The Truth About Aaron

by Jonathan Hernandez

  Dedication

  For anyone who has experienced pain

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  TO MANY, MY YOUNGER brother, Aaron Josef Hernandez, was a monster. I understand how some people could think he got the fate he deserved. He definitely caused destruction in my life, and I’m only now beginning to understand the meaning and impact of his actions.

  After Aaron was found guilty of murder, I found myself guilty by association—guilty of being his brother. In May 2015, a month after the jury delivered the verdict, I started going by Jonathan, my middle name, instead of DJ, as I’d always been known. I needed a new beginning. During one of my prison visits, I told Aaron about my name change; he understood why I wanted to do it, given the negative attention focused on him.

  Aaron and I talked on the phone at least once a week after his conviction. Over one thousand miles apart, he in a Massachusetts prison and me in Iowa, I could still feel his smile through the phone. In prison he sounded more at peace to me. He was beginning to overcome the inner demons he had been facing—demons that had been growing inside of him long before our father passed away in 2006.

  It was painful for both of us when I visited Aaron in person because of the restrictions on our interaction—the shackles on Aaron and the plate of glass between us. Still, while serving his time, Aaron became more reflective and honest with himself about the mistakes he had made and the life he had once led.

  “DJ, please embrace life,” he said to me during one visit. “Embrace all of what’s right in front of you. Please embrace it like it could be gone forever. This is something I wish I would have done.”

  Moments after he uttered these words, a corrections officer interrupted and said, “Time’s up.” Aaron had to report back to his cell.

  He hung up the phone, stood from his small metal stool, and placed his hand on the glass wall.

  “I love you, D,” he said.

  I matched my palm against his.

  “I love you, too, Aaron,” I said.

  Aaron moved toward the exit door, where the officer awaited him. I walked along with him on the other side of the glass, maintaining eye contact, trying to hold on to our final moments together before he vanished.

  AARON WAS A STAR player for the New England Patriots when his NFL career was cut short by his 2013 arrest and 2015 conviction for the murder of Odin Lloyd.

  He ended his life two years later. According to prison officials, a corrections officer found Aaron in his cell at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts, at 3:03 a.m. on April 19, 2017, lifeless. He had tied a bedsheet around his neck and hanged himself from the window bars. Cardboard had been shoved into the tracks of Aaron’s door to prevent it from being opened, and shampoo had been spread across the floor to make it slippery.

  They also said that Aaron had a fresh cut on his right middle finger. On his forehead he wrote “John 3:16” in blood. He smeared his blood on the page of the biblical passage that reads: “For God so loved the world, that he gave His one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

  At the time of his death, at twenty-seven, Aaron was two years into a life sentence with no chance of parole. Five days earlier, he had been acquitted in a second trial for another murder outside a Boston nightclub a year before Lloyd was killed. I last spoke to my brother just three days before he died. Now I constantly replay the final time I heard his voice.

  I was three years older than Aaron. Growing up in Bristol, Connecticut, a city twenty miles southwest of Hartford, we were virtually inseparable. Many evenings we would race each other to the top of a big hill that crested on our street and then, catching our breath, look down at the bright city lights below. Sitting together, we would laugh and talk about our dreams.

  There were frightening times, too. During childhood, in the tiny bedroom we shared on Greystone Avenue, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to Aaron’s screams.

  “They’re going to get me!” he’d yell. “They’re going to get me!”

  Our mother would rush into our bedroom, sit on his bed, and cradle him in her arms as tears streamed down his face. Nothing could soothe him. As she rocked him, he’d keep mumbling, “They’re going to get me. They’re going to get me.”

  DURING ONE OF MY final visits with Aaron, he told me, “One day I hope my truth is told.” That is the intention of this book, to share the entirety of his story. As painful as this has been for me to relive, no secret will be suppressed, no event will be whitewashed.

  Since Aaron’s passing, I’ve reconnected with family members and friends. I’ve spoken to many of his past associates, law enforcement officials, experts studying the brain disease known as CTE, and former teammates. I’ve revisited the places of his greatest triumphs and also the scene where Odin Lloyd was murdered. I’ve reexamined our past together and what led to his double life and his tragic downfall.

  Through it all, I’ve asked myself: Could I have done anything more to help Aaron? Could anyone have saved him?

  It is my hope that sharing the truth about Aaron might help others.

  Chapter 1

  APRIL 19, 2017

  THE WINDING COUNTRY ROADS in Connecticut were empty that predawn April morning as I steered my SUV to Ledyard High School, where I was the head football coach.

  At 5:05 a.m., I pulled into the empty parking lot and made my way to my classroom on the first floor. One of my volunteers met me in my office to review the goals for our workout with the football team, then, carrying my clipboard with a whistle draped around my neck, I descended two flights of stairs into what some of the older teachers called “the bomb shelter”—the basement of the school that housed our weight and wrestling rooms—to begin the team stretch.

  With twenty minutes remaining in the hour-long workout, I looked up and saw Pete Vincent, a physical education teacher, standing in the weight room doorway.

  “You have to cancel the workout,” he said.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “You just have to,” he said.

  “Pete, let’s step outside.”

  We went into the nearby wrestling room. Pete took a couple of deep breaths, then said, “Aaron passed away this morning. He committed suicide in his prison cell.”

  My knees buckled and I
stumbled to a nearby concrete beam to brace myself. I closed my eyes, trying to process what I had just heard.

  “Thank you for telling me, but there is no need to cancel this workout. I can finish.”

  I clenched my jaw through the remaining ten minutes, then dismissed the team. I was broken. I locked the weight room, turned off the lights, and headed for the door. I needed to get to my mother right away.

  I grabbed my bags from my office and racewalked into the mild spring morning to my car. I opened the door, sat behind the wheel, and sobbed like I’d never sobbed before.

  When I collected myself, I dialed my mom’s number.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, an audible catch in her voice.

  She told me she had been in her bedroom in her condo getting ready for her day when her husband, watching television on the first floor, screamed for her. She ran down the stairs and saw the news on ESPN.

  “I’m coming to see you,” I said, as I turned the ignition.

  As I drove, the rising sun casting a blush of pink light into the New England sky, I thought about the last time I saw Aaron in prison; I knew something wasn’t right. I remembered the paranoia I saw in Aaron during his final days as a free man, the knife he kept on his nightstand, his changing behavior.

  I never imagined the depth of the darkness he was falling into.

  MY MOTHER MET ME outside on her porch.

  “How did it get to this?” I said as we hugged and cried.

  We stepped inside and talked for an hour about his suicide because it didn’t make sense.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” I said. “I just can’t believe it.”

  Mentally exhausted, I excused myself to lie down upstairs in the spare bedroom. As soon as I settled under the covers, I heard the front screen door creak open, then slam shut. I bolted out of bed. From the top of the staircase, I could see a reporter peering inside the front-door window. I ran back to the bedroom, looked through the blinds, and saw him returning to the other half-dozen reporters lined up at the end of the street.

  When I felt the vibration of the garage door open, I went downstairs to find my mother confronting another reporter. “Get off my property!” she yelled.

  Once I felt comfortable leaving my mother alone, I decided to drive back to my apartment in Groton, ninety minutes away. I couldn’t wait to hug my wife and our five-month-old daughter. Earlier that morning, I didn’t have much time to talk to my wife because of how fast everything was happening.

  I left my mother’s condo and entered my car. I flipped on the ignition, yanked my sun visor down, and pulled my hooded sweatshirt over my forehead. As I drove away, reporters with notebooks and cameras approached my slow-moving vehicle.

  Chapter 2

  TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

  TIME TO GET UP,” our mom said from the foot of my bed where she stood at the ironing board pressing her clothes. She ironed in our room because it was the best space in our small house; she didn’t want the board in the middle of the living room for guests to see. “Time to get moving.”

  I opened my eyes and checked the clock: 6:30 a.m. Aaron was a few feet away on his twin mattress, facedown, mouth open, snoring, with his knees tucked into his chest and his butt up in the air. I was nine and Aaron was six.

  Outside the bedroom window, the gray sky was filled with snowflakes, our backyard covered in a sheet of white.

  “School’s canceled. You’re going to the babysitter.”

  Our mother, Terri, still had to go to work. She was five foot four and 135 pounds, but she had a strong Italian personality and was old-school strict. She was a secretary at our elementary school, less than a mile away.

  Our father, Dennis, a five-ten, 240-pound, charismatic Puerto Rican, was a custodian at a middle school in town. He normally worked the late shift, so most mornings as Aaron and I walked through the hallway toward the kitchen we’d see his big belly pushing up the covers on his bed. Today, he was already at the school, plowing the parking lot and shoveling the sidewalks.

  Aaron and I brushed our teeth and quickly put on our winter layers: wool socks, sweatpants, snow pants, and sweatshirts. We headed to the kitchen, where our mother had our lunches packed in two brown paper bags—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off, fruit, a Twinkie, and an I-love-you note for each of us. We slid on our big puffy coats, our winter hats and boots, and then hopped into our red minivan for the four-minute drive.

  These snow days were extra special to us, because when we played football we got to tackle on the unplowed street, no more two-hand touch. That day, we played a pickup game at the end of the cul-de-sac with a couple of the kids from the neighborhood, two-on-two. I was the quarterback and Aaron was my receiver.

  In our huddle, I called the plays from our playbook: “Pass in the Grass,” “Out to Curb Left,” “Double Move to the Basketball Hoop.” Aaron ran the route and I flung him the ball. The boys we were playing were older than us but we loved the challenge, especially when they talked trash to us. Our dad always told us not to speak to our opponents, because it was a waste of energy.

  The four of us then went tramping through the nearby woods. We climbed trees, played hide-and-seek, and sprinted after each other in our custom winter version of capture the flag: if a snowball hit you in the other team’s territory, you had to run back to your flag and touch it before you could rejoin the action.

  Around noon it was time to return to our babysitter’s house to eat lunch and dry our winter jackets, snow pants, hats, and gloves. We agreed to meet in the street in a few hours for the afternoon rematch.

  We ate fast, anxious to return outside. But then one of the older boys at the house, a teenager, asked us to play a game of indoor hide-and-seek. This boy, who was in high school, frightened us. He was a bully and his brother scared us with knives that he flashed at us.

  I bolted upstairs, wedging myself into a bedroom closet. Aaron went into a blue tent on the first floor. For five, ten, fifteen minutes, I remained in the dark closet, annoyed. I didn’t understand why no one came looking for me.

  I found out much later, when Aaron was in prison, that the older boy had actually forced Aaron into the tent.

  “Why would the two of you hide in there together?” I asked Aaron that afternoon. “That’s not a smart hiding spot.”

  Aaron didn’t say a word.

  BACK IN OUR WARM, freshly dried outfits, we were putting our snow boots on near the front door when Aaron said, “Tell me something funny, D. I need to hear something funny, D.”

  Aaron always asked me to make him laugh when he was upset. I told him a joke and then we went outside to play two-on-two basketball with our friends in the snow at the end of the cul-de-sac. I had no idea what he had just been through.

  DINNERTIME WAS AT FIVE o’clock on the dot, so at 4:45 p.m. we started sprinting back home from the babysitter’s house, which was a quarter-mile away. If we were late, our dad might take off his leather belt and whip us on the behind with it.

  “My legs are killing me,” Aaron said. “I can’t go faster.”

  “Hurry, Aaron,” I said, struggling for breath. “Hurry.”

  Our mom greeted us at the front door, looking at her watch. After throwing our winter clothes in the hamper, the four of us—Mom, Dad, Aaron, and myself—sat down at our dinner table in our kitchen, where our mother served us steaming plates of lasagna. After eating, our mother did the dishes and made brownies. Then the four of us piled into our red minivan parked in the driveway. Our destination: Blockbuster Video.

  Our dad, riding shotgun, played the green-light game on roads that were now clear of snow. At a red light, he turned to us and said, “Hey, watch this. I’m a magician. I’ll tell you exactly when this red light will turn green.”

  He counted down from five. Then, seeing the light in the other direction flip from yellow to red, he yelled, “And now!”

  We fell for it every time. We were convinced he had super powers.

  We were
n’t the only ones. Our father was beloved in Bristol, where over time he had earned a nickname: The King. Every year he hosted a three-on-three basketball tournament on our backyard court. The grill would be firing, the pig would be roasting, and the cars would be parked up and down the street. Sometimes we’d have five hundred people watching the games, standing shoulder to shoulder, kids on their knees looking between the adults’ legs. Others brought lawn chairs and would sit and gossip for hours. Our dad got physical on the court and dominated the grill, where he cooked burgers, hot dogs, and chicken. It was like he was everyone’s best friend.

  Aaron and I played rock-paper-scissors in the backseat to see who would have first pick of the brownies when we returned home. We both loved the soft center pieces without the crust.

  We pulled up to the blue-and-yellow BLOCKBUSTER sign shining in the night. This was our happy place. Aaron and I leaped out of the minivan and ran inside filled with excitement.

  We carefully selected our movies to rent before moving to the candy aisle. We each were allowed to make one selection. Everything would be split fifty-fifty.

  Once home, we hurried to our room to put on pajamas—white long johns and white tube socks. The four of us had our regular spots on the sectional couch in the living room: Dad was on the far left facing the television, me next to him, then Aaron, then our mother. As the movie started, Aaron and I laid our heads on the same pillow; he stretched his feet over our mother’s lap, I put mine over our father’s.

  For the next few hours, we were just there together, a family, warm in the glow of the television. Our mouths covered in chocolate from the brownies, my brother and I fell asleep on the couch before the second movie began.

  THE NEXT MORNING, SATURDAY, began with a basketball game at the local Boys & Girls Club. Aaron was too young for the league, so he sat in the stands eating a sausage-egg-and-cheese sandwich as he cheered my team on. After the final horn, Aaron and I played a game of H-O-R-S-E together until the next team started their pregame layup lines.

  As we walked back to our car, I heard my dad say, “Aaron, why do you stand like a faggot—with your hands clasped on your stomach and your elbows glued to your ribs? It’s feminine. Are you a faggot? Only faggots stand like that. There are no faggots in the Hernandez family.”