I too don't want to hear about ACon, BUT...I stumbled on this article on SI.com about his brother's POV and it was riveting. It doesn't really change my mind on ACon, but it does bring an interesting perspective.
http://www.si.com/longform/2016/aaron-hernandez-brother-dj-hernandez/
Wylie, Texas; April 2016
You can argue about climate change or what causes it, but you cannot argue with hail. It hits Wylie like something out of the Bible: stones that could slay Goliath breaking through roofs and landing in living rooms, shattering windows and destroying cars. The storms typically last less than half an hour, but a home can be wrecked in less time than that.
Jonathan Hernandez is about to climb a roof in nearby Plano when his phone starts ringing. He has been a roofer for less than a year; he has owned his company, High Rise Roofing, for just a few months. But it doesn’t matter. Word spread in Wylie after a smaller storm hit one month ago: Call Jonathan. He’ll take care of you.
He ensures that shingles are placed carefully and he prods insurance companies until they cover everything they’re supposed to cover. He’ll ask a client what name they prefer being called, because sometimes Robert prefers Bobby or Kim prefers Kimberly. And now the people of Wylie are pleading: Jonathan! Jonathan! We need you! Now! They can’t wait. Another rainstorm is forecast for the next day.
There are 15,000 homes in Wylie, at least 80% of which have been damaged. Jonathan and his crew work into the night, walking on roofs in the dark, boarding up openings where windows used to be. One desperate resident, who isn’t even a client, asks Jonathan to board up a dozen windows. He does it, never gets paid, and doesn’t say a word about it, just as he never complains about Texas’s stifling summer heat. Even on the hottest days, he wears two shirts. They cover the tattoo over his heart:
D&A
THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FOR A BROTHER.
THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FROM A BROTHER.
Jonathan Hernandez used to be D.J. Hernandez, but his clients don’t know that unless he tells them. He usually does not tell them. There’s a lot that he does not tell them.
They need to know when their roof will be fixed, not that their roofer sometimes takes calls from his famous brother at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Mass., or that he still feels so close to his incarcerated brother that he says, “I feel him smile through the phone.” They care about their own houses, not the one where their roofer lived back when he was D.J., sharing a room for 15 years with a man who has since been convicted of one murder and indicted for two more. When all is said and done, they’re more focused on the job’s paperwork than the zippered leather folder that holds it, the one engraved with a Hawkeyes logo and the words IOWA FOOTBALL.
Front page of the Hartford Courant, April 16, 2015
Iowa City; June 2013
D.J. Hernandez sits at his desk, just another blade of grass on the coaching landscape: a graduate assistant at Iowa, making $18,144 a year to do what he’s told. But D.J. doesn’t give a damn about the money, and he doesn’t always do what he’s told, either. At 27 he has already checked off so many boxes for a successful coach: soaring ambition, relentless work ethic . . . failed marriage, disregard for material things . . . superior knowledge of the game . . . inflated sense of self.
Hernandez arrived at Iowa in 2013 as a graduate assistant, then watched helplessly from afar as his brother became the lead suspect in a murder investigation.
Matthew Holst/Getty Images
During one game he will speak out of turn and get chewed out by offensive line coach Brian Ferentz; when D.J. apologizes, Ferentz will tell him, “You don’t f------ listen!” Someday D.J. will run his own program. Someday he will do the chewing out. For now he must act like a graduate assistant.
His phone rings. It’s his younger brother, Aaron. Not surprising; the two speak almost every day. Aaron is a star tight end for the Patriots. He has completed one year of a seven-year, $40 million contract. He has paid off some of D.J.’s credit-card debt, and when they grab dinner or hit a club, Aaron pays. But their relationship is unchanged by money, geography or celebrity. D.J. says Aaron is his best friend. To him every conversation might as well be taking place in their old backyard in Bristol, Conn.
He answers. Aaron sounds quieter than normal.
“Listen,” Aaron says. “You remember Odin?”
Odin? Sure. D.J. has met Odin Lloyd a few times. Nice guy. Just a few weeks earlier they all hung out at Aaron’s house in North Attleboro, Mass., along with the Hernandez’s childhood friend Stephen Ziogas and Aaron’s pal Ernest (Bo) Wallace. They played pool and used Aaron’s sauna; Aaron, who needed to get in shape for training camp, had even worn a full sweat suit in the sauna. Afterward Aaron’s barber came by to give him a haircut.
Hernandez caught nine passes for 83 yards in what would be his final NFL game, a playoff loss to the Ravens on Jan. 20, 2013.
Al Tielemans
Aaron’s fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins, was there too, but she stayed upstairs most of the time with Avielle, the daughter she had with Aaron, and her sister Shaneah, who was dating Lloyd.
D.J. did not always approve of his brother’s guest list. Bo was a nice enough guy who mumbled a lot and helped Aaron coordinate his schedule. But it was no secret that he had a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for drugs. He was the latest in a string of guys who’d come out of nowhere and attached themselves to Aaron. Whenever D.J. would ask Aaron why he was hanging out with a sketchy character, Aaron would respond, “What’s the worst that can happen? He’s my friend.”
On some level Aaron knew the worst that could happen. He feared it. Aaron had one friend, an ex-con named Sharrod, who made him particularly nervous. He didn’t say why. He just said he was worried about his family’s safety. When Aaron bought his house from former Patriot Ty Warren, he even installed an elaborate video-surveillance system.
That last time D.J. saw Odin, Aaron had left the house with Lloyd. But Aaron could have left with anybody and had fun; he is social tofu, absorbing the flavor of whatever he touches. Ever since Aaron was a kid, he had this desire to like and be liked, no matter the circumstances.
Ziogas tells a story: Once, when Aaron was in high school, a kid started talking trash at a party, and eventually the kid said, “I’m going to stab you.”
Aaron was amused. You’re not going to stab me.
The kid stabbed him above the knee.
Aaron was bigger and tougher. He could have kicked the crap out of that kid. But he didn’t. He gave him five minutes to get out of sight. The kid bolted. Aaron let him go.
Ziogas, who played linebacker at Brown University, says, “I’ve never met anybody as socially versatile as Aaron Hernandez.” He could be playing video games with a nine-year-old one minute, then bonding with Myra Kraft, the sexagenarian wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and then hit a club with a friend who has two priors for drugs. . . .
Selected two rounds and 71 picks apart in the 2010 draft, Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski had developed into a dangerous tight end tandem unlike any other in the league over their first three seasons together.
Beantown; Youtube
Anyway, maybe a simple question deserves a simple answer. “Yes,” D.J. tells Aaron, he remembers Odin. Seems like a good guy.
Aaron says Odin is dead.
There is more.
“I just want you to know,” Aaron says, “because you’re my brother and I love you: He was found, and they’re trying to investigate, and my name is being thrown around.”
A murder? D.J. sits at his desk, “frozen,” he later says, “within my own body.” Aaron promises he is innocent: “D, I swear on everything. . . .” And D.J. believes him.
But still. . . . Murder? D.J. does not press his brother for details. Before he can process the news privately it becomes public, streamed across the bottom of his TV as casually as CELTICS 62 76ERS 59. Police are investigating Aaron Hernandez in connection to a possible homicide. . . A nation is shocked. . . Odin Lloyd has been found shot to death in an industrial park near Aaron’s house. D.J. wants to hug him.
Forget the machismo of football. The Hernandezes love each other and don’t care who knows it. When D.J. attends Patriots games, Aaron stands on the field before kickoff and blows his brother a kiss.
Now D.J. wants to go straight to North Attleboro again and hold his 6' 1", 245-pound brother . . . but he doesn’t. He thinks of his budding coaching career. He pictures himself on TV, walking onto the site of a murder investigation, and how that would look to potential employers.
The two brothers connected whenever D.J. (right) traveled to see Aaron play with the Patriots, including New England’s trip to Super Bowl XLVI.
Profootballtalk.nbcsports.com
Over the next week, Aaron fills in the details with D.J. on the phone, drip by drip: “The police are in my house again . . . They’re looking around my bedroom. . . .”
D.J. is supposed to go home in a week anyway, so he does. But what is home anymore? He can’t visit Aaron. Too many cameras. His mom, Terri, still lives in the little white house in Bristol with her second husband, Jeff Cummings, but the joy that D.J. felt there as a child is gone today. Strangers lurk outside or knock on the door. A reporter brings Subway sandwiches as a way to get in the house.
With his world falling apart, D.J. drives to a beach in Old Lyme, Conn., to clear his mind. His phone rings again. It’s his mother, screaming: “They’re taking him! They’re taking him!”
He drives back to the house and finds his mom on the living room couch, wailing. They had sat in that room so many times as a foursome—Terri, D.J., Aaron and their dad, Dennis. The boys would lie with their heads meeting at the right angle of the sectional couch, drinking hot cocoa and watching whatever movie they’d rented from Family Video.
With his world falling apart, D.J. drives to a beach in Old Lyme, Conn., to clear his mind. His phone rings again. It’s his mother, screaming: “They’re taking him! They’re taking him!”
Now Aaron is on the news, being led out of his own house in a white T-shirt, red gym shorts and handcuffs, accused of murder. The fact that it is actually unfolding on TV only adds to the sensation that this is only happening on TV. D.J. has to convince himself it’s all real.
“How does this happen?!” Terri screams. “What did I do wrong?”
She collapses on top of D.J., who holds her and rubs her back. He cries, but not because his brother has been arrested. He cries because his mom is blaming herself, a life’s work undone.
“Mom,” he tells her, “you’ve done a great job.”
This is the Hernandez family now: A dead father, a son who’s locked up, a mother in tears and another son who closely resembles the one who got arrested. D.J. ducks into a nearby tavern wearing a hat, hoping nobody will notice him, but somebody says, “You look just like that guy on TV!”
As Aaron was led out of his house in handcuffs while news cameras rolled, D.J. consoled his mother at home in Bristol.
George Rizer/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Two days later D.J. ends up at a diner with some cousins and he warns them: “Somebody may try to pick a fight. Ignore them.” Of course, somebody tries to pick a fight. The cousins do not ignore them. Punches are thrown, ketchup bottles fly, and D.J. sits still, trying to apply the discipline of his football career to a world that has lost any semblance of it. He walks out before the fight ends, before police arrive, but still it’s deemed newsworthy. HERNANDEZ’S OLDER BROTHER WAS PRESENT AT BAR FIGHT, USA Today says.
D.J. realizes that even in Iowa City he has been the victim of identity theft. He is no longer a promising college football coach. He is the look-alike brother of an accused murderer.
D.J. goes back to Iowa, eats at a restaurant called Formosa and it all happens again: A group of young men spot him through a window, point and make bullet sounds. There is no fight this time, but D.J. realizes that even in Iowa City he has been the victim of identity theft. He is no longer a promising college football coach. He is the look-alike brother of an accused murderer.
The media covers the story like a spreading fire, the narrative chasing the news. As reporters attempt to explain the shocking events, Aaron’s life story gets stuffed into a single sentence, highlighting his family’s lowest moments and biggest mistakes: Aaron was a prodigy in Bristol, but his father was a former small-time thug and his mother had been arrested as part of a bookmaking bust; when Dennis died young and Terri remarried, Aaron rebelled and became a thug—and then a murderer. Write it that way and Aaron’s arrest is no surprise.
D.J wonders how so many people can claim to know his brother better than he does.
Bristol, Conn.; May 2016
Jonathan needs a rental car but not GPS. He knows all the streets, but he’s not 100% sure what is on them. He’s 30 now. He has not lived in Connecticut in five years, and every trip home is the opposite of an archaeology dig: At any turn, he might discover something is missing.
He asks to meet at 5:30 a.m. at Starbucks, but he does not eat there. He wants to stop instead at a nearby Valero gas station to see if they still sell those delicious sausage-and-egg sandwiches. “The last time I came here, they had ’em. You want one?”
They have ’em. He buys two for himself. They’re as good as he remembers.
It is just after dawn. He drives up Greystone Avenue and back down Pleasant View Avenue. He parks. “I’m going to get out,” Jonathan says as he pulls up to the back of a small white house. “They can yell at me if they want.” He opens the car door and says, “This is our backyard.” Well, it was their backyard. Terri moved out two years ago.
If you believe Aaron Hernandez grew up to be evil, then the murder of Odin Lloyd began here. It began with Dennis Hernandez watching The Price Is Right while his five-year-old son Aaron rested his head on Dennis’s belly. It continued in the backyard, with the sound track from Space Jam on the CD player, the family’s purebred white German shepherd, UConn, pacing behind a gate, and grandma Edith Valentine watching the boys play basketball on the driveway court from her chair. There were no easy layups. When one brother drove to the hole, the other one fouled him into the grassy bank behind the basket. Yes: If you believe Aaron Hernandez grew up to be evil, then the murder of Odin Lloyd began here, and his older brother was a witness.
(story was way too long to post so click link)
http://www.si.com/longform/2016/aaron-hernandez-brother-dj-hernandez/
Wylie, Texas; April 2016
You can argue about climate change or what causes it, but you cannot argue with hail. It hits Wylie like something out of the Bible: stones that could slay Goliath breaking through roofs and landing in living rooms, shattering windows and destroying cars. The storms typically last less than half an hour, but a home can be wrecked in less time than that.
Jonathan Hernandez is about to climb a roof in nearby Plano when his phone starts ringing. He has been a roofer for less than a year; he has owned his company, High Rise Roofing, for just a few months. But it doesn’t matter. Word spread in Wylie after a smaller storm hit one month ago: Call Jonathan. He’ll take care of you.
He ensures that shingles are placed carefully and he prods insurance companies until they cover everything they’re supposed to cover. He’ll ask a client what name they prefer being called, because sometimes Robert prefers Bobby or Kim prefers Kimberly. And now the people of Wylie are pleading: Jonathan! Jonathan! We need you! Now! They can’t wait. Another rainstorm is forecast for the next day.
There are 15,000 homes in Wylie, at least 80% of which have been damaged. Jonathan and his crew work into the night, walking on roofs in the dark, boarding up openings where windows used to be. One desperate resident, who isn’t even a client, asks Jonathan to board up a dozen windows. He does it, never gets paid, and doesn’t say a word about it, just as he never complains about Texas’s stifling summer heat. Even on the hottest days, he wears two shirts. They cover the tattoo over his heart:
D&A
THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FOR A BROTHER.
THERE’S NO OTHER LOVE LIKE THE LOVE FROM A BROTHER.
Jonathan Hernandez used to be D.J. Hernandez, but his clients don’t know that unless he tells them. He usually does not tell them. There’s a lot that he does not tell them.
They need to know when their roof will be fixed, not that their roofer sometimes takes calls from his famous brother at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Mass., or that he still feels so close to his incarcerated brother that he says, “I feel him smile through the phone.” They care about their own houses, not the one where their roofer lived back when he was D.J., sharing a room for 15 years with a man who has since been convicted of one murder and indicted for two more. When all is said and done, they’re more focused on the job’s paperwork than the zippered leather folder that holds it, the one engraved with a Hawkeyes logo and the words IOWA FOOTBALL.
Front page of the Hartford Courant, April 16, 2015
Iowa City; June 2013
D.J. Hernandez sits at his desk, just another blade of grass on the coaching landscape: a graduate assistant at Iowa, making $18,144 a year to do what he’s told. But D.J. doesn’t give a damn about the money, and he doesn’t always do what he’s told, either. At 27 he has already checked off so many boxes for a successful coach: soaring ambition, relentless work ethic . . . failed marriage, disregard for material things . . . superior knowledge of the game . . . inflated sense of self.
Hernandez arrived at Iowa in 2013 as a graduate assistant, then watched helplessly from afar as his brother became the lead suspect in a murder investigation.
Matthew Holst/Getty Images
During one game he will speak out of turn and get chewed out by offensive line coach Brian Ferentz; when D.J. apologizes, Ferentz will tell him, “You don’t f------ listen!” Someday D.J. will run his own program. Someday he will do the chewing out. For now he must act like a graduate assistant.
His phone rings. It’s his younger brother, Aaron. Not surprising; the two speak almost every day. Aaron is a star tight end for the Patriots. He has completed one year of a seven-year, $40 million contract. He has paid off some of D.J.’s credit-card debt, and when they grab dinner or hit a club, Aaron pays. But their relationship is unchanged by money, geography or celebrity. D.J. says Aaron is his best friend. To him every conversation might as well be taking place in their old backyard in Bristol, Conn.
He answers. Aaron sounds quieter than normal.
“Listen,” Aaron says. “You remember Odin?”
Odin? Sure. D.J. has met Odin Lloyd a few times. Nice guy. Just a few weeks earlier they all hung out at Aaron’s house in North Attleboro, Mass., along with the Hernandez’s childhood friend Stephen Ziogas and Aaron’s pal Ernest (Bo) Wallace. They played pool and used Aaron’s sauna; Aaron, who needed to get in shape for training camp, had even worn a full sweat suit in the sauna. Afterward Aaron’s barber came by to give him a haircut.
Hernandez caught nine passes for 83 yards in what would be his final NFL game, a playoff loss to the Ravens on Jan. 20, 2013.
Al Tielemans
Aaron’s fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins, was there too, but she stayed upstairs most of the time with Avielle, the daughter she had with Aaron, and her sister Shaneah, who was dating Lloyd.
D.J. did not always approve of his brother’s guest list. Bo was a nice enough guy who mumbled a lot and helped Aaron coordinate his schedule. But it was no secret that he had a lengthy criminal record, including convictions for drugs. He was the latest in a string of guys who’d come out of nowhere and attached themselves to Aaron. Whenever D.J. would ask Aaron why he was hanging out with a sketchy character, Aaron would respond, “What’s the worst that can happen? He’s my friend.”
On some level Aaron knew the worst that could happen. He feared it. Aaron had one friend, an ex-con named Sharrod, who made him particularly nervous. He didn’t say why. He just said he was worried about his family’s safety. When Aaron bought his house from former Patriot Ty Warren, he even installed an elaborate video-surveillance system.
That last time D.J. saw Odin, Aaron had left the house with Lloyd. But Aaron could have left with anybody and had fun; he is social tofu, absorbing the flavor of whatever he touches. Ever since Aaron was a kid, he had this desire to like and be liked, no matter the circumstances.
Ziogas tells a story: Once, when Aaron was in high school, a kid started talking trash at a party, and eventually the kid said, “I’m going to stab you.”
Aaron was amused. You’re not going to stab me.
The kid stabbed him above the knee.
Aaron was bigger and tougher. He could have kicked the crap out of that kid. But he didn’t. He gave him five minutes to get out of sight. The kid bolted. Aaron let him go.
Ziogas, who played linebacker at Brown University, says, “I’ve never met anybody as socially versatile as Aaron Hernandez.” He could be playing video games with a nine-year-old one minute, then bonding with Myra Kraft, the sexagenarian wife of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and then hit a club with a friend who has two priors for drugs. . . .
Selected two rounds and 71 picks apart in the 2010 draft, Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski had developed into a dangerous tight end tandem unlike any other in the league over their first three seasons together.
Beantown; Youtube
Anyway, maybe a simple question deserves a simple answer. “Yes,” D.J. tells Aaron, he remembers Odin. Seems like a good guy.
Aaron says Odin is dead.
There is more.
“I just want you to know,” Aaron says, “because you’re my brother and I love you: He was found, and they’re trying to investigate, and my name is being thrown around.”
A murder? D.J. sits at his desk, “frozen,” he later says, “within my own body.” Aaron promises he is innocent: “D, I swear on everything. . . .” And D.J. believes him.
But still. . . . Murder? D.J. does not press his brother for details. Before he can process the news privately it becomes public, streamed across the bottom of his TV as casually as CELTICS 62 76ERS 59. Police are investigating Aaron Hernandez in connection to a possible homicide. . . A nation is shocked. . . Odin Lloyd has been found shot to death in an industrial park near Aaron’s house. D.J. wants to hug him.
Forget the machismo of football. The Hernandezes love each other and don’t care who knows it. When D.J. attends Patriots games, Aaron stands on the field before kickoff and blows his brother a kiss.
Now D.J. wants to go straight to North Attleboro again and hold his 6' 1", 245-pound brother . . . but he doesn’t. He thinks of his budding coaching career. He pictures himself on TV, walking onto the site of a murder investigation, and how that would look to potential employers.
The two brothers connected whenever D.J. (right) traveled to see Aaron play with the Patriots, including New England’s trip to Super Bowl XLVI.
Profootballtalk.nbcsports.com
Over the next week, Aaron fills in the details with D.J. on the phone, drip by drip: “The police are in my house again . . . They’re looking around my bedroom. . . .”
D.J. is supposed to go home in a week anyway, so he does. But what is home anymore? He can’t visit Aaron. Too many cameras. His mom, Terri, still lives in the little white house in Bristol with her second husband, Jeff Cummings, but the joy that D.J. felt there as a child is gone today. Strangers lurk outside or knock on the door. A reporter brings Subway sandwiches as a way to get in the house.
With his world falling apart, D.J. drives to a beach in Old Lyme, Conn., to clear his mind. His phone rings again. It’s his mother, screaming: “They’re taking him! They’re taking him!”
He drives back to the house and finds his mom on the living room couch, wailing. They had sat in that room so many times as a foursome—Terri, D.J., Aaron and their dad, Dennis. The boys would lie with their heads meeting at the right angle of the sectional couch, drinking hot cocoa and watching whatever movie they’d rented from Family Video.
With his world falling apart, D.J. drives to a beach in Old Lyme, Conn., to clear his mind. His phone rings again. It’s his mother, screaming: “They’re taking him! They’re taking him!”
Now Aaron is on the news, being led out of his own house in a white T-shirt, red gym shorts and handcuffs, accused of murder. The fact that it is actually unfolding on TV only adds to the sensation that this is only happening on TV. D.J. has to convince himself it’s all real.
“How does this happen?!” Terri screams. “What did I do wrong?”
She collapses on top of D.J., who holds her and rubs her back. He cries, but not because his brother has been arrested. He cries because his mom is blaming herself, a life’s work undone.
“Mom,” he tells her, “you’ve done a great job.”
This is the Hernandez family now: A dead father, a son who’s locked up, a mother in tears and another son who closely resembles the one who got arrested. D.J. ducks into a nearby tavern wearing a hat, hoping nobody will notice him, but somebody says, “You look just like that guy on TV!”
As Aaron was led out of his house in handcuffs while news cameras rolled, D.J. consoled his mother at home in Bristol.
George Rizer/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Two days later D.J. ends up at a diner with some cousins and he warns them: “Somebody may try to pick a fight. Ignore them.” Of course, somebody tries to pick a fight. The cousins do not ignore them. Punches are thrown, ketchup bottles fly, and D.J. sits still, trying to apply the discipline of his football career to a world that has lost any semblance of it. He walks out before the fight ends, before police arrive, but still it’s deemed newsworthy. HERNANDEZ’S OLDER BROTHER WAS PRESENT AT BAR FIGHT, USA Today says.
D.J. realizes that even in Iowa City he has been the victim of identity theft. He is no longer a promising college football coach. He is the look-alike brother of an accused murderer.
D.J. goes back to Iowa, eats at a restaurant called Formosa and it all happens again: A group of young men spot him through a window, point and make bullet sounds. There is no fight this time, but D.J. realizes that even in Iowa City he has been the victim of identity theft. He is no longer a promising college football coach. He is the look-alike brother of an accused murderer.
The media covers the story like a spreading fire, the narrative chasing the news. As reporters attempt to explain the shocking events, Aaron’s life story gets stuffed into a single sentence, highlighting his family’s lowest moments and biggest mistakes: Aaron was a prodigy in Bristol, but his father was a former small-time thug and his mother had been arrested as part of a bookmaking bust; when Dennis died young and Terri remarried, Aaron rebelled and became a thug—and then a murderer. Write it that way and Aaron’s arrest is no surprise.
D.J wonders how so many people can claim to know his brother better than he does.
Bristol, Conn.; May 2016
Jonathan needs a rental car but not GPS. He knows all the streets, but he’s not 100% sure what is on them. He’s 30 now. He has not lived in Connecticut in five years, and every trip home is the opposite of an archaeology dig: At any turn, he might discover something is missing.
He asks to meet at 5:30 a.m. at Starbucks, but he does not eat there. He wants to stop instead at a nearby Valero gas station to see if they still sell those delicious sausage-and-egg sandwiches. “The last time I came here, they had ’em. You want one?”
They have ’em. He buys two for himself. They’re as good as he remembers.
It is just after dawn. He drives up Greystone Avenue and back down Pleasant View Avenue. He parks. “I’m going to get out,” Jonathan says as he pulls up to the back of a small white house. “They can yell at me if they want.” He opens the car door and says, “This is our backyard.” Well, it was their backyard. Terri moved out two years ago.
If you believe Aaron Hernandez grew up to be evil, then the murder of Odin Lloyd began here. It began with Dennis Hernandez watching The Price Is Right while his five-year-old son Aaron rested his head on Dennis’s belly. It continued in the backyard, with the sound track from Space Jam on the CD player, the family’s purebred white German shepherd, UConn, pacing behind a gate, and grandma Edith Valentine watching the boys play basketball on the driveway court from her chair. There were no easy layups. When one brother drove to the hole, the other one fouled him into the grassy bank behind the basket. Yes: If you believe Aaron Hernandez grew up to be evil, then the murder of Odin Lloyd began here, and his older brother was a witness.
(story was way too long to post so click link)
