cover

CONTENTS

About the Book
About the Authors
Also by James Patterson
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Part Four
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part Five
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Six
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Part Seven
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Part Eight
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Part Nine
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Part Ten
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Part Eleven
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Coda
Epilogue
Picture Section
Copyright

ABOUT THE BOOK

NFL COACHES, PLAYERS AND FANS CALLED AARON HERNANDEZ UNSTOPPABLE.

HIS FOUR-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER CALLED HIM DADDY.

THE LAW CALLED HIM INMATE #174594.

Aaron Hernandez was a college football All-American who became the youngest player in the NFL and later reached the Super Bowl. He was a star on the league-dominant New England Patriots, who extended his contract for a record $40 million. Hernandez’s every move as a professional athlete played out in the headlines, yet he led a secret life – one that ended in a maximum-security prison. What drove him to go so wrong, so fast?

Hernandez was the best athlete Connecticut’s Bristol Central High had ever produced. But by the time he arrived at University of Florida, he was already courting trouble. As his fame grew and he joined the NFL, trouble followed him. Between the summers of 2012 and 2013, Hernandez was linked to a series of violent incidents culminating in the death of Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro American football player who dated the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée.

All-American Murder is the first book to fully investigate the shocking story of Aaron Hernandez – from his meteoric rise in the world of American football to his first-degree murder conviction and the mystery of his own untimely death. Drawing on original, in-depth reporting, this is an explosive account of a life cut short in the dark shadow of fame.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

JAMES PATTERSON is one of the best-known and biggest-selling writers of all time. His books have sold in excess of 350 million copies worldwide. He is the author of some of the most popular series of the past two decades – the Alex Cross, Women’s Murder Club, Detective Michael Bennett and Private novels – and he has written many other number one bestsellers including romance novels and stand-alone thrillers.

James is passionate about encouraging children to read. Inspired by his own son who was a reluctant reader, he also writes a range of books for young readers including the Middle School, I Funny, Treasure Hunters, House of Robots, Confessions and Maximum Ride series. James has donated millions in grants to independent bookshops and he has been the most borrowed author in UK libraries for the past ten years in a row. He lives in Florida with his wife and son.

Alex Abramovich is the author of Bullies: A Friendship. He writes for the London Review of Books and teaches at Columbia University.

Mike Harvkey is the author of the novel In the Course of Human Events. He has written for Esquire, Salon, Poets & Writers, and other publications.

 

Also by James Patterson

MURDER IS FOREVER TRUE CRIME

Murder, Interrupted
Home Sweet Murder
Murder Beyond the Grave

A list of more titles by James Patterson can be found at the back of this book

Title page for All-American Murder

To Bill Robinson, who got this thing cooking

PROLOGUE

MATTHEW KENT RAN track and played football at a high school in Attleboro, Massachusetts. After school, he worked out at a gym called Answer is Fitness. Then he would run, two miles north, to his house on Homeward Lane. The route went through an industrial park and into a clearing. The path turned to gravel, then dirt. On the far side of the clearing, at Landry Avenue, it turned into pavement again.

On June 17, 2013, Matthew did not get as far as the pavement.

It was a Monday. The day before the last day of school. Matthew had gotten to the gym at four. By the time he got out, an hour later, the weather – which had been beautiful all day – had started to turn. Clouds were gathering. The wind had started to gust. Matthew was running through the industrial park.

Suddenly, at the far end of the clearing, he stopped.

There was a man, lying on his back near a dirt pile.

Matthew called out to him: “Are you all right?”

The man did not answer. Matthew walked a bit closer, until he was about twenty feet away.

“Are you all right?” he asked again.

Once again, there was no answer.

Detective Mike Elliott was nearing the end of his eight-hour shift at the station when the transmission came over the radio: A guy down. A “possible sudden” behind the Corliss Landing industrial park.

Lieutenant Michael King, of the Massachusetts State Police, was coaching his son’s little league team when he got the call – he was already on his way down to the clearing. Assistant District Attorney Patrick Bomberg would arrive shortly after, along with uniformed police officers and members of the North Attleboro fire department. But North Attleboro PD Captain Joseph DiRenzo beat everyone else to the scene.

The captain had left work at four. He was less than a mile away from Corliss Landing when the call came in, and he showed up, in shorts and a T-shirt, at 5:38.

DiRenzo saw right away that they were dealing with a homicide.

“There were rounds, and what appeared to be bullet wounds to the torso,” he says. “When I knelt down and touched the body, I could clearly tell that rigor mortis had set in.”

The man on the ground was lying faceup. His left fist was clenched over his chest – one of several places he had been shot. He was young. He was black. His eyes were half-open.

Flies were buzzing around the man’s nostrils.

DiRenzo made note of the sneaker prints that had been left in the dirt. He saw a baseball cap, a white towel, and a partially smoked marijuana blunt lying on the ground. When he looked up, he saw something else: Dark, menacing clouds. A storm coming in from the west.

Soon, it would rain – heavy rain, which would wash away crucial pieces of evidence.

“It could not have come at a worse time,” DiRenzo recalls. “We have the body itself, tire marks, shoe prints, and rounds. All of a sudden you could see the trees bending over, clouds moving in in slow motion. It was a moment of, ‘Holy shit, we’ve gotta do something here!’”

The fire department had brought tents and tarps that the police could use to cover the crime scene. The cops worked quickly, trying to stay ahead of the storm. They measured, logged, and photographed as much as they could. But they also had to be careful not to contaminate the location.

Everyone had to park one hundred yards away from the body, in order to preserve the tire tracks. Everyone, including the firemen, had to wear boots and gloves, or have the bottoms of their shoes photographed for comparison purposes in preparation for the eventual homicide investigation.

The man had been standing when the first shot hit him. The detectives made note of the dirt the man’s heels had kicked up as he fell – it was the kind of detail that a rain-storm would wash away.

The man had been shot several more times after falling.

Boom, he goes down, the cops thought. Then, when he’s down: Boom, boom, boom. You could definitely tell, somebody wanted to make sure he was dead. And the shell casings are right there – one in the dirt and three more in a little indentation in the ground right next to the body. They’re all right there. Whoever did this was brazen. It’s crazy – not even bothering to pick up the brass?

The police put tarps over the tire and sneaker prints, set a tent up over the body, and covered the body itself with a tarp, placing rocks around the tarp’s circumference to keep the wind from blowing it away.

There was nothing more they could do before the storm passed.

The rain lasted for twenty minutes – a half hour at the most – but it was heavy. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts shook the trees that stood around the clearing. The temperature dropped by twenty degrees. When the rain stopped, a state trooper named Michael Cherven removed the tarp and went through the dead man’s pockets:

Sixty-four dollars and seventy-five cents in cash. Two sets of keys for an Enterprise Rent-A-Car. A cell phone.

“His cell phone?” one of the officers said. “For Christ’s sake, you’re gonna kill someone, take his cell phone!”

In the man’s wallet, they found an ID: Odin Lloyd. Twenty-seven years old. The face in the photograph matched the victim’s.

Back at the North Attleboro police station, Detective Elliott and Elliott’s colleague, Detective Daniel Arrighi, waited outside of the room as a state trooper named Eric Benson called the car rental company and spoke with a manager named Edward Brennan.

“I’m investigating an apparent homicide in North Attleboro,” Benson said. “We’ve recovered two sets of keys to a black Chevy Suburban, Rhode Island registration 442427. We have reason to believe that the person who rented it may be in danger.”

Brennan looked up the number.

“Oh, no,” he said.

Outside of the room, the detectives strained to hear Trooper Benson’s side of the conversation. A few moments went by.

Benson opened the door.

“You’re not going to believe this,” he said when he saw Elliott and Arrighi. “The car was rented by Aaron Hernandez.”

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

IT WAS NOVEMBER 23, 2006, and Aaron Hernandez’s high school football team – the Rams – was suiting up for the Battle for the Bell.

Played annually on Thanksgiving mornings, the Battle was a grudge match between Aaron’s school, Bristol Central, and its crosstown rival, Bristol Eastern.

Bristol, Connecticut, is a working-class town – football country in the middle of a state where soccer and crew are the suburban sports – and the Battle drew thousands of people to Muzzy Field, an ancient, minor-league baseball stadium that had hosted Babe Ruth at one time, and had been scouted as a film location for The Natural.

Every year, going all the way back to 1959, bragging rights had been at stake: Would the Rams get to lord it over the Lancers for twelve more months?

This year, the stakes were especially high. If the Rams won, they’d advance – for the first time in nineteen years – to the state championship. If they lost or tied, it would be the end of their season, and the end of Aaron Hernandez’s high school football career.

The Rams were confident as they ran out onto the field in their red-and-white uniforms. They had good reason to be. With Aaron Hernandez as their team captain, the Rams had won all but one of their games. Everyone favored them over the Lancers, who had bigger players on their team but had lost four of their games that season. Everyone knew that, on this day, a win by the Rams would push them into the playoffs.

Once again, all eyes were on Aaron Hernandez.

Aaron was a quadruple-threat athlete. He ran track, and was the best player on the school’s basketball team. He had speed, dexterity, good reach, great hands. When he played baseball, he was the pitcher. On the basketball court, his dunks were legendary. And on the football field, he ducked, dodged, and stutter-stepped like a basketball star.

At 6′1″ and 245 pounds, Aaron already had the body of an NFL player. Big and fast, he was the kind of tight end who’d always be the offense’s primary option.

He was the best athlete that Bristol Central had ever produced.

“Bristol Central had become the powerhouse of the state,” says Armando Candelaria, who was coaching high school football nearby in New Britain. “And Aaron Hernandez was the big name in Connecticut football. New Britain is a bigger city than Bristol. Our rivalry goes back to 2001, when Aaron’s brother, DJ, was on Bristol Central’s team. Our rivalry went from there to Aaron’s own rise in football. In 2005, I remember game planning for Aaron. Planning just for him.

“He was like something you’d see on ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. A man among boys, even as a junior. When we played him the second game of his junior year, he caught four balls for a hundred and eighty yards – on a losing effort. In college, he could have played tight end or defensive end – it didn’t matter. You knew who the best player was when he walked onto the field. He was. Definitely.

“I was the defensive coordinator, the secondary coach. It was my responsibility to stop Aaron. But he was very, very hard to block. He’d run away from the whole game. There was nothing you could do about it. From the coaching point of view, his numbers were unbelievable. As a senior, on both sides of the ball, he was dominating. His junior year as a tight end put him on the map. He would give you two hundred yards receiving as a tight end. I remember one game: DJ was a senior. Aaron was a freshman, but he didn’t look like a fourteen-year-old kid. He ran a shallow cross, coming across the middle, and turned it up against seniors. To do that at fourteen against varsity kids speaks volumes.

“In his junior year, we started calling him ‘The Big Guy.’ We started to play a tough man underneath him – whoever got at his feet – and then we’d have a man eight yards on top of him, in case he got free of the first guy. Double coverage the whole time. That was easier said than done because my staff and I did not anticipate how physical he was. He was a lot faster in person than he was on film, and he would get free from the first defender and get open in front of the second defender. That made the game plan difficult during his junior year. We still got the win, but he made it known that you weren’t going to double him.

“Everyone talked about his size. No one talked about his feet. He had really good basketball feet. His athleticism and speed took over. His footwork and balance. When you saw it live you understood, the kid was a born athlete.”

“The thing that stood out to me,” says Ian Rapoport, who covered football for the Boston Herald, “was the first time I saw a guy fall down. He was the first football player who played like a basketball player, making defensive backs fall down. The kind of player who made the press box go, ‘Wow!’ An incredible, freakish athlete, with unbelievable versatility and talent. The first time I saw him, I thought, This guy’s got game. He could start and stop on a dime. It was amazing.”

CHAPTER 2

AARON KNEW THAT the Lancers’ coach would double-team him at every turn, just as every other opposing coach had all season long.

“From a coaching perspective, the philosophy had to be to figure a way to take Aaron out of the game plan,” says Sal Cintorino, who ran the football program at Newington High School and went on to coach Bristol Central. “That was what everyone tried to do. We’d try to put two guys on him, try to influence Matt Coyne, who was their quarterback at the time, to go in a different direction. But Coyne had so much confidence in Aaron. He didn’t care who covered him. He’d throw right into the coverage. Somehow, Aaron would come away with the football.”

Given how well Aaron had been playing, Bristol Central should have steamrolled the Lancers straight back to their side of town. But, just after kickoff, dark clouds full of rain, slush, and snow filled the sky.

Although it was just a few degrees above freezing, the cold did not bother Hernandez. He had played beautifully in the cold in last year’s Battle, making seven catches for 112 yards, scoring a touchdown, leading the Rams to a thirteen-point victory. More troubling was the fact that the Rams were a passing team – and, Aaron knew, passing teams did not do well on rainy, windy football fields.

The Lancers took a 7-0 early lead in the game, moving fifty-five yards on eleven plays. In the second quarter, the Rams’ coach, Doug Pina, adjusted for the rain and moved Aaron into the backfield. Hernandez did not disappoint. He ran straight up the middle, plowing straight through the other team’s players. He made a short but explosive touchdown run that opened up a 14-7 lead. But stripped of their passing game, playing in the mud, the Rams struggled to maintain their advantage.

“It was a bad day,” Pina recalls. “The field was a mess. Our quarterback was having a lot of trouble throwing.”

“It was the coldest I’d ever been,” one of Aaron’s teammates remembers. “I remember being out there, just stepping in puddles when I was on the field. Down in the line your hands would sink into the mud.”

“The downpour was torrential,” says Cintorino. “The rain was sideways.”

Aaron’s teammates on the sidelines wondered if Bristol’s Parks Department had let the game go forward because the department employee who had made that call was biased toward Bristol Eastern.

“Physically, the Lancers were bigger, and the conditions would have given them an advantage there,” a player on Aaron’s team says.

“Paul Philippon, the head coach at Bristol Eastern, was adamant about playing that game,” Cintorino remembers. “Everyone else was like, ‘It’s a terrible game in this weather!’ But Phillipon said, ‘We’re playing this game.’ The reason was, Central was not going to be able to throw the ball. The weather was that bad. And if you couldn’t throw, you had to figure out some other way to get the football to Aaron.”

Aaron battled through freezing rain in the third quarter. The Rams held the Lancers to seven points. But midway through the fourth quarter, the Lancers capitalized on the advantage the weather had given them. Rallying, they ended the game in a tie at fourteen.

Given the Rams’ reputation, that tie – one of only two in the decades-long history of the Battle – felt more like a loss. (“Probably the biggest upset anyone could think of,” Cintorino says.) It knocked Bristol Central out of contention for the upcoming state championship, ending Bristol Central’s season as well as Aaron’s high school career.

But if Aaron was disappointed, he did not show it that day. As a high school player, he was known for his composure.

“Mature before his time,” Cintorino recalls. “A lot of kids at seventeen would have been very angry after a loss like that. But in the football arena, where I saw him, he was very mild, very humble, and very mature. He carried himself in a way you’d appreciate.”

What changed?

Blows sustained on the football field were already altering the structure of Aaron’s still-developing brain.

Celebrity status, drug use, and criminal associations would help to make Hernandez unstable, paranoid, and dangerous.

But some of those who knew Aaron in Bristol suggest that, even then, his humility was a put-on. The only real change, they say, had to do with Aaron’s ability – or his desire – to hide his true character.

CHAPTER 3

THE FORMATION OF Aaron Hernandez’s mask began at home, in a cottage on Greystone Avenue.

Growing up, Aaron shared a bedroom with DJ – Dennis John – who was three years his senior. Sometimes, it felt as if everyone in the family was living right on top of one another. But Aaron’s parents, Dennis and Terri, were proud of the home and took even more pride in DJ and Aaron. They were determined to keep the boys on the straight and narrow.

“I met the Hernandezes in second grade, or third grade, when I began to play football,” a family friend named Tim Washington remembers. “Aaron and DJ lived near the high school, in a rural type of area off of Union Street. They had a nice house with a nice finished basement. Their dad had a little gym set up down there for them to work out. It had some weights and a weight bench. There was an in-ground pool and the basketball court right behind that. Aaron and DJ played basketball and home run derby in the woods off to the back of the house.

“Dennis and his brother, Dave, were on the coaching staff for the Bristol Bulldogs and the Pop Warner league. Dennis was the janitor at my middle school. And in high school and college, I dated Dave’s daughter, Davina. We were very close. Dennis would always tell me, ‘My boys are coming up! You need to watch out for my boys. You need to protect my boys.’

“Dennis knew that those boys were going to be special in any sport that they played. And Aaron was driven to make his dad proud.”

Dennis woke DJ and Aaron at dawn so that they could work out. The boys practiced their layups for hours on end. They ran countless suicide drills up and down the hills around their home. All the while, lessons their father had instilled in them rang in their heads:

If you do anything great in life, it will come from within, Dennis would tell them. And, If it is to be, it is up to me.

Aaron and DJ worshipped Dennis. And if Dennis was over-protective of them, it was because he had come close to living out his own dreams.

Dennis Hernandez had played for Bristol Central back in the 1970s. Like his son, he’d been triple-varsity, running track and playing basketball as well as football. Along with his twin brother, David, he’d been big and fierce: a dominant player. For decades to come, Dennis held on to his high school nickname – “the King.”

Along with David, Dennis had gotten a full football scholarship to the University of Connecticut. But, in his youth, he had also gotten into a fair deal of trouble.

As one of the only Puerto Rican kids in a hardscrabble, Irish-Italian town, Dennis had spent his youth proving his mettle, on and off the football field. A wild kid with a chip on his shoulder, Dennis drank and partied. Along with his brother, and a friend and teammate named Rocco Testa, he got into fights, broke into strangers’ houses, and stole. Surrounded by friends from the wrong side of town, both twins ended up dropping out of UConn.

Testa came to a bad end. A few days before Thanksgiving, in 1977, he and his uncle, a petty criminal named Gary Castonguay, were burglarizing a house in Plainville, Connecticut. When a police officer named Robert Holcomb arrived, responding to a call about a burglary in progress, Castonguay shot him four times and left him to bleed to death. Officer Holcomb was twenty-eight, with a three-year-old son. Castonguay was thirty-three, with a long rap sheet. Testa was twenty. When Castonguay was arrested, two weeks after the shooting, Testa was given immunity from murder and burglary charges in exchange for testifying against his uncle.

For David and Dennis, this story would serve as a cautionary tale. But fatherhood was the thing that straightened the brothers out for good. David became a corrections officer. Dennis got his job as a janitor at Bristol Eastern. Dennis’s wife, Terri, who’d been a majorette, a few years behind him at Bristol Central, became an administrative assistant at a Bristol elementary school.

The young couple scrimped and saved to buy the cottage on Greystone Avenue. They had their boys, and a white German shepherd named “UConn.” They loved their lives. But money would always be an issue for them.

Dennis and Terri saw to it that Aaron and DJ had everything that they needed to be safe and comfortable. Still, they couldn’t afford the designer clothes and fancy toys that other parents bought for their kids. Watching her boys go without, and suffering for it, caused Terri to make poor decisions. In 2001, the Bristol police came to the house and placed her under arrest: Terri had gotten involved in a bookkeeping operation run by a local restaurant manager named Marty Hovanesian.

“She was the phone operator,” Hovanesian’s lawyer told the Boston Globe. “A minor player, not the brains.” But the operation was serious enough that Hovanesian was convicted of felony racketeering and professional gambling. “I’m not saying it was right, what she did – at all,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “I don’t think it is. But this woman did this because I was crying every single night. She didn’t do it for the thrill. She didn’t do it to pocket the money. She did it to provide for me and Aaron.”

The case against Terri never went to trial. But in Bristol’s close-knit community, word got out. Before long, the whole town seemed to know about Terri’s arrest.

Aaron was twelve at the time – an innocent, outgoing kid who liked pranks and practical jokes. But despite his popularity, and DJ’s, Aaron and his brother were teased about the incident, and if DJ was quick to forgive, Aaron was more of a cipher. He kept his feelings to himself. But try as he did to mask his embarrassment, Aaron’s relationship with his mother grew strained as he entered his adolescence – and decisions Terri made as the years went by only increased the distance between her and her younger son.

CHAPTER 4

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Aaron kept up appearances. His former classmates describe a likable, well-behaved teenager. The worst thing that Bristol law enforcement has to say about Aaron, in his youth, is that once, at a party, he ran up onto a car and put a slight dent in the roof.

On that occasion, the Bristol police had called Dennis Hernandez.

“Dennis came down and rode a hard line on him,” an officer remembers. “The old man made him do the right thing. Made the kid apologize. And the kid wouldn’t say ‘boo.’ He was reserved. Not a bad kid at all.”

Now, as Aaron finished out his last year of middle school, there was no doubt that he would be joining DJ on the BCHS varsity squad. Aaron’s grades up to this point had been good. (In high school, Hernandez would make the honor roll.) His football game was already exceptional.

Though he preferred basketball, Aaron seemed to have a sixth sense for the sport, leaving spectators with the feeling that he was seeing the field from above.

Dennis Hernandez watched everything that Aaron did on the field from the stands, just as he had with DJ.

Whenever one of his boys scored or made a beautiful play, Dennis was not ashamed to cry tears of pride. But back at home, the family dynamic was changing.

Dennis’s brother, David, was struggling with cancer, and the family had braced itself for bad news.

His son DJ, who had preceded Aaron as a superstar player for the Rams, was heading off to UConn (where he would excel as a quarterback and wide receiver for the Huskies).

His wife, Terri, had become romantically involved with a married man named Jeffrey Cummings.

Cummings’s wife, Tanya, was the daughter of Dennis’s sister, Ruth – which made Aaron and Tanya first cousins. Because the Hernandezes were a tight-knit family, Terri and Jeffrey had to be extra-careful. At first, they were, and no one found out about their relationship. But, in September of 2005, an ugly incident occurred at a UConn football game.

While DJ was down on the field, Tanya came up to Terri and slapped her, right there in the stands.

Now, the family affair was pried open for Aaron and others to see.

Given the chance, Aaron’s parents might have gotten past the unfortunate incident, patched things up, and moved on with their lives and their marriage.

Instead, tragedy struck.

CHAPTER 5

IT WAS JANUARY of 2006. Tim Washington, who had played football with DJ in high school, had gone on to college. But, during the winter break, Tim had gone to work out with his old high school running backs coach.

“One day, I was in the car with the coach,” Washington recalls. “He got a call: ‘Hernandez died.’”

Washington’s first thought was that David Hernandez had died.

“Dave had been battling cancer for as long as his daughter, Davina, and I were together,” he says. “He had been in remission, and then the cancer came back.”

A moment later, the coach’s phone rang again.

“No,” the coach said, “it’s not Dave! It’s Dennis!”

Why would anyone have thought it was Dennis? Dennis couldn’t die. Too many people in Bristol loved him. DJ and Aaron needed him.

Dennis hadn’t even been ill.

“What the hell happened to Dennis?” people said when they found out.

“Everyone was devastated,” Washington remembers. “Every time you’d say, ‘Dennis died,’ they’d look at you and say, ‘You mean Dave?’”

A few days earlier, Dennis Hernandez had gone in to the hospital for a hernia repair. Immediately afterward, he contracted a fatal bacterial infection. The death was stupid, shocking, out of the blue, and impossible to process.

The largest funeral parlor in Bristol was too small to host the thousand-plus people who turned out for the man who was known around town as “the King.”

“The funeral was absolutely gigantic,” Washington remembers. “I waited in line for over an hour just to get in – and I was there pretty early. There was a line for as long as you could possibly see. Dennis was that well-respected.

“They were a staple in Bristol, the Hernandez family. They always had been. Good people, they’d give you the shirt off their backs. They’d give you a ride if you needed it. Get you something to eat if you needed it. Give you advice. Talk to you about sports, how you could get better. They were great, down-to-earth people.”

CHAPTER 6

DJ WAS NINETEEN at the time. He was a few inches shorter than his younger brother, and thirty pounds lighter, but Aaron and DJ had the same strong jaw, the same dark, piercing eyes, the same wide, toothy smile. It wasn’t hard to mistake one for the other.

But the brothers were not the same.

At the funeral home, DJ broke down and sobbed over his father’s coffin.

Aaron, who was sixteen, had trouble expressing his grief.

“He was lost,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “He cried, but [only] at moments. Crying is not always the answer, but being an emotional family, for him to put up a wall during the services … He was holding everything in. Our bodies just reacted differently.”

On the night after the funeral, Aaron scored thirty points in a basketball game against Windsor. The following night, in a game against South Windsor, he scored thirty-one.

“That night after the funeral, when he decided to play in his basketball game, it ended up being very emotional,” says Tim Washington. “He dunked. The whole crowd went crazy. Aaron made the best of it, but it was a tough time. A very tough time, that’s for sure.”

Hernandez continued to work out. On the football field, he was unstoppable. As a sophomore, he had begun to feel more comfortable inside his oversized body. As a junior, he’d set the state record for receiving yards in a single game. The following year, Aaron would tie the state record for career touchdowns. Two ranking services would rate him as the nation’s number-one tight end. Aaron already had a verbal agreement with UConn’s coach, Randy Edsall. He told fans and reporters that he could not wait to play football with DJ again.

Scouts from powerhouse teams like the Florida Gators were also beginning to show up at Aaron’s games. But at home, Aaron began to rebel. “It was very, very hard, and he was very, very angry,” Terri told USA Today. “I didn’t know what to do with him. He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.”

The silence left by Dennis’s absence created its own series of shocks. It was just Terri and Aaron at home – and the comfort that Aaron could take in his mother was undercut by the knowledge that, a few months earlier, she had betrayed his father with Jeffrey Cummings.

With DJ and Dennis both gone, Aaron did not know who to turn to. He did not know what to do with himself. “Everyone was close to my father, but I was the closest,” Aaron would say. “I was with him more than my friends. When that happened, who do I talk to, who do I hang with?”

Before long, Aaron was hanging out on the wrong side of town, at a house on Lake Avenue that belonged to Tito Valderrama – “Uncle Tito,” who had married Dennis and Dave’s sister, Ruth. There, he bonded with his cousin Tanya, the woman who had slapped Terri at DJ’s UConn game.

He grew close to Thaddeus “TL” Singleton, a drug dealer Tanya had taken up with after Cummings left her for Terri Hernandez.

He picked up new running mates: a drug-addled townie named Carlos Ortiz and an older man named Ernest Wallace.

Narcotics officers in Bristol knew Wallace (whose nickname was “Bo”) as one of the petty criminals they’d seen around a housing unit on Lillian Road and Lake Avenue. The police believed that Ortiz – who went by “Charlie Boy” – had ties to a Bristol gang called the Doo Wop Boys, who were themselves affiliated with the Bloods.

Aaron still held it together in public. His mask stayed intact. But privately, friends and mentors like Coach Pina grew worried.

They knew that there was a dark side to Bristol, Connecticut, and it seemed to them that Aaron Hernandez was hell-bent on working his way to its center.

CHAPTER 7

“Hernandez Still on Track for UConn”

Hartford Courant, February 8, 2006

“Misdirection Play: Hernandez to Gators”

Hartford Courant, April 23, 2006

“D.J. Hernandez Tries Draw Play; But Brother Stands By Choice”

Hartford Courant, September 10, 2006

FOOTBALL FANS ACROSS Connecticut were stunned: three months after his father’s death, Aaron announced his intention to back out of the verbal agreement he’d made, as a sophomore, with Huskies coach Randy Edsall.

Although that commitment had been publicized, Aaron had never stopped getting calls – from Boston College, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Miami.

At first, Aaron had been firm about his commitment to Edsall.

“They’ve most all been sending stuff, but they’ve been calling more lately,” he told the Hartford Courant. “They call my coach and he tells me. I just tell him to tell them I’m going to UConn.

“It’s my dream to play with my brother in college,” Aaron said. “But it’s not a huge thing. I think I would still be going to UConn even if my brother wasn’t there. Since he’s there, it just makes it a better fit. Whether my brother is starting or not, he’s still going to push me and make me be better just being there. He’s a big motivator for me.

“Since my freshman year, UConn has been coming after me. They offered after my sophomore year. That was before anybody was going after me. So that makes me feel better.

“UConn is like family. They were there for me when my dad passed away. It’s tough, though. I wish my dad was here now that more schools are coming. Notre Dame just came on recently and it really makes you think. It just makes me think more. My dad would have been able to help me out even more. But I’m pretty sure he would have wanted me to go to UConn. My family wants me to go to UConn and my heart’s at UConn.”

Then, the Florida Gators made their full-court press.

“We don’t typically recruit in Connecticut,” says Urban Meyer, who was the head coach in Florida at the time. “But I remember watching the videotape. I’m always looking for that hybrid player. We’re not looking for a big, slow tight end. We want a guy that can do a lot of things.”

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.