Did sport play part in Hernandez turning to murder?
Film examines if brain injury contributed to gridiron star’s gruesome acts, writes Alan Tyers
He was not as skilled at crime as catching balls
They are not in the “health business”, they are in the “violence business”. So says former American football pro Chris Borland about the NFL, as he and other contributors to an engrossing, ghoulish three-hour documentary try to understand how and why the Super Bowl-scoring player Aaron Hernandez murdered at least one man during the time he was a star for the New England Patriots, and what impact brain injury might have played in his behaviour.
Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, on Netflix, tells the story of Hernandez from a troubled childhood to the murder of Odin Lloyd in 2013, the ensuing media-circus trial, his sentencing to life in prison, and his suicide in jail in 2017.
Lloyd was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee Shayanna Jenkins.
The “how” of the murder was not too hard for the Massachusetts police: Hernandez was clearly not nearly as skilled at crime as he was at catching footballs and running through brick walls as a starting tight end for Bill Belichick’s all-conquering Patriots.
Lloyd was shot a mile from Hernandez’s house; Hernandez returned a hire car shortly afterwards with gun shells in it. There were text messages, cell phone tower traces, tyre tracks, CCTV and prints adding up to a mountain of circumstantial evidence such that Hernandez’s defence team had to admit in closing remarks that he had, in fact and contrary to their original argument, been at the murder scene.
Still, America loves a handsome sports star and, in a post-oj Simpson world, you never can tell, and when the jury took a week to deliberate, nothing was certain. Eventually, however, he was found guilty and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
What was less certain, and where this three-part mini-series really starts getting creative, is why he did it. All manner of theories are offered. Was it a violent childhood with a brutal father, a distant mother, and possible sexual abuse? Was it the repeated head trauma of American football? Certainly post-mortem examination of his brain revealed severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a type of dementia associated with contact sport. Was it his very heavy use of marijuana?
Falling in with a bad crowd? Good oldfashioned sociopathy? The untouchability that sports superstardom confers upon its heroes? Among the most lurid is the theory Hernandez was a closeted homosexual, and that he killed Lloyd because Lloyd was going to blab.
This last, especially, seems to be more or less pure speculation, and some will find it in questionable taste; others might have a similar complaint about the amount of audio, video and still photography of Hernandez’s child in the programme. The true crime genre, whose huge popularity is one of the engines of Netflix’s massive heft, is not an art form for those with delicate sensibilities.
All of which would have added up to a sad and strange tale of a young man who had it all and threw it all away had it not then emerged that Hernandez had been involved in other shootings and, most likely, murders.
In investigating the Lloyd killing, the police found a vehicle at Hernandez’s cousin’s house that tied the player to a double murder in Boston in 2012. Hernandez then stood trial for that; the prosecution said he had got into an argument with two men in a nightclub over a spilt drink, saw them later that evening at a traffic light and shot them both.
Hernandez said that his associate and drug supplier, Alexander Bradley, a truly terrible chap by all accounts in the film, was the triggerman.
Furthermore, in a separate incident, Bradley says, Hernandez shot him in the face, causing him to lose an eye, but he did not tell the police and instead elected to sort it out in his own special way. With friends like these …
The whole saga is a parade of behaviour both astonishing and stupid, and of course very sad for the victims and their families and the ruined lives. Quite what blame the sport of American football has to shoulder is a fascinating and distinctly uncomfortable question, but then young men must be thrown into the meat grinder to make the games.