DAs hope to score with ex-Pat’s ‘angry’ admission
Prosecutors intent on overcoming holes in their murder case against Aaron Hernandez hope his soulbaring phone call to a fan might be their edge.
Assistant Suffolk District Attorneys Mark Lee and Patrick Haggan have asked Suffolk Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Locke to let jurors hear from a female pen pal, who they say Hernandez told he was “very angry all the time.”
The fan, Lee and Haggan told Locke, was “interested in getting to know” the former Patriot in 2015 while he was awaiting trial for the murder of his friend Odin L. Lloyd. She is identified only as “MP” in their motion to bring in his state of mind as evidence of two cold-blooded killings.
“At one point during their conversations, the defendant told her that incidents in his life caused him to be ‘very angry all the time,’ ” the prosecutors wrote. “The defendant’s statements … are probative of his state of mind to explain his anger over a spilled drink.”
The state contends Hernandez stalked and killed Daniel de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, in a drive-by shooting in the South End on July 16, 2012, because Abreu’s cocktail splashed on him in a nightclub.
Hernandez’s lawyers counter in an opposing motion that their trial adversaries are trying to “cherry pick” one remark their client made during a phone call three years after the murders and that to flaunt it now before the jury “would depict the defendant guilty of the crime charged because of bad temper.”
The jury has heard from nearly three dozen prosecution witnesses over 10 days, but so far none have testified to seeing a spilled drink, nor have police or criminalists found DNA or fingerprints connecting Hernandez to the alleged murder weapon.
Yesterday, Kristen Tolan of the Boston Police Latent Print Unit testified that while she was unable to recover any usable prints from Hernandez’s Toyota 4Runner, her processing revealed “white streaks” on the interior indicative of a scrub job.