Hernandez’s messy life a mass of contradictions
COMMENTARY
In place of an obituary for Aaron Hernandez, there is only an inexplicable blank, followed by a question mark.
After all the lethal contradictions of his life, did this kissblowing killer, so promisingly great but with such dead-end eyes, resolve matters with the ultimate act of squandering and hang himself in the desolate shade of a jail cell? And if so, then so what?
He was found not guilty (although not entirely) of a double murder on Friday. He was dead, apparently by his own hand with a bedsheet, by Wednesday. He was not on a suicide watch, and his attorney, Jose Baez, had just given him slight hope that another murder conviction for which he was serving a life sentence might be overturned on appeal.
If he did kill himself at age 27, you can only suppose that he was left too alone in his cell with the consciousness of his crimes.
Hernandez led a forked life; the star NFL tight end was accompanied on the path of success by a brutal lowlife stranger who foiled his potential. He trained hard to become an All-American at Florida and succeeded brilliantly with the New England Patriots, and he had the green shoots of a good life, with a fiancee and a daughter. Yet he was linked to various incidents of violence that left three men dead and others maimed.
In even a single murder, the victims are multiple. Not one, but at least two whole families die: that of the victim, and that of the perpetrator, and in Hernandez's case, the damage to mothers, fathers, brothers, sons and daughters was exponential. Yet Hernandez never appeared to feel sorry for anybody — except, if he did commit suicide, for himself.
He showed no outward recognition of the families of two office cleaners who were murdered, Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, in a 2012 drive-by shooting, allegedly over a spilled drink in a nightclub. Hernandez might not have fired the shots; the jury found reasonable doubt because it was possible that his thuglife associate in the car with him, Alexander Bradley, was the triggerman.
The rest — everything after 2012 — was more unfathomable stupidity, ratcheted up by suspicion and revenge motives. Bradley wound up shot in the face and dumped in an alley, supposedly by Hernandez, and turned into a witness for the state against him, while also admitting that he wanted to kill Hernandez in turn.
Hernandez carried these events lightly in public and had a talent for dual posturing and posing. He played the grateful guy who had been set straight by the Patriots, winning a contract extension worth $40 million just six weeks after he was present for the nightclub murders. "I just hope I keep going, doing the right things, making the right decisions so I can have a good life, and be there to live a good life with my family," he said.
In private, he got so stoned and drunk that he had to get in shape for training camp by wearing a sweatsuit in a sauna.
Less than a year after Hernandez signed his contract extension, he apparently murdered semipro football player Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old friend who had rolled his joints for him, in a fit of paranoia. Physical evidence connected him to the industrial-park pit where Lloyd's body was found with gunshot wounds, including in the back. Baez, Hernandez’s attorney, asserted there were good grounds for appeal in that case.
After being acquitted last week in the double murder, Hernandez wept, and nodded, and apparently expressed optimism about getting out of prison. On Wednesday, Baez issued a statement demanding an investigation, positing that it could have been a jailhouse murder. Will we ever know?
What's knowable is that Hernandez was no innocent bystander in his own death: either he did it to himself, or someone was so appalled at the idea of him winning an appeal and evading a life sentence that they did it to him. But what's unknowable is whether Hernandez might ever have escaped his whole rotten, nihilistic, meaningless pattern of living. Then you survey the entirety of Hernandez's brief bloodstained career, and the squandering of lives all around him, and you say: I just don't know.