All-American Murder, Page 2

  “Physically, the Lancers were bigger, and the conditions would have given them an advantage there,” a player on Aaron’s team says.

  “Paul Philippon, the head coach at Bristol Eastern, was adamant about playing that game,” Cintorino remembers. “Everyone else was like, ‘It’s a terrible game in this weather!’ But Phillipon said, ‘We’re playing this game.’ The reason was, Central was not going to be able to throw the ball. The weather was that bad. And if you couldn’t throw, you had to figure out some other way to get the football to Aaron.”

  Aaron battled through freezing rain in the third quarter. The Rams held the Lancers to seven points. But midway through the fourth quarter, the Lancers capitalized on the advantage the weather had given them. Rallying, they ended the game in a tie at fourteen.

  Given the Rams’ reputation, that tie—one of only two in the decades-long history of the Battle—felt more like a loss. (“Probably the biggest upset anyone could think of,” Cintorino says.) It knocked Bristol Central out of contention for the upcoming state championship, ending Bristol Central’s season as well as Aaron’s high school career.

  But if Aaron was disappointed, he did not show it that day. As a high school player, he was known for his composure.

  “Mature before his time,” Cintorino recalls. “A lot of kids at seventeen would have been very angry after a loss like that. But in the football arena, where I saw him, he was very mild, very humble, and very mature. He carried himself in a way you’d appreciate.”

  What changed?

  Blows sustained on the football field were already altering the structure of Aaron’s still-developing brain.

  Celebrity status, drug use, and criminal associations would help to make Hernandez unstable, paranoid, and dangerous.

  But some of those who knew Aaron in Bristol suggest that, even then, his humility was a put-on. The only real change, they say, had to do with Aaron’s ability—or his desire—to hide his true character.

  Chapter 3

  The formation of Aaron Hernandez’s mask began at home, in a cottage on Greystone Avenue.

  Growing up, Aaron shared a bedroom with DJ—Dennis John—who was three years his senior. Sometimes, it felt as if everyone in the family was living right on top of one another. But Aaron’s parents, Dennis and Terri, were proud of the home and took even more pride in DJ and Aaron. They were determined to keep the boys on the straight and narrow.

  “I met the Hernandezes in second grade, or third grade, when I began to play football,” a family friend named Tim Washington remembers. “Aaron and DJ lived near the high school, in a rural type of area off of Union Street. They had a nice house with a nice finished basement. Their dad had a little gym set up down there for them to work out. It had some weights and a weight bench. There was an in-ground pool and the basketball court right behind that. Aaron and DJ played basketball and home run derby in the woods off to the back of the house.

  “Dennis and his brother, Dave, were on the coaching staff for the Bristol Bulldogs and the Pop Warner league. Dennis was the janitor at my middle school. And in high school and college, I dated Dave’s daughter, Davina. We were very close. Dennis would always tell me, ‘My boys are coming up! You need to watch out for my boys. You need to protect my boys.’

  “Dennis knew that those boys were going to be special in any sport that they played. And Aaron was driven to make his dad proud.”

  Dennis woke DJ and Aaron at dawn so that they could work out. The boys practiced their layups for hours on end. They ran countless suicide drills up and down the hills around their home. All the while, lessons their father had instilled in them rang in their heads:

  If you do anything great in life, it will come from within, Dennis would tell them. And, If it is to be, it is up to me.

  Aaron and DJ worshipped Dennis. And if Dennis was overprotective of them, it was because he had come close to living out his own dreams.

  Dennis Hernandez had played for Bristol Central back in the 1970s. Like his son, he’d been triple-varsity, running track and playing basketball as well as football. Along with his twin brother, David, he’d been big and fierce: a dominant player. For decades to come, Dennis held on to his high school nickname—“the King.”

  Along with David, Dennis had gotten a full football scholarship to the University of Connecticut. But, in his youth, he had also gotten into a fair deal of trouble.

  As one of the only Puerto Rican kids in a hardscrabble, Irish-Italian town, Dennis had spent his youth proving his mettle, on and off the football field. A wild kid with a chip on his shoulder, Dennis drank and partied. Along with his brother, and a friend and teammate named Rocco Testa, he got into fights, broke into strangers’ houses, and stole. Surrounded by friends from the wrong side of town, both twins ended up dropping out of UConn.

  Testa came to a bad end. A few days before Thanksgiving, in 1977, he and his uncle, a petty criminal named Gary Castonguay, were burglarizing a house in Plainville, Connecticut. When a police officer named Robert Holcomb arrived, responding to a call about a burglary in progress, Castonguay shot him four times and left him to bleed to death. Officer Holcomb was twenty-eight, with a three-year-old son. Castonguay was thirty-three, with a long rap sheet. Testa was twenty. When Castonguay was arrested, two weeks after the shooting, Testa was given immunity from murder and burglary charges in exchange for testifying against his uncle.

  For David and Dennis, this story would serve as a cautionary tale. But fatherhood was the thing that straightened the brothers out for good. David became a corrections officer. Dennis got his job as a janitor at Bristol Eastern. Dennis’s wife, Terri, who’d been a majorette, a few years behind him at Bristol Central, became an administrative assistant at a Bristol elementary school.

  The young couple scrimped and saved to buy the cottage on Greystone Avenue. They had their boys, and a white German shepherd named “UConn.” They loved their lives. But money would always be an issue for them.

  Dennis and Terri saw to it that Aaron and DJ had everything that they needed to be safe and comfortable. Still, they couldn’t afford the designer clothes and fancy toys that other parents bought for their kids. Watching her boys go without, and suffering for it, caused Terri to make poor decisions. In 2001, the Bristol police came to the house and placed her under arrest: Terri had gotten involved in a bookkeeping operation run by a local restaurant manager named Marty Hovanesian.

  “She was the phone operator,” Hovanesian’s lawyer told the Boston Globe. “A minor player, not the brains.” But the operation was serious enough that Hovanesian was convicted of felony racketeering and professional gambling. “I’m not saying it was right, what she did—at all,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “I don’t think it is. But this woman did this because I was crying every single night. She didn’t do it for the thrill. She didn’t do it to pocket the money. She did it to provide for me and Aaron.”

  The case against Terri never went to trial. But in Bristol’s close-knit community, word got out. Before long, the whole town seemed to know about Terri’s arrest.

  Aaron was twelve at the time—an innocent, outgoing kid who liked pranks and practical jokes. But despite his popularity, and DJ’s, Aaron and his brother were teased about the incident, and if DJ was quick to forgive, Aaron was more of a cipher. He kept his feelings to himself. But try as he did to mask his embarrassment, Aaron’s relationship with his mother grew strained as he entered his adolescence—and decisions Terri made as the years went by only increased the distance between her and her younger son.

  Chapter 4

  By all accounts, Aaron kept up appearances. His former classmates describe a likable, well-behaved teenager. The worst thing that Bristol law enforcement has to say about Aaron, in his youth, is that once, at a party, he ran up onto a car and put a slight dent in the roof.

  On that occasion, the Bristol police had called Dennis Hernandez.

  “Dennis came down and rode a hard line on him,” an officer remembers
. “The old man made him do the right thing. Made the kid apologize. And the kid wouldn’t say ‘boo.’ He was reserved. Not a bad kid at all.”

  Now, as Aaron finished out his last year of middle school, there was no doubt that he would be joining DJ on the BCHS varsity squad. Aaron’s grades up to this point had been good. (In high school, Hernandez would make the honor roll.) His football game was already exceptional.

  Though he preferred basketball, Aaron seemed to have a sixth sense for the sport, leaving spectators with the feeling that he was seeing the field from above.

  Dennis Hernandez watched everything that Aaron did on the field from the stands, just as he had with DJ.

  Whenever one of his boys scored or made a beautiful play, Dennis was not ashamed to cry tears of pride. But back at home, the family dynamic was changing.

  Dennis’s brother, David, was struggling with cancer, and the family had braced itself for bad news.

  His son DJ, who had preceded Aaron as a superstar player for the Rams, was heading off to UConn (where he would excel as a quarterback and wide receiver for the Huskies).

  His wife, Terri, had become romantically involved with a married man named Jeffrey Cummings.

  Cummings’s wife, Tanya, was the daughter of Dennis’s sister, Ruth—which made Aaron and Tanya first cousins. Because the Hernandezes were a tight-knit family, Terri and Jeffrey had to be extra-careful. At first, they were, and no one found out about their relationship. But, in September of 2005, an ugly incident occurred at a UConn football game.

  While DJ was down on the field, Tanya came up to Terri and slapped her, right there in the stands.

  Now, the family affair was pried open for Aaron and others to see.

  Given the chance, Aaron’s parents might have gotten past the unfortunate incident, patched things up, and moved on with their lives and their marriage.

  Instead, tragedy struck.

  Chapter 5

  It was January of 2006. Tim Washington, who had played football with DJ in high school, had gone on to college. But, during the winter break, Tim had gone to work out with his old high school running backs coach.

  “One day, I was in the car with the coach,” Washington recalls. “He got a call: ‘Hernandez died.’”

  Washington’s first thought was that David Hernandez had died.

  “Dave had been battling cancer for as long as his daughter, Davina, and I were together,” he says. “He had been in remission, and then the cancer came back.”

  A moment later, the coach’s phone rang again.

  “No,” the coach said, “it’s not Dave! It’s Dennis!”

  Why would anyone have thought it was Dennis? Dennis couldn’t die. Too many people in Bristol loved him. DJ and Aaron needed him.

  Dennis hadn’t even been ill.

  “What the hell happened to Dennis?” people said when they found out.

  “Everyone was devastated,” Washington remembers. “Every time you’d say, ‘Dennis died,’ they’d look at you and say, ‘You mean Dave?’”

  A few days earlier, Dennis Hernandez had gone in to the hospital for a hernia repair. Immediately afterward, he contracted a fatal bacterial infection. The death was stupid, shocking, out of the blue, and impossible to process.

  The largest funeral parlor in Bristol was too small to host the thousand-plus people who turned out for the man who was known around town as “the King.”

  “The funeral was absolutely gigantic,” Washington remembers. “I waited in line for over an hour just to get in—and I was there pretty early. There was a line for as long as you could possibly see. Dennis was that well-respected.

  “They were a staple in Bristol, the Hernandez family. They always had been. Good people, they’d give you the shirt off their backs. They’d give you a ride if you needed it. Get you something to eat if you needed it. Give you advice. Talk to you about sports, how you could get better. They were great, down-to-earth people.”

  Chapter 6

  DJ was nineteen at the time. He was a few inches shorter than his younger brother, and thirty pounds lighter, but Aaron and DJ had the same strong jaw, the same dark, piercing eyes, the same wide, toothy smile. It wasn’t hard to mistake one for the other.

  But the brothers were not the same.

  At the funeral home, DJ broke down and sobbed over his father’s coffin.

  Aaron, who was sixteen, had trouble expressing his grief.

  “He was lost,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “He cried, but [only] at moments. Crying is not always the answer, but being an emotional family, for him to put up a wall during the services…He was holding everything in. Our bodies just reacted differently.”

  On the night after the funeral, Aaron scored thirty points in a basketball game against Windsor. The following night, in a game against South Windsor, he scored thirty-one.

  “That night after the funeral, when he decided to play in his basketball game, it ended up being very emotional,” says Tim Washington. “He dunked. The whole crowd went crazy. Aaron made the best of it, but it was a tough time. A very tough time, that’s for sure.”

  Hernandez continued to work out. On the football field, he was unstoppable. As a sophomore, he had begun to feel more comfortable inside his oversized body. As a junior, he’d set the state record for receiving yards in a single game. The following year, Aaron would tie the state record for career touchdowns. Two ranking services would rate him as the nation’s number-one tight end. Aaron already had a verbal agreement with UConn’s coach, Randy Edsall. He told fans and reporters that he could not wait to play football with DJ again.

  Scouts from powerhouse teams like the Florida Gators were also beginning to show up at Aaron’s games. But at home, Aaron began to rebel. “It was very, very hard, and he was very, very angry,” Terri told USA Today. “I didn’t know what to do with him. He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.”

  The silence left by Dennis’s absence created its own series of shocks. It was just Terri and Aaron at home—and the comfort that Aaron could take in his mother was undercut by the knowledge that, a few months earlier, she had betrayed his father with Jeffrey Cummings.

  With DJ and Dennis both gone, Aaron did not know who to turn to. He did not know what to do with himself. “Everyone was close to my father, but I was the closest,” Aaron would say. “I was with him more than my friends. When that happened, who do I talk to, who do I hang with?”

  Before long, Aaron was hanging out on the wrong side of town, at a house on Lake Avenue that belonged to Tito Valderrama—“Uncle Tito,” who had married Dennis and Dave’s sister, Ruth. There, he bonded with his cousin Tanya, the woman who had slapped Terri at DJ’s UConn game.

  He grew close to Thaddeus “TL” Singleton, a drug dealer Tanya had taken up with after Cummings left her for Terri Hernandez.

  He picked up new running mates: a drug-addled townie named Carlos Ortiz and an older man named Ernest Wallace.

  Narcotics officers in Bristol knew Wallace (whose nickname was “Bo”) as one of the petty criminals they’d seen around a housing unit on Lillian Road and Lake Avenue. The police believed that Ortiz—who went by “Charlie Boy”—had ties to a Bristol gang called the Doo Wop Boys, who were themselves affiliated with the Bloods.

  Aaron still held it together in public. His mask stayed intact. But privately, friends and mentors like Coach Pina grew worried.

  They knew that there was a dark side to Bristol, Connecticut, and it seemed to them that Aaron Hernandez was hell-bent on working his way to its center.

  Chapter 7

  “Hernandez Still on Track for UConn”

  —Hartford Courant, February 8, 2006

  “Misdirection Play: Hernandez to Gators”

  —Hartford Courant, April 23, 2006

  “D.J. Hernandez Tries Draw Play; But Brother Stands By Choice”

  —Hartford Courant, September 10, 2006

  Football fans acro
ss Connecticut were stunned: three months after his father’s death, Aaron announced his intention to back out of the verbal agreement he’d made, as a sophomore, with Huskies coach Randy Edsall.

  Although that commitment had been publicized, Aaron had never stopped getting calls—from Boston College, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Miami.

  At first, Aaron had been firm about his commitment to Edsall.

  “They’ve most all been sending stuff, but they’ve been calling more lately,” he told the Hartford Courant. “They call my coach and he tells me. I just tell him to tell them I’m going to UConn.

  “It’s my dream to play with my brother in college,” Aaron said. “But it’s not a huge thing. I think I would still be going to UConn even if my brother wasn’t there. Since he’s there, it just makes it a better fit. Whether my brother is starting or not, he’s still going to push me and make me be better just being there. He’s a big motivator for me.

  “Since my freshman year, UConn has been coming after me. They offered after my sophomore year. That was before anybody was going after me. So that makes me feel better.

  “UConn is like family. They were there for me when my dad passed away. It’s tough, though. I wish my dad was here now that more schools are coming. Notre Dame just came on recently and it really makes you think. It just makes me think more. My dad would have been able to help me out even more. But I’m pretty sure he would have wanted me to go to UConn. My family wants me to go to UConn and my heart’s at UConn.”

  Then, the Florida Gators made their full-court press.