Hernandez was smoking K2 before his 2017 suicide
A toxicology report done as part of Aaron Hernandez’s autopsy following his April 2017 suicide in a Massachusetts prison “came back negative for all substances tested to include synthetic cannabinoids,” according to a report issued two weeks after his death by the Massachusetts State Police.
But, the report redacted an interview conducted with an inmate who told police that Hernandez spent the last days of his life smoking K2, a synthetic drug that can cause hallucinations and psychosis and can be difficult to detect in routine drug tests.
The Boston Globe obtained the unredacted police report and published its findings Tuesday. In response, a Massachusetts Department of Corrections spokesman told the Globe that the inmate’s account was redacted
so as to not compromise an ongoing investigation into drug activity at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, where Hernandez hung himself in his cell on April 19, 2017.
Hernandez, a former tight end
for the New England Patriots, had been acquitted of a 2012 double murder in Boston’s South End just five days before his death, and inmates interviewed after his suicide described him as optimistic over the possibility that his life sentence for the 2013 slaying of Odin Lloyd would be overturned.
“What do you do when you get good news?” one inmate told prison investigators, adding, “You celebrate, right?”
But that inmate also told investigators — in the portion of the interview that was redacted — that Hernandez spent the last two days of his life smoking K2 in his cell and that “he wasn’t in the right frame of mind.”
“That [s-] is [f--] all these young kids up,” the inmate said. “They aren’t going to stop no matter what happens in here.”
Prison officials found religious writing on the walls of Hernandez’s cell even though he was not considered to be a religious person; he also had written “3:16” in blood on his forehead and had the Bible citation John 3:16 open on his desk. People familiar with K2’s effects told the Globe that delusions caused by the drug often can be of a religious nature.
“We see many, many cases of people using synthetic cannabinoids and other novel psychoactive substances that are aggressive toward themselves,” Marilyn Huestis, a toxicologist who teaches at the Lambert Center for the Study of Medicinal Cannabis and Hemp at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, told the Globe. She added that it’s difficult for toxicology labs to keep up with and test for changes to the drug’s formulations.
“These are so potent, the doses are so low, that when a person takes it you can only measure it in their blood for a short period of time,’’ Huestis said. “So, labs will frequently miss it in the blood.”
Hernandez also was found to have a severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease linked to repeated head injuries, after his brain was studied following his death.