Chapter 1Greystone Avenue

Foreword

There is a clearing in an industrial park in North Attleborough, off a service road behind a row of low commercial buildings, that I had driven past without a second thought more times than I could count. It is nothing to look at — gravel, scrub, the kind of unloved ground that collects at the edges of a working town. On the morning of June 17, 2013, a passerby found the body of a twenty-seven-year-old man named Odin Lloyd lying in that clearing, shot to death, less than a mile from a house that a forty-million-dollar contract had bought for a tight end who played for the New England Patriots.

I live in Boston. I had watched that tight end play. I had, on autumn Sundays like several million other people in New England, admired the thing he and Rob Gronkowski did to opposing defenses — two enormous men lined up on the same side of the field, impossible to cover, a problem with no answer. He had arrived in the region I write about and made himself, for three seasons, one of the most exciting players in the sport. Then he drove a man to a gravel turnout a few exits down Route 1 and left him there. I did not go looking for this subject. It happened in my backyard, to a team I had grown up watching, and I could not make it make sense.

That was the reason I started. I assumed I was writing a crime story — money and fame and a young man who threw both away, the cautionary tale the sports pages had already filed. What I found instead was something older and stranger and much harder to put down. I found a duplex on a street in Bristol nobody outside Bristol had heard of. I found a father who hit his son and then asked him to throw the ball. I found a boy who learned, before he was old enough to vote, that the safest version of himself was the one who could be useful to people, and who wore a smile he had assembled the way other children learn to tie their shoes.

I worked from the record, which in this case is enormous. Aaron Hernandez was one of the most heavily documented American lives of his generation — court transcripts running to thousands of pages, three criminal proceedings, recorded prison phone calls, a Spotlight investigation, two major documentaries, a decade of press coverage, the published recollections of people who had known him. I did not interview the dead and I did not pretend to reporting I had not done. I read what the public record had already set down, and I read it looking for the person underneath the categories — the tight end, the murderer, the forty million dollars, the brain in the freezer.

Because that is the last fact, and it changes all the others. When Aaron Hernandez hanged himself in a prison cell at twenty-seven, his brain was sent to a laboratory outside Boston, and the pathologist who examined it found the most severe case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy she had ever seen in a person that age. The brain of a twenty-seven-year-old that looked like the brain of a man twice his age. I do not offer that as an excuse; the book does not, either. I offer it as the reason the easy version of this story is a lie. Nothing about Aaron Hernandez fits into a single sentence, and the country has spent years trying to force him into one anyway.

That is what makes him worth a book. Not the crimes, which are terrible and which the pages ahead do not soften. What makes him worth the years is that he was several people at once — the boy who loved his pops and the boy who learned to perform for him, the model rookie and the man in the parking lot, the champion and the killer — and that the system which produced him is still running, in youth leagues and college programs and stadiums a short drive from wherever you are reading this. He is not an aberration the machine coughed up and moved past. He is what the machine is capable of making, and it has not stopped making things.

I came to this book a fan who wanted an explanation and could then go home. I leave it a witness who is no longer sure explanation is the point. That is what the hard subjects do to you. They take away the sentence you came to write.

— Roland Mercer, Boston

Chapter 1 · Greystone Avenue

The duplex on Greystone stood at the unfashionable end of a Bristol street that nobody outside Bristol had ever heard of. Two front doors set close enough that a child could swing his weight from one porch railing to the other. The Hernandez family lived on one side. On the other lived neighbors who would later tell investigators that they used to hear shouting through the wall and that they had stopped bothering to knock.

Dennis Hernandez brought his second son home to that duplex on a cold Monday in November of 1989. The boy weighed nine pounds and change. Dennis was thirty-three, the son of Puerto Rican parents who had migrated up from the island in the 1950s, when Bristol still made things and a man without a college degree could buy a house and feed a family on a steady union shift. By the time Aaron was born his father had not done shift work in a long while; he was a custodian at Bristol Eastern High School, which is to say a man who arrived before students, swept the floors that students would dirty, and stayed late to clean what students had left behind. He was paid hourly. The job came with insurance. It also came, during football season, with a free pass into the bleachers, and Dennis Hernandez almost never missed a game.

Terri Valentine Hernandez was twenty-six the year Aaron was born. She was Italian on both sides, a Connecticut girl who had grown up two towns over and had married Dennis on a bright morning in 1986 in front of two hundred people who were already half drunk by the time they reached the reception. She and Dennis would divorce in 1991 and remarry in 1996, an arc that her younger son later described in a half-amused, half-baffled tone, like a man trying to explain the weather of a country he had only briefly visited. They were always either fighting or fixing, he would say. Never the in-between part.

The in-between part was where Aaron grew up.

There was an older brother named Dennis Jonathan Jr., whom everyone called D.J., who was three years ahead of Aaron in school and three years ahead of Aaron in everything that mattered in the family currency, which was sports. D.J. was the first son. D.J. was also the quarterback. By the time Aaron was old enough to throw a football in a Pop Warner game his brother was already starring at Bristol Central High School and his father was already comparing the two of them aloud at the dinner table. D.J. did this. D.J. did that. Why can't you do this. Why can't you do that. The comparisons were not always cruel. Sometimes they were the kind of joshing that older Connecticut men consider a form of love. But the cumulative effect over a childhood, Aaron's mother later acknowledged, was that the younger boy understood very early that affection in this house was conditional on performance.

He performed. By the second grade he was doing things on a football field that older kids had not yet learned to do. By the fourth grade he was the largest player in his Pop Warner division and also the quickest. By the sixth grade he had started wearing his brother's old practice gear because nothing in the boys' department fit. Coaches in Bristol noticed. Coaches in Hartford noticed. Coaches at high schools in two states started showing up at games to see what the rumor was about. Dennis Hernandez sat in the bleachers at every one. After the games he would walk down to the chain link fence and put a hand on the back of Aaron's helmet and say something quiet and short that even from a distance you could see made the boy's whole body lift.

The other times, the times back at the duplex, the times when Aaron had not played well or had not behaved well or had simply been in the room when his father was already angry about something else, were less photogenic. There was a belt. There were doors closed. There were nights when the older boy and the younger boy lay in their bunks and listened to their parents shout at one another in the kitchen, the cabinets slamming, then the front door, then the engine of one of the cars. Aaron, the younger of the two, the one who would later be diagnosed with the worst case of chronic traumatic encephalopathy any pathologist had ever seen in a brain that age, made a habit of pulling the blanket up over his head and counting in his mind, slowly, until the noise stopped or until sleep took him, whichever came first.

Years later, in a series of phone calls from a maximum-security prison that would be recorded by the Massachusetts Department of Correction and later played, in part, for a Netflix documentary crew, Aaron Hernandez would describe his childhood to whoever was on the other end of the line in two different tones depending on his mood. In the first tone the house on Greystone was a place of warmth. My pops, man, he would say, I loved my pops. In the second tone, the house was a place where he had learned that the only safe move was to make himself useful. He'd hit you, Aaron would say, and then he'd say he loved you, and then he'd ask you to throw the ball with him, and you'd go throw the ball with him because that was what he wanted. Both descriptions were true. They lived inside him without contradiction the way two opposite weather systems can live inside the same January day, and the people who later tried to explain Aaron Hernandez to themselves had to keep both in mind to get him into focus at all.

The cousin's name was Tanya Singleton. She was fourteen years older than Aaron. She lived less than a mile from the Greystone duplex, in a small white-shingle house at 114 Lake Avenue, across the street from a youth football field where Aaron had played as a kid. She was Dennis's niece. She was, in the family pecking order that nobody bothered to explicate but everyone understood, the cousin Aaron loved most.

She had children of her own. She had a husband. She had a small social orbit of women friends from the neighborhood and a circle of male relatives who came in and out of the house wearing work boots and carrying tools. The kitchen smelled of garlic and Bustelo coffee. The living room had a sectional couch that ate quarters. The back door led to a square of yard with a portable basketball hoop that nobody had inflated the ball for in months. By the time Aaron was twelve, Lake Avenue had quietly become the place he went when Greystone was loud. By the time he was fourteen, it was where he ate dinner two or three times a week. By the time he was sixteen and his father was dead and his mother had begun an affair with a man named Jeffrey Cummings, Lake Avenue would be the only address in his life that did not feel like a place he was being asked to perform.

Tanya did not perform back at him. That was the whole story of her, and it was the reason Aaron loved her. She was not impressed by his footwork. She was not interested in whether the coach at Notre Dame was calling. She was older and she was matter-of-fact and she had a habit, when he came in the side door without knocking, of saying, get the milk out of the fridge, sit down, in the same flat voice she would have used on her own son. She was also, the records would later show, a woman who had a complicated and on-and-off relationship with men who did not deserve her, and a woman who would, in the worst week of her life and his, refuse to testify in front of a grand jury rather than say anything that might hurt him. She would die of breast cancer in October of 2015 with that decision still on her record. She is not a footnote in this story. She is the fourth pillar of it after his mother, his father, and his brother, and any account that loses sight of her loses sight of why Aaron Hernandez did some of the things he did.

By age ten Aaron Hernandez was a known quantity in central Connecticut youth football. By age twelve he was being scouted by men who were not supposed to be scouting twelve-year-olds. The American football pipeline does not officially extend down that far, but the unofficial pipeline does, and in a state with as many private and parochial programs as Connecticut, a boy who could already do at twelve what most boys could not do at fifteen got onto the radars of people whose job it was to know.

The radar pinged Bristol Central, which was D.J.'s high school and which his father's brother had also attended. It pinged Notre Dame in West Haven. It pinged Choate, where the football was less serious but the academic credentialing was a whole different country. It eventually pinged the recruiters at the University of Florida, who did not need to send a representative to Bristol but did anyway, because that was the era of football and also because that was what Urban Meyer's program did, which was that it did not leave anything to chance.

For a while, in the middle of all of this, Aaron Hernandez was an ordinary kid. He went to Saint Anthony for first communion. He played roller hockey in the cul-de-sac with cousins. He had a Game Boy. He liked Eminem and DMX and a long list of New England Patriots players whose photographs he had taped, in violation of his mother's wallpaper rules, to the bedroom wall. He had a dog, briefly, and then did not have a dog because the dog dug under the fence. He had homework, which he sometimes did. He had a brother who beat him at one-on-one in the driveway and a father who told him on the way home from a game in November of his eleventh year that he was going to be a professional football player one day if he wanted it bad enough, and a mother who said, Dennis, don't fill his head, and a father who said, Terri, his head is fine, his hands are what I'm filling, and a thirteen-year-old girl up the street named Shayanna Jenkins who he had already known since elementary school and who would, twenty-three years later, be sitting in a courtroom in Fall River, Massachusetts, wearing a black jacket she had bought at a Marshalls clearance rack, listening to a prosecutor describe the contents of a cardboard box she had thrown away on his instructions.

That was the geography of the childhood. Greystone Avenue. Lake Avenue. Bristol Central, when he got old enough. The youth football field across from Tanya's. The Catholic school. The older brother in front of him in the family photograph. The mother and the father holding the camera. The cousins on the porch railing. The dog under the fence. The boy who counted in his head while the kitchen shouted, and who learned, before he was old enough to vote, that the safest version of himself was the one who could be useful to people.

In the photographs that survive from Aaron Hernandez's elementary school years he is almost always smiling. The smiles are not posed, exactly; they have the quality of a child whose face has organized itself into an expression that adults reward. In a 1996 portrait that the Boston Globe later reprinted, taken outside the duplex with both parents and his brother on either side, Aaron is in the front, grinning in a Pop Warner uniform two sizes too large, holding a football the size of his own head. Dennis stands behind him with one hand on each son's shoulder, smiling the smile of a man who has, at least for the duration of the camera's exposure, gotten the day he wanted. Terri is half a step to the left, also smiling, her right hand at her stomach. D.J. is leaning slightly into his brother, also smiling, also wearing a uniform.

It is a perfectly ordinary photograph. It is also the only family photograph from that decade in which all four members are visibly happy at the same instant. The Globe published it in a 2018 Spotlight piece called Aaron Hernandez hid secrets behind his smile, alongside a caption that did not need to point out the obvious. The smile in question, the one in the foreground, the one belonging to the six-year-old in the oversized uniform, is the same smile he will be wearing in 2010 when Robert Kraft puts a Patriots jersey over his shoulders, and in 2012 when he holds his newborn daughter at the hospital, and in March of 2013 when he tells a press conference that he is excited to be a father and a champion, and which is also the smile, more or less, that he will be wearing in the booking photograph from the Bristol County Sheriff's Department on June 26, 2013, the morning he is arrested at his North Attleborough home for the murder of Odin Lloyd.

The smile is the constant. The boy underneath it learned, before anyone else in his life knew it, how to wear it the way other boys learn to wear shoes.

The end of his childhood, although nobody on Greystone Avenue knew it that morning, was approaching at the speed of a routine outpatient surgery.

The procedure was a hernia repair. Bristol Hospital. Friday morning, January 6, 2006. Dennis Hernandez was forty-nine years old and in good health. He had been the assistant custodian at Bristol Eastern for nineteen years. He had quit drinking three years prior. He had recently been talking to Terri about taking a vacation that summer somewhere with a beach. He went into the hospital the night before, did not eat anything after midnight per the pre-operative instructions, and was wheeled into surgery at seven in the morning.

Aaron, sixteen years old, a junior at Bristol Central High School, was the All-State tight end on a team that had won its conference for the second year running. He had been recruited for football by the University of Connecticut, by Boston College, by Notre Dame, by Tennessee, and by the program at the University of Florida, where Urban Meyer had told him over the phone that if Aaron wanted to be the best tight end in the country he should come down and play for the program that produced the best tight ends in the country. Aaron had not yet committed. He had time. He was sixteen.

He was at football conditioning in the school weight room when the phone call came. The football coach, who knew the family, had answered the phone in his office and had walked out into the weight room and had called Aaron over to the side. He had told Aaron something quiet that Aaron later said he could not entirely remember the words of, only the cadence, only the syllable count, only the weight of it sitting on his chest as he understood what was being said. Aaron put down the dumbbell he had been holding. He went to the locker room. He did not change out of his practice clothes. He drove home in the car his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday and parked it crookedly in the driveway and walked into the kitchen where his mother was sitting at the table with the phone in her hand and a face on her that Aaron would later say he had never seen on a human person before.

Dennis Hernandez had not woken up from the anesthesia.

A bacterial infection acquired during or immediately after the surgery had moved through his bloodstream with the speed those infections sometimes move. He had gone into septic shock at some point in the early afternoon. The hospital had moved him to the ICU. By six in the evening he was on a ventilator. By midnight the doctors had told the family that the trajectory was not good. By the following morning he was gone. He had been forty-nine for less than eleven months.

Terri Hernandez stood in the kitchen and held her son. Her son did not cry. He did not cry then and he did not cry at the wake and he did not cry at the funeral and the older relatives who watched him during those days exchanged looks and said quietly to one another, that boy is going to come apart.

He did. It just took longer than they thought it would, and when it came apart it did not look like grief. It looked like the next seventeen years of his life.

The wake was held at O'Brien Funeral Home on Wolcott Street. Three hundred people came. Members of the Bristol Eastern faculty in their Sunday clothes. The whole Bristol Central football team in their letter jackets, lined up as a single block in the back row, looking at one another for instruction nobody was qualified to give. Coaches Aaron had played for since the age of eight. Cousins. Aunts. Uncles. The neighbors from the duplex. The Catholic priest from Saint Anthony. The custodial staff from Bristol Eastern, the men who had worked alongside Dennis for nearly two decades, all in dark suits and dress shoes that they had clearly bought for the occasion. Mike Pouncey and Maurkice Pouncey were not yet in Aaron's life. Tim Tebow was not yet in Aaron's life. Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft and Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski were not yet in Aaron's life. Odin Lloyd was twenty years old and living in Boston and had never heard of Aaron Hernandez. Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado were Cape Verdean immigrants in Dorchester whose names Aaron would not learn for six and a half years and whose lives Aaron would end with five rounds from a .38-caliber revolver fired through the rolled-down window of an SUV at a stoplight in the South End of Boston at 2:33 in the morning of July 16, 2012. Alexander Bradley was a low-level dealer in his early twenties who had not yet met Aaron and had not yet been shot in the eye by him in a parking lot in Riviera Beach, Florida.

None of those people were yet in the story. The story was, on the night of January 7, 2006, only what was in O'Brien Funeral Home: a sixteen-year-old boy in a borrowed dark suit standing next to his mother and his brother in front of a closed casket because the bacterial infection had done enough damage to his father's face that the family had decided not to have an open one, and three hundred people in folding chairs watching him and thinking, more or less in unison, that boy is going to come apart.

Tanya Singleton stood at the back of the room next to her husband, Thaddeus Singleton III. She did not yet know what her aunt Terri had been doing, in the months Dennis had been ill and in the months before, on the nights Terri had said she was working late at the salon. She would find out within the year. She would not, when she found out, take it well. She would also not, in any version of the story that the family later told themselves, hold it against Aaron, because none of it was Aaron's fault, and because the only person in that funeral home who looked, to her eye, more lost than her own children was the boy in the borrowed suit who was standing four feet from a closed casket pretending he could feel his own legs.

She walked up to him at one point during the wake and she put her arms around him and she said in his ear, in the matter-of-fact voice that was her only voice, you come over to the house when you need to come over to the house. He nodded. He did not cry. He did not cry that night. He did not cry the next day. He did not cry, his mother later said, for almost two weeks. When he finally did cry it was in the back yard of the duplex, alone, late at night, and he was sixteen years old, and his father was dead, and the only thing he had ever known how to do well was play a game in which men hit one another as hard as they could and then went home and did it again the next week, and it was the only thing he was going to know how to do for the rest of his short and bewildering life.