Hernandez death brings tragic story to chilling, unexpected conclusion

An American tragedy is now complete. Convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez is dead, found hanged in his prison cell early Wednesday morning.

An awful story has an awful, if unex- pected, ending. Hernandez, 27, is gone, as is Odin Lloyd, the man he killed in 2013. There can be no sympathy for Hernandez, of course, but a shudder should run through all of us. Hernandez once was a young man we thought we knew, living a life in sports so familiar to us, on stages of all- American joy and success, until it all went so terribly wrong.

Hernandez caught touchdown passes from Tim Tebow and Tom Brady. He won a college football national championship at the University of Florida. He went to a Super Bowl with the New England Patriots. He was given a $ 40 million contract over five years, a sign of his sports ascension. He was even born in Bristol, Conn., the home of ESPN. We know this résumé, don’t we? How does murder get attached to that biography?

But it did. Hernandez was a young man who lost his father when he was 16, got into a bar fight soon after arriving at Florida, failed a test for marijuana in college, watched his draft stock plummet and made wrong turn after wrong turn, finally ending with murder.

We can despise him for his heinous actions while also feeling terrible for what he became and the way he died. It is not wrong to think both thoughts.

The news of Hernandez’s death came on the same day the Patriots visited the White House, a day of celebration for many players who knew Hernandez as a teammate before he became a murderer.

It is a day irrevocably altered for them by a true American horror story.