Aaron Hernandez might have been one of the NFL’s all-time greats, but he could never escape drugs, guns and a life of violence
BY PAUL SOLOTAROFF WITH RON BORGES | August 28, 2013
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The first text pinged him around nine that Sunday night: I’m coming to grab that tonight, you gon b around? I need dat and we could step for a little again. For Odin Lloyd, this was bang-up news, proof that his luck had turned around. Aaron Hernandez, the Pro Bowl tight end of the New England Patriots, was coming by later to scoop him up for another five-star debauch, just 36 hours after he’d taken Lloyd out for the wildest ride of his life. All night Friday, they’d kicked it at Rumor, popping bottles and pulling models up the steps of the VIP section of the Boston theater district’s hottest club. “Shit was crazy,” Lloyd told friends the next day at his niece’s dance recital. “The girls were off the chain. We smoked that super-duper and Aaron dropped 10 G’s like it was nothing. We kept rolling past dawn at his big-ass mansion, then he tossed me the keys to his Suburban.”
Big doings for a semipro football player and underemployed landscape helper, though there, too, fortune smiled on Lloyd, 27. He’d just gotten word that he’d have shifts all week, his first steady hours in some time. And now he was about to burn it down again with Hernandez, the $40 million man with the restless streak and a bottomless taste for chronic. The problem, Lloyd said, was it didn’t end there with Hernandez and his how-high crew: “Them boys is into way worse shit than herb.”
How much worse? About as bad as it gets, say longtime family friends. In exclusive conversations with Rolling Stone, those friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went. Sources close to the tight end add that throughout the spring, when players are expected to be preparing themselves for the marathon NFL season, Hernandez had missed workouts and sessions with a rehab trainer, and had been told by his head coach, Bill Belichick, that he was one misstep from being cut.
But training camp was six weeks away, and Hernandez wasn’t one to heed a warning. He went on hitting the clubs with his boys, including Lloyd, who was dating his fiancee’s sister. That Sunday, Lloyd’s best friend urged him to stay home, saying he needed his sleep for the week ahead. Lloyd had already been up all weekend – he’d taken his friends clubbing Saturday night in Hernandez’s black Suburban. Hernandez wouldn’t hear it, though; he kept texting Lloyd. Aite, where? Lloyd relented, ignoring his friend. It don’t matter but imma hit you, said Hernandez at 9:39. If my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it.
Tonight, though, wouldn’t be anything like Friday. All weekend, Hernandez had been stewing in his 7,000-square-foot mansion 45 minutes outside Boston in North Attleborough, not far from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, fixated on something that happened in the club two nights earlier. Per a close friend of Lloyd’s, they’d been getting buzzed in VIP when Lloyd saw two of his cousins downstairs. He went to hug them up and buy them drinks when one of them, a West Indian with dreads, started pointing and mean-mugging Hernandez. “I don’t like that nigger, he’s one of them funny people,” said the cousin. “Stop pointing, that’s my boy,” said Lloyd of Hernandez. “You’re gonna start some shit ’tween me and him.” “Well, I don’t want you with him, he’s a punk,” said Lloyd’s cousin, jabbing his finger again in Hernandez’s direction.
When Lloyd went back upstairs, Hernandez was enraged. Club security cameras allegedly capture the two men squabbling, showing Hernandez, six-two and a rippled 250, facing off with the five-11 Lloyd. The friends stopped short of throwing punches, though cameras mounted outside the club show the argument resuming in the street.
Most people, even self-important stars blowing thousands on bottle-shape women, might have simmered down about now. But the 23-year-old Aaron Hernandez wasn’t like most people; for ages, he hadn’t even been like himself. The sweet, goofy kid from Bristol, Connecticut, with the klieg-light smile and ex-thug dad who’d turned his life around to raise two phenom sons – that Aaron Hernandez had barely been heard from in the seven hard years since his father was snatched away, killed in his prime by a medical error that left his boys soul-sick and lost. Once in a great while, the good Aaron would surface, phoning one of his college coaches to tell him he loved him and to talk to the man’s kids for hours, or stopping Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, to kiss him on the cheek and thank him damply. There was such hunger in that kid for a father’s hand, and such greatness itching to get out, that coach after coach had covered for him whenever the bad Aaron showed – the violent, furious kid who was dangerous to all, most particularly, it seems, to his friends.
And so, two days after the spat with Lloyd, he was nursing his rubbed-raw grievance. “You can’t trust anyone anymore!” he’s heard screaming on the footage of his home-security system. Sometime that night, he reached out to a couple of Bristol goons, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz – two stumble-bum crooks with long sheets of priors and no job or fixed address to lay their heads – and ordered them to take the two-hour drive to Boston on the double, telling one of them, Hurry ur ass up here, nigga.
According to family friends, Hernandez was using angel dust and was so paranoid he always carried a gun.
Around 1:10 a.m., Hernandez set off with Wallace and Ortiz in a rented Nissan Altima to pick up Odin Lloyd. Hernandez’s security cams show him with what looks like a Glock .45 in hand, pacing in his living room. On the 30-mile drive to Fayston Street, a war-zone block in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, where Lloyd lived with his mother and younger sister (he’d been forced to move home after losing his job at the local utility company), the three men stopped to buy a pack of blue cotton-candy Bubblicious and a cheap cigar, the type used to roll blunts. Usually, that was Lloyd’s job – Hernandez fondly called him the Bluntmaster. Making do without him, they got to Lloyd’s house at 2:33 a.m., where a surveillance camera posted across the street showed Lloyd getting into the back seat of the Nissan. It fast became clear to Lloyd, though, that this wouldn’t be a night of hot-sheet fun. He began firing texts off to his sister, sending distress flares every few minutes. U saw who I’m with... Nfl... just so u know...
The last one reached her at 3:23 a.m. Minutes later, Lloyd got out of the car in an industrial park in North Attleborough. He seemed to know what was coming, but decided to make a stand: The driver’s side mirror of the Nissan was broken off, a sign that he might have gone down swinging. On a sand-and-gravel patch, Lloyd raised his arms in defense of the first shot, and was then hit in the back twice as he turned away and fell to the ground. The gunman pumped two more rounds into his chest for good measure. The next day, cops lifted tire tracks near the body that matched the Nissan. Tracing the car back to the rental agency, police would eventually recover a .45 shell case and a wad of cotton-candy Bubblicious. And though Hernandez would monkey with his home-security system, getting rid of six hours of key recordings, and smash up the cellphone he’d turn in to cops, he’d neglect to scrub all the data they contained, handing police a honey pot of incriminating evidence.
They’ll need every bit of it to convict Hernandez of murder and send him away for life. Both on the field and off, he’s been hell to bring down; the man has a genius for breaking loose. According to several experts, he might just do it again, make one last run to daylight around the edge.
There have been 47 arrests of NFL players since the end of the last regular season: bar brawls, cars wrecked, spouses shoved or beaten. Violence travels; it follows these men home, where far too many learn they have no kill switch. But there’s the sociopathy of a savage game, and then there’s Aaron Hernandez. Since 2007, he’s been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses. He posed for selfies in the mirror while a) wielding a .45 and b) swathed from head to toe in Bloods regalia, and threatened to “fuck up” Wes Welker, his Pro Bowl teammate, just days after being drafted by the Patriots. (Welker, a veteran, had refused to help the rookie operate the replay machine.) Since high school, he’s scourged his skin with a scree of tattoos. Writ large on his left arm: HATE ME NOW. On the meat of his right hand, just above the knuckles: the word BLOOD in bright-red scrawl.
Of all the questions raised by the murder of Lloyd, two enigmas underpin the others: How did a kid so rich in gifts and honors – the most celebrated son in the history of Bristol – grow into such a murderously angry man? And why does Bristol, the town that time forgot, keep landing in the middle of this lurid story?
This city of 60,000 was always a sweet, sleepy place to buy a house, raise children and send them elsewhere. The locals built firearms and doorbells in the plants here, then car parts and mainsprings for clocks. The population spiked in the decades after D-Day – vets moving in to take factory jobs and rent small pillbox homes on the west side of town. No one got rich or stuck around for college, but it was heaven to be a 12-year-old here: manicured ballfields, Boys Club summers, a sky-blue pool in every park.
Aaron’s father, Dennis, ruled those fields before his son followed in his footsteps. In the Seventies and Eighties, Dennis and his twin brother, David, became local sports heroes. Enormous for their age and fast and tough, they took to football straightaway and were happier running through, than around, you. They’d be three-sport stars in high school and draw scouts to their games, though as good as they were at football, they were better in street fights, say friends: Nobody fucked with the Hernandez boys.
“They were the roughest kids by far in Guinea Alley,” says Eddy Fortier, who went to Bristol Central with them in the Seventies and is a former youth counselor. “They had to be tough – they were about the only Puerto Ricans in an Irish-Italian town,” says Fortier’s brother, Gary, a reformed ex-con who’s now a painter and assistant pastor at a Bristol church.
Dennis, in particular, was built for big things. A larger-than-life charmer with a maitre d’s flair and a habit of hugging everyone he met, he was called “The King” in his glory days and owned the back pages of The Bristol Press. An All-Everything tailback, he was the rare kid from Bristol to get a full-ride offer to the University of Connecticut, the state’s only Division I football program. (David, a wide receiver, got one too.) Alas, Dennis was no angel: He loved to drink and get high, and had lousy taste in friends, which did him in. His best buddy was a teammate, Rocco Testa, who fancied himself a mobster-in-training. “Rocco and his uncle did burglaries together, broke into houses here in town,” says Detective Sgt. John Sassu of the Bristol Police Department, who also went to high school with the twins. “He got Dennis and David in it before the three of them went to UConn, then more so after they all dropped out.”
The twins were pinched for small-change crimes – assault and petty larceny – in the decade after they both left UConn. As late as 1990, Dennis was busted for burglary, though neither brother seems to have done prison time. Friends say they also occasionally smoked crack, beat up dealers for drugs and cash, and bet way over their heads on sports. As for their pal Testa, he was caught in the act while robbing a house with his uncle, who shot and killed a cop while they tried to escape. “The rumor on the street was Dennis and David were there too,” says Sassu, “but we couldn’t make the case.”
Either way, parenthood seemed to scare the twins straight. Both became fathers, found steady work and had no further truck with Bristol cops. (Neither David nor anyone else in the Hernandez family returned phone calls seeking comment.) Dennis married Terri Valentine, a school secretary in Bristol, and got a job on the custodial staff at the other of the town’s two high schools, Bristol Eastern. They bought a small cottage on Greystone Avenue and produced two wildly gifted sons: DJ, now 27 and an assistant football coach at the University of Iowa, and Aaron, three years younger but bigger and faster, the apogee of the family’s genetics.
Each surpassed his father, both on the field and off, in part because Dennis took elaborate pains to keep them on the straight and narrow. Dennis built a gym in the family basement, paved a chunk of the backyard over for a half-court and staged three-on-three tourneys there, and peppered the boys with can-do slogans, burning them in through repetition. “Some do, some don’t,” he was always telling them. “If it is to be, it is up to me,” went another. He was bent on getting his sons to do everything right, whether it was making the proper blitz read or handing homework in on time, perhaps because he’d squandered his own chance.
DJ seemed his natural heir – the star passer and guard at Bristol Central who played three years of quarterback at UConn and made the dean’s list two years running – until Aaron blew by him on the rail. A huge-for-high-school tight end with wideout speed and a pair of glue-trap hands, he posted the kind of numbers you never see in Northeast states: 1,800 yards and 24 touchdowns in a season, almost 400 yards receiving in a single game, and 12 sacks and three forced fumbles as a part-time blitzer, winning Defensive Player of the Year honors his junior year in 2005. His great asset, besides his hands, which were strong as clamps, was the gift scouts call escapability; he couldn’t be brought down after the catch. He was too big and too fast, and he used his free arm well to shed tacklers. You had to gang up or pin him against the sideline, and even then he’d wriggle out for more yards. “Best athlete this city’s ever produced, and a more polite, humble kid you couldn’t find,” says Bob Montgomery, a columnist for the Press and the town’s official historian. “He’d be in here with his father being interviewed as Athlete of the Week, and there was never any swagger or street stuff from him, just ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’ and ‘Thank you.’”
“Part of Aaron’s problem is, he never got no street sense; Dennis sheltered them from that life with all his might,” says Gary Fortier. “He was the perfect dad: He went to every scrimmage, and got ’em up at dawn to work out,” says Brandon Beam, an insurance agent in Southington who played against Aaron in practice each day as a cornerback for Bristol Central. A middle-class, mixed-race kid (mom Italian; dad Puerto Rican), Aaron had little trouble fitting into suburban Bristol. “He didn’t speak Spanish and had no tattoos,” says Jordan Carello, a Bristol football teammate who recently worked at the Doubletree hotel in town. “He was so focused on his body that he barely partied, maybe snuck a little weed here and there. But we all did that, ’cause our parents were always home. If we wanted to drink on weekends, we had to run out to someone’s car.”
THE FAMILY HERNANDEZ
His high school friends describe Aaron as an overgrown goof who was always trolling for laughs. “The guy would do anything to crack us up,” says Beam. “Stuff his lunch in his mouth in a single bite, or take a booger that was hanging out and eat that shit.” That was Hernandez: physically older than everyone else, but socially about five years younger. Friends say DJ was fiercely protective of his happy-go-lucky lug of a kid brother, and taught him what hard work really looked like. They’d be out running suicides in the dead of summer, and rising early to do squats in the basement. “Aaron was driven by DJ, who was like his second dad,” says Beam. “He really wanted to make Dennis happy.”
It was a very different story with his mother, Terri. “She was good about schoolwork and that sort of stuff,” says a friend of the family, “but she brought drama into that house – starting with the bust for taking bets.” In 2001, when Aaron was 12, Terri was arrested in a statewide sting for booking bets on sports. The matter was handled quietly and she did no time, but she cast shame on the boys and dug a rift with Aaron that deepened over the next several years. Friends say Terri had begun cheating on Dennis with a physically abusive coke dealer named Jeffrey Cummings, who was married to Dennis’ niece, Tanya Cummings.
Terri’s relationship with Cummings, whose nickname is Meathead, was a bottomless source of grief for the sons. There was an ugly spectacle in the stands at a UConn game, says a family friend. Terri, on hand to watch DJ play, was angrily confronted by her niece and slapped in the face. The aftermath, says the friend, “hurt Aaron bad and broke his heart.”
He might have held it together, or handled the fallout better, if Dennis had been around to see him through it. But in January 2006, Dennis checked himself in for a hernia repair at a local hospital. Something happened on the table, though, and he contracted an infection; two days later, he was dead. He was 49, in otherwise splendid health, and beloved by virtually everyone in town. His funeral, at the Church of St. Matthew, was like an affair of state: 1,500 mourners packed the biggest church in Bristol, and hundreds more waited to view the body. DJ was inconsolable, sobbing over the casket, but Aaron, 16 and shocked beyond tears, sat stone-faced. Friends tried to console him or draw him out; instead, he locked down, going mum. “He’d open up the tiniest bit, then say nothing for weeks, like it was a sign of weakness to be sad,” says Beam. “His brother was at college, and the only other person he would really talk to was the one who was taken away.”
Heartsick and furious, Aaron seemed to implode. “He would rebel,” Terri told USA Today in an interview three years later. “He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.” Small wonder there: She moved Cummings into the house she shared with Aaron, and married him when his divorce from Tanya was final.
To no one’s great surprise, cops soon fielded phone calls that Cummings was abusing Terri. “We responded to that address on more than one occasion,” says Detective Lt. Kevin Morrell of the Bristol P.D. In June 2010, Cummings got drunk one night and flew into a rage. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, he slashed Terri’s face and body before she fled to her neighbors next door. Cops arrested Cummings in the yard and charged him with assault and sent him to prison for two years. Terri divorced him that year, but took him back, say friends, when he was released in 2012. At last report, they had split for good; she currently lives alone on Greystone Avenue, though she hasn’t been seen there much since Lloyd’s murder. It bears noting that she’s the rare-bird NFL mother whose son didn’t buy her a big house when he got drafted.
With Cummings around, Aaron began getting scarce, spending a lot of time with family across town, in a roughneck stretch called Lake Avenue. This was the Bristol version of downward mobility, a hop from the hot plate to the fire. His father’s brother-in-law, Uncle Tito, had a house up the block from the projects, where he lived with his grown daughter Tanya – the woman Cummings had ditched to be with Terri. Aaron and Tanya, first cousins bonded by loss, drew close very quickly, friends say. (He has the name of her son – Jano – tattooed on his chest, and has supported them both financially since college.) Among the dubious people hanging around the house were goons like Ernest Wallace and T.L. Singleton, an older-but-not-wiser drug dealer who’d been in and out of prison since the Nineties. Singleton would wind up marrying Tanya and siring a child with her after Cummings left. Along with fringe hustlers like Carlos Ortiz, the angel-dust tweaker, they filled the heart-size hole Dennis left, bolstering Aaron with bromides about family love and vowing that they’d always have his back – which is another way of saying they sunk their claws in. Their motives couldn’t have been plainer if they’d hung them in neon: Here was a kid with can’t-miss skills, a malleable man-child who’d be rich one day and fly them out of the hood in his G-5. All they had to do was get him high and gas his head, inflame his sense of grievance at life’s unfairness.
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FALLEN PATRIOT
Despite all the warning signs, the Patriots signed Hernandez to a five-year, $40 million contract. Hernandez himself acknowledged, in a letter he allegedly wrote from prison, that he “fell off especially after making all that money.”
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS/LANDOV
From middle school, Hernandez had his sights set on UConn, and committed there as a star at Bristol Central. It had been Dennis’ dream to see his boys play there together, having quit the school himself after a couple of years and gone home with his tail between his legs. But then Dennis died, making a jumble of things, and the world came courting his younger son. Enter the University of Florida and the messiah, Urban Meyer, who persuaded Hernandez to renege on UConn and come to Gainesville. It seemed a gift from on high: a championship program in a Bible Belt town with a deeply pious coach and devout assistants. Meyer had a rep for reforming players who’d had trouble elsewhere with the law. And he tried, God knows, to convert Hernandez; did everything short of an exorcism. “But there’s only so much you can do in three years,” says John Hevesy, Hernandez’s position coach with the Gators and now a coach at Mississippi State. “Bristol had him for 17 before he came to us. In the end, I guess, that trumped what we put in.”
Hernandez left home in January 2007, taking early graduation to enroll at Florida and be eligible for spring football. But he was miserable and overmatched his first year there and told friends on the phone he wanted to quit. Meyer brought him in for face-to-face meetings, reading Scripture in his office each morning. He assigned Mike and Maurkice Pouncey, twin All-American linemen, to baby-sit Hernandez, and detailed Tim Tebow, the truest of believers, to be his life instructor. But even Tebow couldn’t save him from himself once Hernandez got a few beers in his system. The pair went out that April to a bar near campus, where the underage Hernandez had an argument with a waiter and punched him in the head as he walked away. Michael Taphorn suffered a ruptured eardrum, but didn’t press charges on Hernandez, telling the cops he was talking to Florida coaches, according to a police report. The matter seems to have been settled quietly out of court, which was fine with Gainesville cops and the DA. They treated the punch-out as a juvie offense, giving Hernandez a deferred prosecution on the hush.
“We didn’t hear that story till much, much later – the police didn’t file a report,” says a local reporter who was covering the team. As a sophomore, Hernandez was benched for the season opener, meaning he’d likely failed drug tests over the summer. But Meyer denied it, saying he “wasn’t ready to play,” again giving cover for bad behavior. “Meyer kept us at such a distance,” says the reporter, “or flat-out lied, that we couldn’t verify a pot suspension.”
Hernandez would fail other drug tests, according to reports, and should have faced bans for up to half a season, per school regulations. Instead, he didn’t miss a single snap, though he was seen hanging out with a crew of thugs at a local bar. One of them was Bristol pal Ernest Wallace, who came down to Florida, says a friend, to be “Aaron’s muscle.”
“I never saw him with them, but misery attracts misery: There’s vultures waiting to swoop,” says Coach Hevesy, who did everything he could to protect Hernandez. He brought him home for meals twice a week, took him deep-sea fishing and treated him like the oldest of his three kids. “He played video games with my son, and my daughter wore his jersey to sleep. But whenever he left campus, he’d come back different. That’s when the problems happened.”
Those problems didn’t hinder his development, however. He was the rare college freshman who outworked upperclassmen, training by himself even before the gym opened, doing kick-flips off the wall of his dorm. As a sophomore, he became a starter and Tebow’s third-down outlet, leading the team in catches in the national-championship win in 2008, the school’s second title in three years. “You see his athleticism and explosiveness, and as an athlete, it’s incredible,” said Tebow. By 20, Hernandez was a first-team All-American and winner of the 2009 John Mackey Award as the country’s top tight end. He could have written his own ticket if he’d kept his nose clean: been a high-first-rounder in the 2010 NFL draft and pulled an eight-figure bonus to sign. Instead, he cemented his don’t-touch rep by getting embroiled in a shooting outside a bar. “He was out with the Pounceys and [ex-Gator safety] Reggie Nelson, and some guys tried to snatch a chain off one of the Pounceys,” says the local reporter. “The guys drive off, then stop at a light, and someone gets out of a car and shoots into their car through the passenger window. One victim described the shooter as possibly Hispanic or Hawaiian, with lots of tattoos on his arms.” The Pounceys were questioned as witnesses to the crime, but Hernandez invoked his right to counsel and never gave a statement, most odd since he was also called as a witness. No charges have ever been filed, and the case is still open. Again, he walked away unscathed: He wasn’t even named in the police report. In hindsight, it might have been the worst thing for him. He seems to have concluded, with an abundance of probable cause, that he was untouchable.
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In April 2010, a few months before the NFL draft, Hernandez sat down and composed a letter, or had his agent at Athletes First do so for him. (The firm is a top-tier NFL shop, repping Ray Lewis, Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews, among others.) It was a Hail Mary pass to 32 teams, asking them to spike their bad reports and pick a dope-smoking, hair-trigger hothead. “My coaches have told you that nobody worked harder than me,” he wrote. “The only X-factor is concerns about my use of recreational drugs. To address that, I am putting my money where my mouth is” by offering to take eight drug tests during the season, and to return a portion of his paycheck if found dirty. This was both delusional and an empty vow: The players’ union would block even one extra test and any attempt to pay back guaranteed money. After seeing his pre-draft psychological report, where he received the lowest possible score, one out of 10, in the category of “social maturity” and which also noted that he enjoyed “living on the edge of acceptable behavior,” a handful of teams pulled him off their boards, and 25 others let him sink like a stone on draft day, April 24th. Only one team took the bait, burning a midround pick on a guy with “character issues”: the stoop-to-conquer Patriots of Bill Belichick.
BY PAUL SOLOTAROFF WITH RON BORGES | August 28, 2013
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The first text pinged him around nine that Sunday night: I’m coming to grab that tonight, you gon b around? I need dat and we could step for a little again. For Odin Lloyd, this was bang-up news, proof that his luck had turned around. Aaron Hernandez, the Pro Bowl tight end of the New England Patriots, was coming by later to scoop him up for another five-star debauch, just 36 hours after he’d taken Lloyd out for the wildest ride of his life. All night Friday, they’d kicked it at Rumor, popping bottles and pulling models up the steps of the VIP section of the Boston theater district’s hottest club. “Shit was crazy,” Lloyd told friends the next day at his niece’s dance recital. “The girls were off the chain. We smoked that super-duper and Aaron dropped 10 G’s like it was nothing. We kept rolling past dawn at his big-ass mansion, then he tossed me the keys to his Suburban.”
Big doings for a semipro football player and underemployed landscape helper, though there, too, fortune smiled on Lloyd, 27. He’d just gotten word that he’d have shifts all week, his first steady hours in some time. And now he was about to burn it down again with Hernandez, the $40 million man with the restless streak and a bottomless taste for chronic. The problem, Lloyd said, was it didn’t end there with Hernandez and his how-high crew: “Them boys is into way worse shit than herb.”
How much worse? About as bad as it gets, say longtime family friends. In exclusive conversations with Rolling Stone, those friends, who insisted they not be named, say Hernandez was using the maniacal drug angel dust, had fallen in with a crew of gangsters and convinced himself that his life was in danger, carrying a gun wherever he went. Sources close to the tight end add that throughout the spring, when players are expected to be preparing themselves for the marathon NFL season, Hernandez had missed workouts and sessions with a rehab trainer, and had been told by his head coach, Bill Belichick, that he was one misstep from being cut.
But training camp was six weeks away, and Hernandez wasn’t one to heed a warning. He went on hitting the clubs with his boys, including Lloyd, who was dating his fiancee’s sister. That Sunday, Lloyd’s best friend urged him to stay home, saying he needed his sleep for the week ahead. Lloyd had already been up all weekend – he’d taken his friends clubbing Saturday night in Hernandez’s black Suburban. Hernandez wouldn’t hear it, though; he kept texting Lloyd. Aite, where? Lloyd relented, ignoring his friend. It don’t matter but imma hit you, said Hernandez at 9:39. If my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it.
Tonight, though, wouldn’t be anything like Friday. All weekend, Hernandez had been stewing in his 7,000-square-foot mansion 45 minutes outside Boston in North Attleborough, not far from Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play, fixated on something that happened in the club two nights earlier. Per a close friend of Lloyd’s, they’d been getting buzzed in VIP when Lloyd saw two of his cousins downstairs. He went to hug them up and buy them drinks when one of them, a West Indian with dreads, started pointing and mean-mugging Hernandez. “I don’t like that nigger, he’s one of them funny people,” said the cousin. “Stop pointing, that’s my boy,” said Lloyd of Hernandez. “You’re gonna start some shit ’tween me and him.” “Well, I don’t want you with him, he’s a punk,” said Lloyd’s cousin, jabbing his finger again in Hernandez’s direction.
When Lloyd went back upstairs, Hernandez was enraged. Club security cameras allegedly capture the two men squabbling, showing Hernandez, six-two and a rippled 250, facing off with the five-11 Lloyd. The friends stopped short of throwing punches, though cameras mounted outside the club show the argument resuming in the street.
Most people, even self-important stars blowing thousands on bottle-shape women, might have simmered down about now. But the 23-year-old Aaron Hernandez wasn’t like most people; for ages, he hadn’t even been like himself. The sweet, goofy kid from Bristol, Connecticut, with the klieg-light smile and ex-thug dad who’d turned his life around to raise two phenom sons – that Aaron Hernandez had barely been heard from in the seven hard years since his father was snatched away, killed in his prime by a medical error that left his boys soul-sick and lost. Once in a great while, the good Aaron would surface, phoning one of his college coaches to tell him he loved him and to talk to the man’s kids for hours, or stopping Robert Kraft, the Patriots’ owner, to kiss him on the cheek and thank him damply. There was such hunger in that kid for a father’s hand, and such greatness itching to get out, that coach after coach had covered for him whenever the bad Aaron showed – the violent, furious kid who was dangerous to all, most particularly, it seems, to his friends.
And so, two days after the spat with Lloyd, he was nursing his rubbed-raw grievance. “You can’t trust anyone anymore!” he’s heard screaming on the footage of his home-security system. Sometime that night, he reached out to a couple of Bristol goons, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz – two stumble-bum crooks with long sheets of priors and no job or fixed address to lay their heads – and ordered them to take the two-hour drive to Boston on the double, telling one of them, Hurry ur ass up here, nigga.
According to family friends, Hernandez was using angel dust and was so paranoid he always carried a gun.
Around 1:10 a.m., Hernandez set off with Wallace and Ortiz in a rented Nissan Altima to pick up Odin Lloyd. Hernandez’s security cams show him with what looks like a Glock .45 in hand, pacing in his living room. On the 30-mile drive to Fayston Street, a war-zone block in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, where Lloyd lived with his mother and younger sister (he’d been forced to move home after losing his job at the local utility company), the three men stopped to buy a pack of blue cotton-candy Bubblicious and a cheap cigar, the type used to roll blunts. Usually, that was Lloyd’s job – Hernandez fondly called him the Bluntmaster. Making do without him, they got to Lloyd’s house at 2:33 a.m., where a surveillance camera posted across the street showed Lloyd getting into the back seat of the Nissan. It fast became clear to Lloyd, though, that this wouldn’t be a night of hot-sheet fun. He began firing texts off to his sister, sending distress flares every few minutes. U saw who I’m with... Nfl... just so u know...
The last one reached her at 3:23 a.m. Minutes later, Lloyd got out of the car in an industrial park in North Attleborough. He seemed to know what was coming, but decided to make a stand: The driver’s side mirror of the Nissan was broken off, a sign that he might have gone down swinging. On a sand-and-gravel patch, Lloyd raised his arms in defense of the first shot, and was then hit in the back twice as he turned away and fell to the ground. The gunman pumped two more rounds into his chest for good measure. The next day, cops lifted tire tracks near the body that matched the Nissan. Tracing the car back to the rental agency, police would eventually recover a .45 shell case and a wad of cotton-candy Bubblicious. And though Hernandez would monkey with his home-security system, getting rid of six hours of key recordings, and smash up the cellphone he’d turn in to cops, he’d neglect to scrub all the data they contained, handing police a honey pot of incriminating evidence.
They’ll need every bit of it to convict Hernandez of murder and send him away for life. Both on the field and off, he’s been hell to bring down; the man has a genius for breaking loose. According to several experts, he might just do it again, make one last run to daylight around the edge.
There have been 47 arrests of NFL players since the end of the last regular season: bar brawls, cars wrecked, spouses shoved or beaten. Violence travels; it follows these men home, where far too many learn they have no kill switch. But there’s the sociopathy of a savage game, and then there’s Aaron Hernandez. Since 2007, he’s been charged with, or linked to, the shootings of six people in four incidents. Three of the victims were gruesomely murdered. One survivor, a former friend named Alexander Bradley, has had multiple operations and lost his right eye. The other two survivors were shot in their car outside a Gainesville, Florida, bar after an altercation involving Hernandez and two of his teammates his freshman year at the University of Florida. While in Gainesville, he sucker-punched a guy and shattered the fellow’s eardrum, and reportedly failed multiple drug tests, though he was suspended only once for those offenses. He posed for selfies in the mirror while a) wielding a .45 and b) swathed from head to toe in Bloods regalia, and threatened to “fuck up” Wes Welker, his Pro Bowl teammate, just days after being drafted by the Patriots. (Welker, a veteran, had refused to help the rookie operate the replay machine.) Since high school, he’s scourged his skin with a scree of tattoos. Writ large on his left arm: HATE ME NOW. On the meat of his right hand, just above the knuckles: the word BLOOD in bright-red scrawl.
Of all the questions raised by the murder of Lloyd, two enigmas underpin the others: How did a kid so rich in gifts and honors – the most celebrated son in the history of Bristol – grow into such a murderously angry man? And why does Bristol, the town that time forgot, keep landing in the middle of this lurid story?
This city of 60,000 was always a sweet, sleepy place to buy a house, raise children and send them elsewhere. The locals built firearms and doorbells in the plants here, then car parts and mainsprings for clocks. The population spiked in the decades after D-Day – vets moving in to take factory jobs and rent small pillbox homes on the west side of town. No one got rich or stuck around for college, but it was heaven to be a 12-year-old here: manicured ballfields, Boys Club summers, a sky-blue pool in every park.
Aaron’s father, Dennis, ruled those fields before his son followed in his footsteps. In the Seventies and Eighties, Dennis and his twin brother, David, became local sports heroes. Enormous for their age and fast and tough, they took to football straightaway and were happier running through, than around, you. They’d be three-sport stars in high school and draw scouts to their games, though as good as they were at football, they were better in street fights, say friends: Nobody fucked with the Hernandez boys.
“They were the roughest kids by far in Guinea Alley,” says Eddy Fortier, who went to Bristol Central with them in the Seventies and is a former youth counselor. “They had to be tough – they were about the only Puerto Ricans in an Irish-Italian town,” says Fortier’s brother, Gary, a reformed ex-con who’s now a painter and assistant pastor at a Bristol church.
Dennis, in particular, was built for big things. A larger-than-life charmer with a maitre d’s flair and a habit of hugging everyone he met, he was called “The King” in his glory days and owned the back pages of The Bristol Press. An All-Everything tailback, he was the rare kid from Bristol to get a full-ride offer to the University of Connecticut, the state’s only Division I football program. (David, a wide receiver, got one too.) Alas, Dennis was no angel: He loved to drink and get high, and had lousy taste in friends, which did him in. His best buddy was a teammate, Rocco Testa, who fancied himself a mobster-in-training. “Rocco and his uncle did burglaries together, broke into houses here in town,” says Detective Sgt. John Sassu of the Bristol Police Department, who also went to high school with the twins. “He got Dennis and David in it before the three of them went to UConn, then more so after they all dropped out.”
The twins were pinched for small-change crimes – assault and petty larceny – in the decade after they both left UConn. As late as 1990, Dennis was busted for burglary, though neither brother seems to have done prison time. Friends say they also occasionally smoked crack, beat up dealers for drugs and cash, and bet way over their heads on sports. As for their pal Testa, he was caught in the act while robbing a house with his uncle, who shot and killed a cop while they tried to escape. “The rumor on the street was Dennis and David were there too,” says Sassu, “but we couldn’t make the case.”
Either way, parenthood seemed to scare the twins straight. Both became fathers, found steady work and had no further truck with Bristol cops. (Neither David nor anyone else in the Hernandez family returned phone calls seeking comment.) Dennis married Terri Valentine, a school secretary in Bristol, and got a job on the custodial staff at the other of the town’s two high schools, Bristol Eastern. They bought a small cottage on Greystone Avenue and produced two wildly gifted sons: DJ, now 27 and an assistant football coach at the University of Iowa, and Aaron, three years younger but bigger and faster, the apogee of the family’s genetics.
Each surpassed his father, both on the field and off, in part because Dennis took elaborate pains to keep them on the straight and narrow. Dennis built a gym in the family basement, paved a chunk of the backyard over for a half-court and staged three-on-three tourneys there, and peppered the boys with can-do slogans, burning them in through repetition. “Some do, some don’t,” he was always telling them. “If it is to be, it is up to me,” went another. He was bent on getting his sons to do everything right, whether it was making the proper blitz read or handing homework in on time, perhaps because he’d squandered his own chance.
DJ seemed his natural heir – the star passer and guard at Bristol Central who played three years of quarterback at UConn and made the dean’s list two years running – until Aaron blew by him on the rail. A huge-for-high-school tight end with wideout speed and a pair of glue-trap hands, he posted the kind of numbers you never see in Northeast states: 1,800 yards and 24 touchdowns in a season, almost 400 yards receiving in a single game, and 12 sacks and three forced fumbles as a part-time blitzer, winning Defensive Player of the Year honors his junior year in 2005. His great asset, besides his hands, which were strong as clamps, was the gift scouts call escapability; he couldn’t be brought down after the catch. He was too big and too fast, and he used his free arm well to shed tacklers. You had to gang up or pin him against the sideline, and even then he’d wriggle out for more yards. “Best athlete this city’s ever produced, and a more polite, humble kid you couldn’t find,” says Bob Montgomery, a columnist for the Press and the town’s official historian. “He’d be in here with his father being interviewed as Athlete of the Week, and there was never any swagger or street stuff from him, just ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’ and ‘Thank you.’”
“Part of Aaron’s problem is, he never got no street sense; Dennis sheltered them from that life with all his might,” says Gary Fortier. “He was the perfect dad: He went to every scrimmage, and got ’em up at dawn to work out,” says Brandon Beam, an insurance agent in Southington who played against Aaron in practice each day as a cornerback for Bristol Central. A middle-class, mixed-race kid (mom Italian; dad Puerto Rican), Aaron had little trouble fitting into suburban Bristol. “He didn’t speak Spanish and had no tattoos,” says Jordan Carello, a Bristol football teammate who recently worked at the Doubletree hotel in town. “He was so focused on his body that he barely partied, maybe snuck a little weed here and there. But we all did that, ’cause our parents were always home. If we wanted to drink on weekends, we had to run out to someone’s car.”
THE FAMILY HERNANDEZ
His high school friends describe Aaron as an overgrown goof who was always trolling for laughs. “The guy would do anything to crack us up,” says Beam. “Stuff his lunch in his mouth in a single bite, or take a booger that was hanging out and eat that shit.” That was Hernandez: physically older than everyone else, but socially about five years younger. Friends say DJ was fiercely protective of his happy-go-lucky lug of a kid brother, and taught him what hard work really looked like. They’d be out running suicides in the dead of summer, and rising early to do squats in the basement. “Aaron was driven by DJ, who was like his second dad,” says Beam. “He really wanted to make Dennis happy.”
It was a very different story with his mother, Terri. “She was good about schoolwork and that sort of stuff,” says a friend of the family, “but she brought drama into that house – starting with the bust for taking bets.” In 2001, when Aaron was 12, Terri was arrested in a statewide sting for booking bets on sports. The matter was handled quietly and she did no time, but she cast shame on the boys and dug a rift with Aaron that deepened over the next several years. Friends say Terri had begun cheating on Dennis with a physically abusive coke dealer named Jeffrey Cummings, who was married to Dennis’ niece, Tanya Cummings.
Terri’s relationship with Cummings, whose nickname is Meathead, was a bottomless source of grief for the sons. There was an ugly spectacle in the stands at a UConn game, says a family friend. Terri, on hand to watch DJ play, was angrily confronted by her niece and slapped in the face. The aftermath, says the friend, “hurt Aaron bad and broke his heart.”
He might have held it together, or handled the fallout better, if Dennis had been around to see him through it. But in January 2006, Dennis checked himself in for a hernia repair at a local hospital. Something happened on the table, though, and he contracted an infection; two days later, he was dead. He was 49, in otherwise splendid health, and beloved by virtually everyone in town. His funeral, at the Church of St. Matthew, was like an affair of state: 1,500 mourners packed the biggest church in Bristol, and hundreds more waited to view the body. DJ was inconsolable, sobbing over the casket, but Aaron, 16 and shocked beyond tears, sat stone-faced. Friends tried to console him or draw him out; instead, he locked down, going mum. “He’d open up the tiniest bit, then say nothing for weeks, like it was a sign of weakness to be sad,” says Beam. “His brother was at college, and the only other person he would really talk to was the one who was taken away.”
Heartsick and furious, Aaron seemed to implode. “He would rebel,” Terri told USA Today in an interview three years later. “He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.” Small wonder there: She moved Cummings into the house she shared with Aaron, and married him when his divorce from Tanya was final.
To no one’s great surprise, cops soon fielded phone calls that Cummings was abusing Terri. “We responded to that address on more than one occasion,” says Detective Lt. Kevin Morrell of the Bristol P.D. In June 2010, Cummings got drunk one night and flew into a rage. Grabbing a knife from the kitchen, he slashed Terri’s face and body before she fled to her neighbors next door. Cops arrested Cummings in the yard and charged him with assault and sent him to prison for two years. Terri divorced him that year, but took him back, say friends, when he was released in 2012. At last report, they had split for good; she currently lives alone on Greystone Avenue, though she hasn’t been seen there much since Lloyd’s murder. It bears noting that she’s the rare-bird NFL mother whose son didn’t buy her a big house when he got drafted.
With Cummings around, Aaron began getting scarce, spending a lot of time with family across town, in a roughneck stretch called Lake Avenue. This was the Bristol version of downward mobility, a hop from the hot plate to the fire. His father’s brother-in-law, Uncle Tito, had a house up the block from the projects, where he lived with his grown daughter Tanya – the woman Cummings had ditched to be with Terri. Aaron and Tanya, first cousins bonded by loss, drew close very quickly, friends say. (He has the name of her son – Jano – tattooed on his chest, and has supported them both financially since college.) Among the dubious people hanging around the house were goons like Ernest Wallace and T.L. Singleton, an older-but-not-wiser drug dealer who’d been in and out of prison since the Nineties. Singleton would wind up marrying Tanya and siring a child with her after Cummings left. Along with fringe hustlers like Carlos Ortiz, the angel-dust tweaker, they filled the heart-size hole Dennis left, bolstering Aaron with bromides about family love and vowing that they’d always have his back – which is another way of saying they sunk their claws in. Their motives couldn’t have been plainer if they’d hung them in neon: Here was a kid with can’t-miss skills, a malleable man-child who’d be rich one day and fly them out of the hood in his G-5. All they had to do was get him high and gas his head, inflame his sense of grievance at life’s unfairness.
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FALLEN PATRIOT
Despite all the warning signs, the Patriots signed Hernandez to a five-year, $40 million contract. Hernandez himself acknowledged, in a letter he allegedly wrote from prison, that he “fell off especially after making all that money.”
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS/LANDOV
From middle school, Hernandez had his sights set on UConn, and committed there as a star at Bristol Central. It had been Dennis’ dream to see his boys play there together, having quit the school himself after a couple of years and gone home with his tail between his legs. But then Dennis died, making a jumble of things, and the world came courting his younger son. Enter the University of Florida and the messiah, Urban Meyer, who persuaded Hernandez to renege on UConn and come to Gainesville. It seemed a gift from on high: a championship program in a Bible Belt town with a deeply pious coach and devout assistants. Meyer had a rep for reforming players who’d had trouble elsewhere with the law. And he tried, God knows, to convert Hernandez; did everything short of an exorcism. “But there’s only so much you can do in three years,” says John Hevesy, Hernandez’s position coach with the Gators and now a coach at Mississippi State. “Bristol had him for 17 before he came to us. In the end, I guess, that trumped what we put in.”
Hernandez left home in January 2007, taking early graduation to enroll at Florida and be eligible for spring football. But he was miserable and overmatched his first year there and told friends on the phone he wanted to quit. Meyer brought him in for face-to-face meetings, reading Scripture in his office each morning. He assigned Mike and Maurkice Pouncey, twin All-American linemen, to baby-sit Hernandez, and detailed Tim Tebow, the truest of believers, to be his life instructor. But even Tebow couldn’t save him from himself once Hernandez got a few beers in his system. The pair went out that April to a bar near campus, where the underage Hernandez had an argument with a waiter and punched him in the head as he walked away. Michael Taphorn suffered a ruptured eardrum, but didn’t press charges on Hernandez, telling the cops he was talking to Florida coaches, according to a police report. The matter seems to have been settled quietly out of court, which was fine with Gainesville cops and the DA. They treated the punch-out as a juvie offense, giving Hernandez a deferred prosecution on the hush.
“We didn’t hear that story till much, much later – the police didn’t file a report,” says a local reporter who was covering the team. As a sophomore, Hernandez was benched for the season opener, meaning he’d likely failed drug tests over the summer. But Meyer denied it, saying he “wasn’t ready to play,” again giving cover for bad behavior. “Meyer kept us at such a distance,” says the reporter, “or flat-out lied, that we couldn’t verify a pot suspension.”
Hernandez would fail other drug tests, according to reports, and should have faced bans for up to half a season, per school regulations. Instead, he didn’t miss a single snap, though he was seen hanging out with a crew of thugs at a local bar. One of them was Bristol pal Ernest Wallace, who came down to Florida, says a friend, to be “Aaron’s muscle.”
“I never saw him with them, but misery attracts misery: There’s vultures waiting to swoop,” says Coach Hevesy, who did everything he could to protect Hernandez. He brought him home for meals twice a week, took him deep-sea fishing and treated him like the oldest of his three kids. “He played video games with my son, and my daughter wore his jersey to sleep. But whenever he left campus, he’d come back different. That’s when the problems happened.”
Those problems didn’t hinder his development, however. He was the rare college freshman who outworked upperclassmen, training by himself even before the gym opened, doing kick-flips off the wall of his dorm. As a sophomore, he became a starter and Tebow’s third-down outlet, leading the team in catches in the national-championship win in 2008, the school’s second title in three years. “You see his athleticism and explosiveness, and as an athlete, it’s incredible,” said Tebow. By 20, Hernandez was a first-team All-American and winner of the 2009 John Mackey Award as the country’s top tight end. He could have written his own ticket if he’d kept his nose clean: been a high-first-rounder in the 2010 NFL draft and pulled an eight-figure bonus to sign. Instead, he cemented his don’t-touch rep by getting embroiled in a shooting outside a bar. “He was out with the Pounceys and [ex-Gator safety] Reggie Nelson, and some guys tried to snatch a chain off one of the Pounceys,” says the local reporter. “The guys drive off, then stop at a light, and someone gets out of a car and shoots into their car through the passenger window. One victim described the shooter as possibly Hispanic or Hawaiian, with lots of tattoos on his arms.” The Pounceys were questioned as witnesses to the crime, but Hernandez invoked his right to counsel and never gave a statement, most odd since he was also called as a witness. No charges have ever been filed, and the case is still open. Again, he walked away unscathed: He wasn’t even named in the police report. In hindsight, it might have been the worst thing for him. He seems to have concluded, with an abundance of probable cause, that he was untouchable.
Matt Taibbi Decodes the NFL Draft
In April 2010, a few months before the NFL draft, Hernandez sat down and composed a letter, or had his agent at Athletes First do so for him. (The firm is a top-tier NFL shop, repping Ray Lewis, Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews, among others.) It was a Hail Mary pass to 32 teams, asking them to spike their bad reports and pick a dope-smoking, hair-trigger hothead. “My coaches have told you that nobody worked harder than me,” he wrote. “The only X-factor is concerns about my use of recreational drugs. To address that, I am putting my money where my mouth is” by offering to take eight drug tests during the season, and to return a portion of his paycheck if found dirty. This was both delusional and an empty vow: The players’ union would block even one extra test and any attempt to pay back guaranteed money. After seeing his pre-draft psychological report, where he received the lowest possible score, one out of 10, in the category of “social maturity” and which also noted that he enjoyed “living on the edge of acceptable behavior,” a handful of teams pulled him off their boards, and 25 others let him sink like a stone on draft day, April 24th. Only one team took the bait, burning a midround pick on a guy with “character issues”: the stoop-to-conquer Patriots of Bill Belichick.
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