Aaron Hernandez: American Football in the dock as NFL star player's murderous double life is revealed

New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez was as violent off the field as he was on it. Tim Walker reports on the $40m athlete’s alleged involvement in a string of crimes dating back to 2007

Aaron Hernandez in action for New England Partiots in the NFL (Getty)

Had things gone differently for Aaron Hernandez, the 25-year-old former tight end for the New England Patriots would be wearing a Super Bowl ring by now. Instead, on Wednesday, the one-time rising star of the era’s pre-eminent NFL franchise was led from a Massachusetts courtroom in handcuffs, found guilty of the 2013 murder of his friend, Odin Lloyd.

“I didn’t do it,” Mr Hernandez reportedly told guards as he was transported from the courthouse in Fall River to Cedar Junction state prison to serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Yet most onlookers will surely agree with the jury, who had heard testimony from more than 130 prosecution witnesses since the trial began in January. The defence called just three.

What jurors didn’t know during their week-long deliberations was that Mr Hernandez has also been indicted over a separate double homicide in Boston in 2012, for which he is expected to face trial later this year. It’s a hard fall for a man who, until his arrest, was paid millions to take hard falls. But it is also, perhaps, the inevitable outcome of a life lived as violently off the field as on.

Mr Lloyd, 27, a semi-professional footballer, was last seen alive climbing into a rented Nissan with Mr Hernandez and his friends Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace, at about 2.30am on 17 June 2013, outside his home in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston. The two men had been friends since Mr Lloyd began dating the sister of Mr Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins.

But prosecutors said the friendship had soured – which explained why, after Mr Hernandez picked him up, Mr Lloyd texted his sister to make sure she knew who he was with, should anything untoward occur. “Who?” she asked him. “NFL,” Mr Lloyd responded. “Just so you know.”

Hours later, one of Mr Hernandez’s own home security cameras filmed him hefting a handgun. The same day, a jogger came across the bullet-ridden body of Mr Lloyd on a deserted industrial site not far from Mr Hernandez’s mansion. He had been shot six times. Mr Hernandez was arrested nine days later. Mr Wallace and Mr Ortiz will both stand trial separately for the murder.

The Patriots sacked Mr Hernandez immediately following his arrest, but it is now apparent that he was involved in other violent incidents during his time with the team. The motive for Mr Lloyd’s killing was never made entirely clear during the trial, but one theory suggested by investigators was that he had heard rumours of Mr Hernandez’s involvement in a previous crime.

In July 2012, two Cape Verdean men, Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu and Safiro Teixeira Furtado, were killed in a drive-by shooting in Boston, shortly after an altercation with Mr Hernandez and his entourage at a nearby nightclub. It is their murders for which he will next face trial. The player also remains a suspect in a 2007 shooting in Gainesville, Florida, and was recently sued by a friend for allegedly shooting him in the face in 2013, after they argued over a drinks bill.

His double life of criminality and competitive sporting success has its origins in Mr Hernandez’s hometown of Bristol, Connecticut, where he was born in 1989, the second son of an Italian mother and a Puerto Rican father. The struggling industrial city is a two-hour drive from the Patriots HQ in Boston, but a world away from the NFL.

Both parents had colourful pasts. Dennis Hernandez, Aaron’s father, had been a small-time crook even as he distinguished himself as a sportsman at the University of Connecticut. But he cleaned up his act after Aaron and his older brother DJ, now 27, were born. Their mother, Terri, was arrested for booking sports bets in 2001, though she never served any prison time.

The brothers both inherited their father’s sporting prowess. DJ, now 27, coaches football at the University of Iowa; Aaron was a football star even in high school. “Best athlete this city’s ever produced, and a more polite, humble kid you couldn’t find,” Bob Montgomery, Bristol’s official historian, recently told Rolling Stone that: “There was never any swagger or street stuff from him.”

Most who know him point to 2006 as the year when Mr Hernandez underwent a dramatic change in character. Dennis died from complications during a routine hernia operation, and while the teenager’s sporting career continued its upward trajectory, his personal life took a plunge. “It was very, very hard and he was very, very angry,” Terri Hernandez told USA Today in 2009. “He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.”

At 17, Mr Hernandez was allowed to graduate from high school early, in order to take up a football scholarship at the University of Florida. Yet in his first year at the university, he got into a fight with a bouncer at a bar, and was reportedly questioned by police about a shooting in which two other men were injured. Trouble brewed at home, too, where Terri was remarried to a drug dealer whom her son despised. The man was later jailed for slashing her with a kitchen knife.

Mr Hernandez fell in with a crowd of fellow Bristolians that included Mr Wallace and Mr Ortiz. He acquired multiple tattoos, one of which spelled the word “Blood” across his fist. He supposedly smoked copious amounts of cannabis, and posed for photographs with a handgun. But it was not mere posing. In a psychological report seen by teams including the Patriots prior to the 2010 NFL draft, he was described as “living on the edge of acceptable behaviour”.

Yet despite reports that he had failed several drug tests, Mr Hernandez was offered a four-year contract with the New England team that had won three Super Bowls during the preceding decade, under the leadership of coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady.

Professional sport has a long history of setting young men from troubled backgrounds on the straight and narrow, but the NFL has also developed an unfortunate reputation for its players’ aggression beyond the locker room.

Former NFL running back Lawrence Phillips is expected to be charged in the killing last weekend of his cellmate at the California prison where he is serving a 31-year sentence for assaulting his girlfriend.

When Mr Hernandez joined the Patriots in 2010, aged 20, he was the youngest player on the NFL’s active roster. In 2012 he scored a touchdown in his first and only Super Bowl, and though the Patriots were defeated by the New York Giants, his performance helped to earn him a contract extension worth $40m over five years. He would never see it out. On 1 February this year, as New England celebrated its fourth Super Bowl win under Belichick and Brady, the man with the potential to be its biggest new star was instead standing in the dock.