Now ‘it’s real’: Hernandez guilty
Verdict in brutal murder by former NFL star a stunner
Even after a 10-week trial in which prosecutors meticulously laid out their murder case, it was still stunning to see former NFL star Aaron Hernandez standing in a Massachusetts courtroom Wednesday and hearing the word “guilty.”
Stunning because of the brutality of the crime — the execution-style murder of Odin Lloyd, who was left to die in an industrial park near Hernandez’s home. Stunning because of Hernandez’s stature as a New England sports star, a Pro Bowl tight end with a $40 million contract, a fiancée and an infant daughter.
“Speechless,” former University of Florida teammate Joe Haden, a star cornerback for the Cleveland Browns, wrote on Twitter after the verdict.
It was a common sentiment.
“I just can’t wrap my head around this. For the first time, it’s real,” tweeted former NFL receiver David Nelson, another former college teammate. “He was found guilty, and should do the time. But man … that’s not the guy I knew.”
Prosecutors produced enough circumstantial evidence to persuade a jury to convict Hernandez, 25, for the murder of Lloyd, an acquaintance who had been dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée. Prosecutors did not provide a detailed motive, nor did they find a murder weapon, but after deliberating for more than seven days, jurors did not buy arguments from Hernandez’s attorneys that one of Hernandez’s two accomplices pulled the trigger while high on drugs.
Hernandez (who faces additional charges in a murder from 2012 slayings in Boston) was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He will serve that time in Walpole, Mass., less than 4 miles from the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.
“The jury found that he was just a man who committed a brutal murder,” District Attorney Thomas Quinn told reporters. “The fact that he was a professional athlete meant nothing in the end.”