All-American Murder

by James Patterson

  Wilcox was alarmed by the news. She called hospitals in the Miami area. She called the Miami police, who told her to file a missing person report at her local precinct in Hartford.

  All the while, she kept texting with Aaron: Have you heard from him, she would say.

  Have you heard from him yet?

  The bullet had ripped apart Bradley’s right eye. Miraculously, it had not gone into his brain. The next day—Valentine’s Day—Detective Kenny Smith from the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department arrived at St. Mary’s Hospital to interview Bradley, who was recovering from surgery, and found him to be conscious and cogent, if not quite cooperative.

  “Where were you the night before?” the detective asked.

  “Sir, I’m from Connecticut, so that could tell you how much I know.”

  “Okay,” said the detective. “So, what can you give me to try to find the people that did this to you? I mean, it’s up to you, you’re a big boy, if you won’t…”

  “He’s a fucking asshole, whoever did this to me!”

  “Well obviously! You’ve got a big enough hole in your head!”

  “Fuck yeah, I do.”

  “It’s up to you,” said the detective. “You can help me. You know where you were, you know what happened, you can tell me, or you can tell me to, just what you said, F-off.”

  “I’m not saying F-off to you, man, that’s the part I’m trying to get you to understand. I’m not disrespecting you by any means. I’m not saying F-off and fuck you, I’m just saying I ain’t got the means, I ain’t telling on nobody.”

  “You don’t want to cooperate with the investigation. But if I don’t have a victim, I don’t have a crime. That’s up to you…That’s your choice, not mine. But you have to understand, next time they may not screw up. They may shoot better, you got it?”

  Bradley took the detective’s card. He had no intention of calling and sharing what he knew with the Palm Beach police, or with anyone else.

  But he did call Hernandez from his hospital bed.

  “What’s up?” Bradley said when Aaron picked up.

  “Who’s this?” Aaron said. He sounded surprised.

  “You know who this is,” Bradley sneered. “It‘s me, it’s your boy.”

  Aaron hung up on him before he could say anything more.

  Bradley called Hernandez back two more times. “I don’t know why you keep hanging up,” he said when Aaron finally picked up the phone. “I didn’t tell the police on you.”

  Then Bradley said something else: “You know what time it is when I get back.”

  Hernandez hung up on him once again. Bradley ended up sending a text: I really do love you, my boy, but you won’t get away with that.

  Chapter 42

  A week later, Aaron Hernandez flew to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis and surprised Bill Belichick by telling the coach that his life was in danger.

  “It’s not safe for me to be in New England,” Hernandez said, and asked Belichick to trade him—to get him out of the area. The coach told Hernandez that the Patriots would not agree to a trade.

  Instead, he offered to help Hernandez with security issues in Boston.

  Hernandez was nursing a shoulder injury at the time of this meeting. If he couldn’t be traded out of the area, he told Belichick, he would spend the spring rehabilitating in Southern California. That way, Aaron said, he would be closer to Tom Brady, who was spending his off-season on the West Coast with his wife, Gisele Bündchen.

  The Patriots’ owner, Robert Kraft, has denied that any such conversation took place. Belichick, who rarely grants interviews and declined requests to be interviewed for this book, has refused any comment. And while the timeline suggests that Hernandez had good reason to be afraid of Alexander Bradley, Aaron’s agent, Brian Murphy, has a different read on Aaron’s request to be traded.

  For Murphy, the request had nothing to do with Bradley and the Florida incident, and everything to do with Aaron’s need to put some distance between himself and his friends in Boston and Bristol—with troubles that Aaron had gotten himself into at home.

  “From the day I met him, Aaron was constantly trying to get better as a player and as a person,” Murphy says. “He was always asking me about what books to read. Always asking what movies to watch. Always asking me, ‘How should I handle this? How should I handle that?’ He truly wanted to get better. But that’s when he was in California, three thousand miles away from Boston. When I would go to visit him in Boston during the season, he wasn’t nearly as focused on getting better. He would revert to his immature ways. He had a lot of friends from back home. And, once he got his big deal, that struggle became real for him. He was now a very wealthy NFL player—which is different than just being an NFL player. He was very high profile. He had had a lot of success. He was treated differently, both poorly and better, by his friends back home and by the people he was hanging out with back home, and he found a certain fame off the field that he enjoyed. He enjoyed being Aaron Hernandez from Bristol, Connecticut. That struggle became more real for him. It became harder and harder for him to keep trying to improve. So we sat down and I told him, ‘Listen, you have to figure out who you want to be. I can’t help you be someone you don’t want to be, and I can’t tell you who you want to be.’

  “At the end of the day—and I wasn’t the only one in his life saying this—at the end of the day, he said he wanted to go all in on being a good dad, a good fiancé, a good ball player, a good teammate, and he thought that would be easier and, quite honestly, safer to do away from Foxborough. He didn’t think he could make that change in Foxborough. He thought that would be dangerous, in the sense that there’s too many old habits to fall back into, along with people would wouldn’t be very happy with his decision.

  “At that point, he decided to change his life. It was a little late—right?—because he had signed his new contract, they’d paid him all the money, and he had sworn to play on the Patriots. So we said, ‘Listen, you have to have an honest conversation. Go in there and talk to Coach Belichick. Tell him how you feel, what you want to do, why you want to do it, and see what he says.’ I was going to go to the meeting with him, but Coach Belichick wanted to do it with just Aaron, which made a lot of sense to me. Nothing wrong with that. And when he came out he felt very good about the meeting. They weren’t going to trade him, but he had their support. He knew that the Patriots were going to try to help him accomplish those goals as well.”

  Chapter 43

  I was at the Combine in 2013,” says Albert Breer, the sports reporter. “I went out to dinner with Aaron and asked him, ‘What are you doing here?’ An obvious question, because it’s not common that veteran players are at the Scouting Combine. He told me he was there to meet with Belichick. He was going to tell Belichick that he was planning to spend the off-season rehabbing in California—that he’d got an apartment out there. His story at that point was, ‘I’m doing it to be closer to Brady.’ That was during a period when Brady was spending a good chunk of his off-season in LA, at the house that he and Gisele had in Brentwood.

  “What I found out later was that his reason for staying out of Massachusetts was that he was too close to Connecticut—and the heat was on. But I remember, on that night he had his hood over his head and was nervous and darty.”

  According to Ian Rapoport, Hernandez “came to Indy to meet with Belichick and ask to be traded. Basically, to tell Belichick, ‘I’m in trouble.’ Like he was getting heat back home. At that point, he was dealing with gangs and gangsters and starting to get really paranoid—maybe for a reason. He wanted to get traded. The Patriots ended up saying that the best way to do it was for him to train—to rehab—in California, where Brady was. To do his rehab and get away from Bristol.

  “At the Combine, I went out with a bunch of buddies. Aaron’s agent, Brian Murphy. Albert Breer. Greg Bedard, who at that point worked at the Boston Globe. A couple of other people. We’re having drinks. That’s what happens at the Combine—everyo
ne has drinks with everyone. Agents, players, personnel people, coaches. Murph says, ‘Hey, a friend of mine is going to show up.’ It turns out to be Aaron. He hangs out with us, has a bunch of beers.”

  Afterward, Hernandez went out with Breer, Rapoport, and Bedard. “We went to an Irish bar close by,” Breer says. “There was a friend of mine who’s a scout for another team and this guy—his team had had Aaron off the draft board. When we bought shots, the scout raised his glass to Aaron and said, ‘Man, we were wrong about you.’ Think about that stuff in retrospect. It’s mind-blowing. We didn’t know anything about the double murder in Boston. I lived down the street from where those murders happened and didn’t even hear about them—they weren’t a big news story in Boston. Someone who was working with Aaron in Florida told me, ‘He’s the most talented liar I’ve ever been around.’ But the thing about Aaron was, he was a total chameleon. He was just as comfortable walking with executives as he was walking to the corner in Bristol, Connecticut. He could blend into whatever environment you put him in. I think that was why he was able to get away with a lot of this stuff. But on that one night, while we were there, he seemed fidgety.”

  “We went to one bar,” Rapoport says. “We went to another bar. We got fairly drunk and had a good time.”

  Breer recalls drinking Irish Car Bombs. Rapoport does not remember Aaron being especially fidgety. But as the evening wore on, Rapoport saw Aaron’s mood turn.

  “He walks outside to get a cab, and we look out there he’s peeing on the cab. It’s like, ‘Jesus Christ, Aaron, what are you doing? You can’t do that!’ Greg Bedard had to go out there, shake him loose, and say, ‘You can’t do these kind of things.’

  “Aaron got very angry, but sort of didn’t understand why he couldn’t do that. He was just doing what he wanted. It was interesting.”

  “The thing with Aaron fit into this mosaic of a guy who thinks he’s above the law,” Breer says today. “A guy who operates outside the law, or the rules, or whatever they are. That’s the way I would look at it. With Aaron, it was just part of a larger picture.”

  Chapter 44

  Hernandez may have told Belichick that spending the off-season in California would bring him closer to Brady. Brian Murphy may have thought that Hernandez had moved out west to get away from bad influences in New England. But Hernandez did not see a lot of Tom Brady in the months that followed, and he did not keep himself out of trouble.

  The cement house that he and Shayanna rented in March, at the corner of Lyndon and Hermosa Beach Avenue in Hermosa Beach, looked out over the Pacific Ocean. The idea was to spend two months in paradise: he would relax, spending time with Shayanna and their baby daughter. Instead, he found himself flying old friends, like Bo Wallace, out from Bristol—and, eventually, fighting with Shayanna.

  On the evening of March 25, a call came in to the 911 dispatcher in Hermosa Beach. Shayanna was calling. Aaron had just hurt his hand.

  “I need an ambulance,” Shayanna said. “Immediately. He’s losing a lot of blood, he cut himself.”

  “Where did he cut himself?” the dispatcher asked.

  “On his wrist.”

  “Did he do this on purpose?”

  “Yes,” Shayanna said. “Are you sending someone?”

  “Ma’am, I’m making up the call right now. You need to be calm.”

  The dispatcher asked Shayanna if her fiancé had ever threatened to hurt himself in the past.

  “No,” Shayanna said. “No, no, no.”

  She and Aaron had simply gotten into an argument.

  Moving down her checklist, the dispatcher asked Jenkins if alcohol or drugs had been involved. “No,” Shayanna said, emphatically.

  After a bit more prodding, the dispatcher finally got Shayanna to admit that Aaron had put his fist through a window. “You didn’t say that before,” she told Shayanna. “You made it sound like he cut himself.”

  “He’s bleeding!” Shayanna yelled. “I don’t know…”

  If the dispatcher couldn’t help her, Shayanna said, she should put somebody nice on the line. Then, before the dispatcher could say anything else, Shayanna hung up.

  On several occasions, Aaron’s neighbors were the ones who called the police.

  At around the time of the 911 call, Aaron and Shayanna visited a tattoo parlor in Hermosa Beach and got a set of matching tattoos.

  Remind me that we’ll always have each other, Aaron’s read, referencing a lyric by the band Incubus.

  Shayanna’s tattoo completed the verse: When everything else is gone.

  But a few days later, on April 2, the police were called out to Aaron and Shayanna’s rental. When they arrived, they heard fighting and saw that furniture had been thrown around the room.

  When the police asked Shayanna to file a report she declined.

  Nine days later, on April 11, Aaron drove to a Bank of America in Hermosa Beach to make some deposits. One check, from the Patriots, was for $1,835,809.97. Another, from Puma, added $30,000 to Aaron’s balance. After depositing the checks, Aaron asked the teller to wire $15,000 to a Florida bank account belonging the parents of Oscar “Papoo” Hernandez.

  According to charges prosecutors would file in District Court in Massachusetts, Papoo passed the money along to Bo Wallace and two other men, who used the funds to buy two pistols, a Colt AR-15, a Hungarian-made AK-47, and a used Toyota Camry—which was used to ship the pistols and the AK-47 from Florida to Aaron’s home in North Attleboro, where Shayanna Jenkins ended up signing for it.

  Aaron liked the tattoos that he and Shayanna had gotten well enough to return to the shop.

  This time, he wanted a tattoo that depicted the smoking muzzle of a semiautomatic handgun, like the one that had been used to shoot Alexander Bradley. He asked the artist to ink a spent shell underneath it.

  Above his wrist, Aaron got a tattoo of a revolver with five bullets in its chamber, and had the phrase “God Forgives,” written backward so that it could be easily read in the mirror, tattooed beside it.

  Subsequently, prosecutors would argue that chambered bullets symbolized the five shots that were fired on the night of the double murder in Boston.

  All the while, Aaron was receiving a steady barrage of text messages from Alexander Bradley—who had not forgiven Hernandez at all.

  If anything, Bradley seemed to believe that Hernandez owed him recompense for his injuries.

  u did that bullshit for no reason n me being the real friend I was to u I didn’t try to ruin u even after u tried to kill me, Bradley had written in one text message. think about how real that is…the tears should be in my eyes after the way u betrayed me I never crossed u n no way…

  I luve u and u r not gonna frame me for some bread, Aaron replied.

  I would never try to frame u u left me with one eye and a lot of head trauma u owe for what u did n its too bad u don’t know me enuff to know that this convo is private between us this ain’t for no lawyer or cop too see we both know what happened the truth is the truth if I dealt with police my boy this woulda been over n done with that’s whats crazy about this situation we know each other so well u know i aint on no bs u too paranoid that’s what made u do this shit u did N last but not least i always wanted the best for u remember that you obviously didn’t feel the same.

  I will always be there for u till the day u die, Aaron texted, but not in the state of mind ur in nd been in and I don’t kno wat gotten into u after all the yrs we were inseparable but everything aside ur always on my mind and I love u and always will no homo.

  Whats crazy is I believe that part is true, Bradley replied. u prolly do think about how real of a nigga I am n how u even flipped on me but what sickens me is the fact that u r denying this shit like its for the lawyer or cops yo u must really not know me but i guess i didn’t know u either cause i woulda never thought, ud try to end me…

  At around this time, Aaron updated his contacts in his phone. From now on, Alexander Bradley would come up as “Lies.”

&n
bsp; On April 11, the day that Aaron wired $15,000 to Papoo Hernandez’s parents, he and Bradley had yet another exchange.

  do u have trust worthy niggaz like me around doubt it dog, Bradley texted. 6 strong wit a lot of weapontry so hey u turned this convo into this…

  Once again, Aaron denied having done anything wrong.

  if u ever got me in trouble or ruin my life for suttin I didn’t do I don’t even wanna get back at you but u will pay!!!, he texted. I’ll be back around the way in a couple months too and I can’t wait to see u cuz I see u still be at ur baby mothers crib a bunch! Love u cuz can’t stop loving someone that was the only person that I fucked wit and was like a brother to me but dam u are trying to sue me for suttin I didn’t do and don’t even kno about!!! If u could win that then God is on ur side but I doubt something can be proved that isn’t true!!!

  Here u go threaten again u know that dont scare me tho if u knew how g eed up i am u wouldnt even say that, Bradley told Hernandez. Then he told Aaron how exactly how “G’d up” he’d gotten, with AK-47s, MAC-11s, MAC-90s at the ready, four bulletproof vests, and Oh, almost 4 got da right niggaz 2 use the weopontry…

  if you think them wolves ain’t on deck then try what u gotta try, Bradley wrote.

  The two men went back and forth, mixing threats, veiled and unveiled, with endearments:

  What makes u think I wanna kill u u da one who tried 2 kill me n oh I promis ull pay 4 that n u r so boxed in ull be number one suspect… (Bradley)

  I swear to God either you know you’re trying to ruin my life and kill me when all I did was be there for you I still love you no homo I will always love you. (Hernandez)