Hernandez case goes to jury
Ex-Pats star’s attorney calls key witness a ‘three-legged pony’
Prosecutors will bet their case against disgraced New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez on a jury’s common sense today, having conceded their spilled-drink motive for the brutal murders of two immigrants “will never make sense.”
“The ‘why’ will never make sense to you, but you know who committed this crime,” First Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Patrick Haggan appealed to the panel yesterday at the conclusion of his 90-minute closing argument.
Jabbing a finger at Hernandez, 27, Haggan said, “His time is right now. Speak the truth through your verdicts and find him guilty.”
The jury was pared down last night to seven women and five men with a Boston woman serving as foreperson. They are expected to begin their deliberations today following additional law instructions by Suffolk Superior Judge Jeffrey A. Locke.
Their verdicts will come down to a choice between two tales of the shootings:
• One, in which prosecutors say the former NFL star shot to death office cleaners Daniel de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, in an indignant meltdown because Abreu accidentally splashed a drink on him at the Cure nightclub on July 16, 2012;
• The other, backed by Hernandez’s defense team, in which his pal Alexander Bradley, a convicted drug dealer, killed the men in a gunfight at a South End traffic light over a marijuana deal gone bust, while driving the Pro Bowler’s Toyota 4Runner.
For the first time yesterday, lead defense attorney Jose Baez dropped the bombshell that, “Aaron Hernandez wasn’t in that car during the shooting. He wasn’t there.”
Baez vilified Bradley as a “parasite” in a $500 Burberry shirt. He likened the state’s case against his client to “a house of cards, and the slightest breeze will knock it down.”
Haggan countered, “The defense can be summed up in two words: fertile imagination.”
Haggan left jurors with a gruesome photo of Bradley in a Florida hospital bed, his right eye blown out after Hernandez allegedly shot him in the face so Bradley could never give him up for the murders.
But Bradley lived. Haggan said phone records show Bradley tried calling Hernandez five times from the hospital and was hung up on each time.
Haggan agreed Bradley was not the ideal star witness for the prosecution, but, “Alexander Bradley stuck to what he believed,” he said, and was “honest to a fault.”
Baez added “Alexander Bradley was their threelegged pony and they were going to ride him to the finish line. They were not going anywhere that Bradley wasn’t taking them. And that’s a fact.”