# The Industrial Park Murder *A Biography of Aaron Hernandez* — Legendary Biographies No. 142 - **Subject:** Aaron Josef Hernandez - **Written by:** Roland Mercer - **Shelf:** Sport / American Football - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 208 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-121-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Alasdair Finn (ISBN 979-8-90623-599-2) - **Content notes:** homicide; suicide; CTE Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/142-the-industrial-park-murder.html ## About this book April 19, 2017, the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts. Aaron Josef Hernandez, twenty-seven, the former New England Patriots tight end who had signed a $40 million contract extension in August 2012 and was convicted of murdering the semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd in April 2015, is found hanging in his cell. He has been acquitted five days earlier in the 2012 double-murder trial of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado at a Boston nightclub. His post-mortem brain examination at the Boston University CTE Center will produce the most severe diagnosis of chronic traumatic encephalopathy ever found in someone of his age — a stage-three diagnosis the lead investigator Ann McKee said she had only previously seen in NFL players in their sixties. Roland Mercer's biography opens earlier — in Bristol, Connecticut, where Aaron was born in 1989, the second son of a Mexican-American Hernandez family — and follows the arc through the Bristol Central High School years, the death of his father Dennis Hernandez of complications from hernia surgery in January 2006, the long University of Florida years on Urban Meyer's Gators and the 2008 national championship, the 2010 NFL draft fall to the fourth round, the three Patriots seasons and the Super Bowl XLVI appearance, the June 17, 2013 Industrial Park murder of Lloyd, the long Bristol County trial of 2015, the April 2015 conviction and the move to MCI-Cedar Junction, the transfer to Souza-Baranowski, and the morning of April 19. What emerges is a portrait of the Bristol-born NFL tight end whose career the league had not finished writing — and the CTE diagnosis that the sport has spent the years since his death trying to absorb. ## Contents 1. Greystone Avenue 2. The King Is Dead 3. The Quarterback 4. The House at Lake Avenue 5. Gainesville 6. Venue 7. Slipping 8. The Patriot Way 9. Forty Million 10. Cure Lounge 11. Angel Dust 12. Riviera Beach 13. John Dietsch Boulevard 14. Ninety Minutes 15. The Box 16. Souza-Baranowski 17. John 3:16 18. Stage 3 19. Epilogue — American Sports Story ## Questions **Who is The Industrial Park Murder about?** Aaron Josef Hernandez. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Industrial Park Murder — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,297 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 208 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: homicide; suicide; CTE. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Roland Mercer is a Boston-based culture writer whose biographies of athletes have appeared as cover features in Sports Illustrated and The Atlantic. He covers the NFL, NBA, and the institutions that profit from each. His longform writing focuses on the physical costs of modern athletic competition and the complex systems that surround professional sports. Through books like The Fastest Woman, Friendly Fire, and The Bypass Transfusion, Mercer examines the intersection of physical endurance and commercial pressure. In books such as The Twisties and The Industrial Park Murder, he explores the psychological strain on high-profile competitors and the darker aspects of competitive industries. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his free time rowing on the Charles River and collecting vintage sports memorabilia.