FATAL DESTRUCTION
Bad choices defined the life of Aaron Hernandez
When the tears spilled out of Aaron Hernandez’s eyes last Friday after being acquitted of a double homicide, you couldn’t be sure who they were for. Now we’ll never know.
That’s been the only truth we can be sure of since the moment the former New England Patriots tight end was implicated in the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro football player Hernandez was eventually convicted of shooting in cold blood in a dark industrial park a mile from the $1.3 million mansion he lived in when he wasn’t shacked up in a flophouse near Gillette Stadium hiding from whatever fears were tormenting him.
We’ll never know is all we’ll ever know of him.
We’ll never know why he hanged himself five days after that acquittal and three days after the second anniversary of his conviction in the Lloyd case that left him locked in a prison cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley with no possibility of parole. He’d been acquitted of the drive-by murders of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado but still judged guilty of Lloyd’s death so nothing really changed when the tears flowed except Hernandez himself.
That was the first time he’d shown anything more than a smirk toward the world or a smile toward his fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez. Something snapped when he heard the words “not guilty” and for the first time since this all began he lost control.
He was no longer the alpha male of the football field or the prison yard. He was a child, weeping we know not for what.
What went through his mind when he found himself behind bars on Easter Sunday, a day of redemption for many but not for him? Even though his high-powered defense attorney Jose Baez had gotten him off in part by implying without a scintilla of evidence that perhaps the two dead men had been drug dealers involved with Hernandez’s nefarious friend turned hate-filled enemy, Alexander Bradley, he was still alone with whatever dark thoughts filled his mind in a cell he shared with no one.
Baez was claiming there were grounds for a new trial in the Lloyd case and reasonable doubt could be created. Baez, undefeated in murder trials, is the king of creating doubt. The reasonableness of that doubt is often debatable, but doubt he could create.
So why would someone seemingly finally in possession of some good news, choose the wee hours yesterday morning to hang himself with a bedsheet tied to a window? We’ll never know. Was it too many hours alone with regret? Was it too many hours alone with rage? Was it too many hours alone with the knowledge of his innocence, which he proclaimed to the end, or the knowledge Baez got a guilty man off and might do it again? Only God and a handful of people, half of them dead, know the truth. For the rest of us there is only speculation and confusion.
There is so much we’ll never know, yet there are a couple of things we do know.
We know Aaron Hernandez was no victim. From the time the anchor in his life, his father Dennis, died during a routine hernia operation, he went from goofy kid to wannabe gangbanger, tatted up and loaded for bear. He made one bad choice after another with a nearly unbroken string of lowlife associates, violent acts and days and nights wrapped in a cloud of dope smoke. Some who knew him say the dope was laced with PCP, a drug so potent most people stopped using it long ago because it leads to paranoia and worse.
He starred on the football field because of an uncanny ability to shake himself free but could never shake free of the life he chose. Trouble didn’t follow him, he sought it out.
A psychological test he took before the 2010 draft found him to favor “living on the edge.” He registered the lowest possible score in social responsibility, one out of 10. That plus the baggage he’d laden on himself at Florida while becoming the top tight end in the country led to every team in the NFL passing on him at least three times before the Patriots took him with the 113th pick.
Two years later he was a Pro Bowl alternate. Three years later he was in handcuffs, marched into a cell he would never leave. He would be implicated or charged in the shootings of six men dating back to a 2007 drive-by in Gainesville, where Florida police wanted to question him but his lawyers refused and no charges were filed.
We don’t really know who shot those guys in Gainesville or Lloyd, Furtado, de Abreu or Bradley, who claims Hernandez did before leaving him for dead. We do know what juries said, what lawyers said, what Bradley said, what the evidence said. Yet all we really know is Aaron Hernandez couldn’t live anymore with the weight of what he was carrying.
What that was, we’ll never know. But an old boxing philosopher named Cus D’Amato once told me, “Guys born round don’t die square.” Aaron Hernandez chose a life filled with violence and shady characters, it wasn’t thrust upon him.
Sometime around 3:05 a.m. yesterday he died the way he’d lived, making one last bad choice and letting others suffer the consequences.