SHOCKING END
Aaron Hernandez was found alone in his jail cell dead of an apparent suicide at 3:05 a.m. But why he did it remains a mystery.
The apparent prison-cell suicide of convicted killer and disgraced New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez has triggered numerous calls for probes, while a Jamaica Plain juror who voted to acquit the ex-NFL star less than a week ago was stunned by the news.
Hernandez, 27, used a bedsheet to hang himself from his cell window yesterday before guards found him about 3:05 a.m. at the SouzaBaranowski Correction Center, prison officials said. He was officially pronounced dead at a Leominster hospital an hour later.
The sudden death of the one-time $40 million passcatcher was all the more surprising given its timing. It came just five days after a jury found him not guilty of a 2012 double homicide in Boston, prompting his lawyers to target an appeal in his previous conviction of the 2013 slaying of Odin L. Lloyd.
Juror Robert Monroe, 27, of Jamaica Plain, told the Herald yesterday he thought Hernandez was overjoyed by the jury’s decision last Friday.
“When the verdict was said, a lot of people were emotional, and I looked over and I thought he was crying tears of joy,” said Monroe, who sat on the Suffolk County jury that acquitted Hernandez in the murders of Daniel de Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28. “It’s confusing. I thought he was really happy at the verdict. If he hung himself not too long after … clearly, I must have been wrong.”
Monroe, a graphic designer, said Hernandez’s temperament stayed even-keeled throughout the two-month trial, where prosecutors fingered him as the triggerman who killed the Cape Verdean men following a nightclub dispute.
“He seemed very normal. If the judge made a joke, everybody laughed, he would smile,” said Monroe.
The acquittal spurred hope in his legal team, including defense attorney Jose Baez, who said there was nothing “that would have indicated anything like this was possible.” Hernandez was serving a life sentence in Lloyd’s death.
“Aaron was looking forward to an opportunity for a second chance to prove his innocence,” said Baez, who said his firm will do its own probe of his death.
Hernandez’s acquittal, Monroe said, hinged on the testimony of star witness Alexander Bradley, a convict himself who he said jurors deemed unreliable.
“A lot of his testimony, I felt was either unverifiable or a lie,” Monroe said. “I felt the commonwealth didn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that it was him who pulled the trigger and not the other person in the car — Alexander Bradley.
“I’m sorry that the commonwealth didn’t provide
enough evidence to prove guilt,” he said. “That was their job. I do believe the two people who were slain, they were living the American dream. … They didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
As news of Hernandez’s death spread, those who knew him and the victims in the 2012 shooting met it with a mix of disbelief, and in some cases, defiance.
“Absolutely no chance he took his own life,” tweeted Hernandez’s former agent, Athletes First president Brian Murphy, who used a nickname to describe his former client. “Chico was not a saint, but my family and I loved him and he would never take his own life.”
Hernandez’s longtime friend, Miami Dolphin Mike Pouncey, posted on Instagram that he had spoken to Hernandez a day before his death, calling him “my brother.”
A man who only identified himself as Claudio, and as a friend of Furtado and de Abreu, said he wanted Hernandez “to stay in jail.”
“I wanted him to suffer in jail,” he said as he stood outside the Dorchester home of Furtado’s mother.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is conducting an autopsy in Boston to determine the cause and manner or death, authorities said.
“There’s no indication he left a suicide note,” said Christopher Fallon, a spokesman for the Department of Correction.