

  Part Five

  Chapter 36

  On July 27—two weeks after the shooting in Boston—Aaron Hernandez reported to Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, for the start of the Patriots training camp.

  Reporters who’d gathered outside the stadium were joking about Rob Gronkowski’s off-season exploits. Among other things, Aaron’s teammate had posed for photos with an adult-film actress while wearing his jersey—and nothing else.

  “Aaron, was your summer as crazy as Gronk’s?” a reporter asked.

  Hernandez refused the bait. “Um,” he said. “More private. But I still had some fun.”

  The reporters asked him again about Gronk. They asked what he thought of Tom Brady’s off-season cliff-diving. They asked him to be a bit more specific about the “fun” he had had.

  “This is a regular job,” Hernandez said. “We like to have fun, too. I’ve been zip-lining and stuff like that, too. They can’t really tell you what you can and what you can’t do, but you just have to be careful about what you do. If you’re out there and being reckless and doing some crazy stuff, then that’s your own stupidity.”

  While Hernandez talked to the reporters, Boston PD continued its investigation into the double homicide outside of Cure. Don Gobin and Brian Quon told the police about a silver SUV with Rhode Island plates—a Nissan Pathfinder, they thought, or a Toyota 4Runner. Both men said that the SUV had been driven by a light-skinned, clean-shaven Hispanic man with short hair. One recalled that the passenger had braided hair.