Boston Herald

Hernandez fiancee grudging in testimony about actions

- By LAUREL J. SWEET — laurel.sweet@bostonhera­ld.com

Aaron Hernandez could not have been in Connecticu­t on the lam from two murders the morning of July 16, 2012, because he was booked at a Holiday Inn in Plainville with the expectant mother of his daughter, the former New England Patriot’s frosty fiancee testified yesterday.

“Not to my knowledge — unless he’s a clone,” Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez told First Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggan. But a senior inspector for the U.S. Marshals, who conducted an exhaustive investigat­ion of Hernandez’s iPhone 4S’ movements that week, says his findings suggest otherwise.

Deputy Special Agent Anthony Visalli, who also testified yesterday, said cell towers picked up Hernandez’s phone in Hartford at 10:47 a.m. on July 16, 2012, and still in the Nutmeg State as late as July 19, 2012. He acknowledg­ed there were stretches in between when the phone was apparently turned off and he could not account with certainty where it was.

But when Haggan asked Visalli if cell towers in Connecticu­t could ping off Hernandez’s phone if he was at a Plainville Holiday Inn, the fed responded, “Absolutely no way.”

Cell records show someone used Hernandez’s phone at 2:37 a.m. on July 16, 2012, to leave Jenkins Hernandez a 17-second voicemail from the South End, where seven minutes earlier two office cleaners, Daniel de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, were shot to death in a borrowed BMW idling at a stoplight.

Prosecutor­s say Hernandez murdered the two strangers for spilling a drink on him at the Cure Lounge, and that his pal Alexander Bradley drove the getaway car.

Jenkins Hernandez claimed yesterday to have no memory of receiving a voice message on that day at that hour.

Jenkins Hernandez, 27, was given immunity for her much-anticipate­d testimony — and she made sure Haggan worked for it.

At one point when she didn’t like his questions, she haughtily exclaimed, “I’m done.”

Bradley was shot in the face in Florida on Feb. 13, 2013, but survived.

Jenkins Hernandez said she couldn’t recall asking why his closest friend vanished — and he never said a word about it until she learned from someone else he’d been shot.

“He wasn’t my friend,” she bristled. “We weren’t sitting on the couch having popcorn and watching movies.” Jenkins Hernandez took Hernandez’s surname in 2015 following his conviction for the 2013 murder of Odin L. Lloyd. They are not married, she said.

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