NFLer LOVE ‘HOAX’
No ‘gay’ note, att’y says
AARON HERNANDEZ’S lawyer said the fallen football star did not write a suicide note to a prison boyfriend, according to a report.
“Rumors of letters to a gay lover, in or out of prison, are false,” attorney Jose Baez told TMZ Sports. “These are malicious leaks used to tarnish somebody who is dead.”
Days after Hernandez was found hanged in a Massachusetts prison cell, a local prosecutor said three letters were found next to the dead man’s Bible, which reports said was opened to John 3:16.
News stories said the letters were written to his fiancée, the 4-year-old daughter they shared, and to a prison lover, who was the last person to see him alive.
But Baez said the letter to a gay lover was a lie.
An attorney for that inmate, however, confirmed his client was supposed to get one of the goodbye notes. He has asked that the prisoner, Kyle Kennedy, be able to read his letter.
Friends and relatives held a funeral for Hernandez, 27, Monday in his native Bristol, Conn.
Baez was not initially sold on the suicide pronouncement, and would not say if he was swayed by an autopsy that reached the same conclusion.
“There is still plenty we are investigating,” Baez said.
Hernandez (photo) was serving a life sentence for the 2013 murder of semipro linebacker Odin Lloyd.
He had also been charged with the 2012 double murder of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, but a jury found him not guilty just five days before he killed himself.
Hernandez’s lawyers asked a court to dismiss the murder conviction. Under state law, that conviction could ultimately be vacated because his case was still under appeal.
Meanwhile, the prison where Hernandez killed himself is under lockdown as investigators probe beyond the ex-NFL star’s death, a top state official said. A Massachusetts judge ordered that Hernandez’s suicide notes be handed over to his grieving family so they could understand why he hanged himself with a bed sheet last week, the Boston Globe reported.
Daniel Bennett, the state’s top public safety officer, appeared in court Monday to speak out against handing over the letters.
During a recorded sidebar the Globe released, Bennett said surrendering the notes over would harm the investigation into the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center where Hernandez was detained.
George Leontire, the lawyer representing Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez, filed court documents this week saying the family had the right to see the ex-New England Patriots star’s final words.
“They desperately (need) the closure the suicide notes would provide,” Leontire wrote, according to the newspaper.
Details are still emerging about Hernandez’s private life behind bars. A Newsweek report out Friday indicated Hernandez might have killed Lloyd to cover up his bisexuality.