Aaron Hernandez

Aaron Hernandez was drafted into the NFL in 2010, at the age of 20. At 27, he was found dead from suicide in a prison cell. In the few years between, he became a professional football star with the New England Patriots, caught a touchdown from Tom Brady in Super Bowl XLVI, signed a $40 million contract, was convicted of first-degree murder, received a sentence of life in prison, and was acquitted in a separate double murder trial. Hernandez’s meteoric rise and shocking fall tell a tragedy not only of Shakespearean proportions but also of the perils of big-time athletic fame and the inescapability of one’s demons.

A hero in Bristol

Hernandez grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, in a home of turmoil. In jailhouse tapes, Hernandez described his house as one of constant arguing. His brother, Jonathan Hernandez, said their father, Dennis Hernandez, regularly beat the two boys over the slightest provocation.

Hernandez’s relationship with his mother, Terri Hernandez, was no better. In later jailhouse conversations, he repeatedly blamed her for how his life turned out. “You ruined me,” he said to her at one point. “You were supposed to get me my medication,” he said, referring to a treatment for hyperactivity. “I knocked you over the head with a frickin’ hammer,” she replied, adding, “That was your medication.”

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Hernandez’s childhood trauma may have run even deeper than that. Both his brother and lawyer said that he told them that he had been sexually abused as a child, though neither named an attacker.

Hernandez would later share his parents’ violent tendencies, but he first inherited—and swiftly eclipsed—his father’s athletic abilities. While Dennis Hernandez had been a local star athlete who peaked with a football scholarship to the University of Connecticut, Aaron Hernandez became one of the country’s top recruits at Bristol Central High School in Connecticut from 2003 to 2007. Reminders of his dominance remain to this day: Hernandez still owns state records for most receiving yards in a career (3,677), season (1,807), and single game (376).

According to some rankings, Hernandez was the best tight end prospect in the entire country in 2007. The distinction earned him an early scholarship to the University of Florida, a football powerhouse. It was a measure of his athletic prowess, but the move thrust the 17-year-old Hernandez, still a minor and wrestling with the untimely passing of his father a year prior, into a big-time NCAA football program with few rules or guardrails.

Gator country

Hernandez graduated from high school in 2007, midway through his senior year, and headed to Florida under famed coach Urban Meyer. Meyer’s system bred future NFL stars but was also accused of lacking discipline. During his six-year tenure in 2005–10, Meyer won two national championships—and his players were arrested at least 31 times.

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In 2007, when Hernandez was still just 17, he punched an employee at a Gainesville, Florida, bar in the side of the head in a dispute over the bill, rupturing his eardrum and causing police to respond. A lawyer working for the university helped settle the matter without charges being pressed. More seriously, Hernandez was implicated—but never charged—in a shooting near campus later that year. Hernandez also reportedly failed multiple drug tests (he acknowledged failing only one).

Nevertheless, Hernandez—who stood roughly 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 meters) tall, weighed about 245 pounds (111 kg), and was steadily collecting the tattoos that would eventually coat both his arms—shined on the gridiron. He played a significant role on the national championship team in 2008, and the next season he won the John Mackey Award as the country’s best tight end, catching 68 passes for 850 yards and five touchdowns. After his junior year (2009–10), he left college and entered the NFL draft.

The Patriot way

Despite Hernandez’s obvious talents, NFL teams were wary of his reported behavior. He fell to the fourth round of the 2010 NFL draft, where he was selected by the New England Patriots, led by renowned coach Bill Belichick and legendary QB Tom Brady. Hernandez, one of the youngest players in the league at just 20 years old, had landed in the lap of football royalty.

He quickly made a splash in Foxborough, Massachusetts, the home of the Patriots, by teaming up with fellow rookie Rob Gronkowski. With Brady under center, the two tight ends formed the nexus of a unique, high-powered offense known colloquially as the “Boston TE Party.” The Patriots became one of two teams to score 500 points in three straight seasons (2010–12) and finished in first place in the AFC East Division all three years.

In 2011 Hernandez emerged individually as an NFL star, catching 79 passes for seven touchdowns in the regular season and helping the Patriots reach the Super Bowl, where he nabbed eight catches and scored a touchdown in a loss to the New York Giants.

Hernandez impressed the notoriously exacting Belichick so much that before the 2012 season—after only two years on the Patriots, and at the age of 22—the team agreed to a $40 million contract extension with him, one of the richest ever for a tight end at the time. “It’s surreal. Probably when I’m done with this conversation I’ll get some tears in my eyes. But it’s real, and it’s an honor,” Hernandez said at the time.

Beyond his athletic abilities, Hernandez had also embraced the Patriots community. Following news of his extension, team owner Robert Kraft told a story about Hernandez making a generous donation to a Kraft-run charity:

One of the touching moments since I’ve known the team—knowing that this is our charitable gala tonight—Aaron came into my office, a little teary-eyed and presented me with a check for $50,000 to go to Myra Kraft Giving Back Fund. I said, “Aaron, you don’t have to do this, you’ve already got your contract.” And he said, “No, it makes me feel good, and I want to do it.”

But Hernandez’s football success masked problems brewing behind the scenes. He ran with a seedy crowd that included friends from his hometown of Bristol, which was only a couple hours away. Hernandez reportedly was using the powerful hallucinogenic PCP (known as angel dust) and carrying a gun everywhere. Whether real or imagined, he worried for his safety and rented a safe house where he could stay anonymously.

Murder of Odin Lloyd

On June 18 and 22, 2013, a flood of police descended on Hernandez’s million-dollar home in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. Investigators searched the house in connection with the recent killing of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semiprofessional football player from Boston. On June 26, police returned to arrest Hernandez for Lloyd’s murder. The Patriots cut Hernandez from the team shortly after the news broke. “It’s a sad day, really a sad day on so many levels,” Belichick said at a news conference a month later.

In the early hours of June 17, 2013, Hernandez and two associates had picked up Lloyd, who had been dating Hernandez’s fiancée’s sister. Lloyd appeared concerned enough about the encounter that he texted his sister to let her know he was with Hernandez. “U saw who I’m with,” Lloyd wrote to her. “Nfl.” He then added, “Just so U know.”

A few minutes after his last text, Lloyd was shot to death in an industrial park near Hernandez’s house. A clear motive was never established for the murder.

First murder trial

Hernandez’s arrest sent shock waves through the sports world and beyond. He was one of the few star athletes in U.S. history to be charged with murder, and perhaps the most famous NFL star to go on trial since O.J. Simpson.

Even before the trial, more hints of Hernandez’s violent tendencies spilled out onto the national stage. In 2014 a grand jury indicted Hernandez on separate murder charges in a 2012 double homicide in Boston. Hernandez was also facing a civil suit from Alexander Bradley, whom Hernandez allegedly shot in the face after they left a Florida strip club in 2013, causing him to lose his right eye. (Hernandez settled the suit with Bradley in 2016.)

In 2015 Hernandez was tried for first-degree murder for Lloyd’s killing. The case against him was damning. Prosecutors laid out arguments that included text messages between Hernandez and Lloyd and surveillance video showing Hernandez with a gun at his house after the killing. Additionally, Hernandez faced testimony from Bradley, who told the court Hernandez was paranoid and thought he was being followed.

In a strange confluence of legal events, Hernandez’s trial overlapped with another high-profile, sports-related prosecution in Massachusetts: that of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

On April 15, 2015, the jury found Hernandez guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. His legal troubles, however, would continue.

Second murder trial

In 2017 Hernandez went on trial again for first-degree murder. This time he faced charges for the 2012 killing of two men who had been shot in their car after leaving a Boston bar at which they had been in an altercation with Hernandez. During the trial, Bradley again testified against Hernandez.

Hernandez was bolstered this time around by high-powered defense lawyer Jose Baez, who had successfully defended Casey Anthony in the tabloid-ridden murder trial concerning the death of her two-year-old daughter. Hernandez was acquitted of murder but was found guilty of unlawfully possessing a firearm. The judge added several years to his existing life sentence.

Death and subsequent legal battles

On April 19, 2017, five days after his acquittal, Hernandez killed himself in his jail cell by hanging. He left behind multiple notes, including one to his fiancée. He was 27 years old.

But the legal wrangling was not over. Hernandez’s attorneys filed to vacate his sentence under a Massachusetts legal principle called “abatement,” which removes a conviction if a person dies during the appeal process. The court had no choice but to grant the request and, in doing so, potentially insulated Hernandez’s remaining family from civil suits filed against them by the families of his victims.

Hernandez’s estate ultimately settled civil suits with Lloyd’s mother and the families of the two men he had been accused of killing in 2012, and the highest court in Massachusetts reinstated Hernandez’s conviction in 2019.

Family

Hernandez was survived by his fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, whom he had known since childhood. He and Jenkins had a daughter in 2012.

CTE and legacy

Following his death, answers began to emerge about Hernandez’s violent and unpredictable nature. In November 2017, researchers at Boston University (BU) announced they had detected chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in the former tight end’s brain. The condition, common in football players and caused by repeated head trauma, can lead to erratic behavior, violence, and memory loss.

The extent of Hernandez’s brain damage was severe. Researchers called it the worst they had seen in a young person in their study of nearly 500 brains. “Especially in the frontal lobes, which are very important for decision-making, judgment, and cognition, we could see damage to the inner chambers of the brain,” said Ann McKee, director of BU’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, in 2017. “This would be the first case we’ve ever seen of that kind of damage in such a young individual.”

Hernandez’s story of superstar athlete turned murderer proved a natural—and lucrative—fit for an American media obsessed with true crime drama. A number of books, documentaries, and dramatizations emerged after his death that ranged from informative to salacious.