Boston Globe Spotlight team coming with the Aaron Hernandez story

KnowledgeDropper

KnowledgeDropper

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In New England, Aaron Hernandez ran for glory, and for his life

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“Receiver Brandon Lloyd, offering his most detailed account of Hernandez’s troubling behavior, said Welker warned him.

“He is looking at me wide-eyed,’’ Lloyd recalled. “And he says, ‘I just want to warn you that [Hernandez] is going to talk about being bathed by his mother. He’s going to have his genitalia out in front of you while you’re sitting on your stool. He’s going to talk about gay sex. Just do your best to ignore it. Even walk away.’ ’’”

Also Tebow was checking in on the dude even in the NFL. Someone needs to ask Tebow how much he knew
 
Da_Eggman

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KnowledgeDropper said:
In New England, Aaron Hernandez ran for glory, and for his life

Highlight:

“Receiver Brandon Lloyd, offering his most detailed account of Hernandez’s troubling behavior, said Welker warned him.

“He is looking at me wide-eyed,’’ Lloyd recalled. “And he says, ‘I just want to warn you that [Hernandez] is going to talk about being bathed by his mother. He’s going to have his genitalia out in front of you while you’re sitting on your stool. He’s going to talk about gay sex. Just do your best to ignore it. Even walk away.’ ’’”

Also Tebow was checking in on the dude even in the NFL. Someone needs to ask Tebow how much he knew
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:ohhh:
 
MikelArteta

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Squirrel from Meteor Man

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NFL teams said no 112 times to selecting Aaron Hernandez in the 2010 draft. The word was out: Hernandez, the nation’s best collegiate tight end, was a problem.

Scouts described him as a social misfit with a serious marijuana habit, and there were concerns about his possible ties to criminals in his hometown of Bristol, Conn.

Yet with the 113th pick of the draft, the New England Patriots took a chance on Hernandez. Leaders of the most successful football team of the 21st century saw themselves as uniquely suited to molding troubled players into valued contributors. They were banking on their system to keep Hernandez in line.

It was The Patriot Way.

For Hernandez and the team, the pick would prove a massive miscalculation.

“Him going to New England was the worst thing the NFL could have done,’’ said Dennis SanSoucie, Hernandez’s friend since childhood. “The one place you don’t send him back is where he tried getting away from.’’

Hernandez would play at Gillette Stadium, an easy two-hour drive to his hometown, where, as a teenager dealing with upheaval in his family, he had increasingly hung out with a bunch of small-time criminals. Hernandez would eventually hire two Bristol buddies with criminal records as assistants, one of them a drug dealer who supplied him with pot.

“I think this story turns out a lot differently if he’s, say, in Seattle or San Francisco or someplace just out of reach of Bristol, Conn.,” said Greg Bedard, who, as a football columnist for the Globe and Sports Illustrated, covered Hernandez from his rookie training camp until his final day of freedom.
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Squirrel from Meteor Man

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But it wasn’t just geography. It was also the franchise. By the time Hernandez arrived, owner Robert Kraft, coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady had built a dynasty that had won three Super Bowl championships. Their win-at-all-costs approach left little room for the personal problems of players in distress. Even when Hernandez finally approached Belichick in a state of deepening paranoia in 2013 — afraid for his family’s safety — his coach saw little reason to get more than minimally involved.

For three bizarre years, teammates and team officials watched Hernandez spiral into trouble with a range of reactions from bemusement to annoyance to alarm; some also learned to give his Bristol crowd a wide berth. Hernandez could be weirdly warm and fuzzy one minute, wildly raging the next, and, as time went on, frequently agitated — and armed.

There’s no evidence that his coaches or others associated with his football career knew with certainty that Hernandez was heavily into drugs or dangerously brandishing weapons, but there were plenty of warning signs. As long as he performed weekend miracles on the football field, no one seemed too eager to find out more about what was up with Hernandez, chalking up his behavior to his youth and dubious choice of friends and hoping that a fiancee and a new baby would turn him around.

That, it turned out, was wishful thinking.

Police first visited Aaron Hernandez’s home within a year of his first Patriots training camp. At 3:45 a.m. on April 30, 2011, Plainville police received numerous calls about a fight in progress in the street in front of Hernandez’s rented townhouse.

He was arguing with Brandon Beam, a former Bristol Central High School football teammate. Beam and Hernandez had been out drinking in Boston, according to a previously undisclosed transcript of an interview Boston homicide detectives later conducted with Beam.

Beam told the detectives he was driving Hernandez home from Boston in Hernandez’s Range Rover when a state trooper stopped him for speeding at 120 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour work zone and for weaving between lanes.

Beam said he was fortunate, despite receiving a $998 ticket, that Hernandez was riding shotgun. It was a Friday night, and if the trooper had arrested him for reckless driving — a distinct possibility given the circumstances — he would have spent the weekend in jail awaiting a court appearance.
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Squirrel from Meteor Man

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The trooper recognized Hernandez.

“I should have been in jail,’’ Beam said, according to the transcript. “But [Hernandez] got me out.’’

Beam and Hernandez were free to go, but the episode wasn’t over. Hernandez was so angry about the traffic stop that the two feuded loudly in the street until the Plainville police, also recognizing the NFL star, shooed them indoors.

Beam was a choirboy compared to some of Hernandez’s other Bristol friends, such as Alexander Bradley, a drug dealer Hernandez met while he was in college. Bradley became Hernandez’s chief marijuana supplier, no small role considering Hernandez’s prodigious use of the drug.

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A mug shot of Alexander Bradley, an ex-convict who was once close to Hernandez.
Once Hernandez started collecting an NFL salary in 2010, he made Bradley a paid assistant. In addition to supplying drugs, Bradley’s job was to calm Hernandez, who often erupted into fits of anger and paranoia. Bradley later testified that one of his other assignments was to procure for Hernandez a $375 silver revolver.

Wherever Hernandez went, a gun often went, too. One night in the summer of 2012, he turned up at a popular club in New York’s East Village and bought a drink for a female hip-hop promoter who hung out with him a few times.

The promoter, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said Hernandez was different from other celebrity athletes she’d met: less entitled, more respectful. But she said she worried about the influence his ex-con friends from Bristol exerted over him. She described him as a follower.

“He was very gullible and willing to do whatever,’’ she said. “It’s like he didn’t realize that he’s getting himself in a lot of trouble by hanging out with the wrong people at the wrong time.’’

She vividly recalled riding along Manhattan’s FDR Drive with Hernandez and two of his Bristol friends. She was in the front passenger seat. Hernandez sat in the back with one of his friends, who had a gun. The rear windows were open.

“All of a sudden, out the back window, I guess they shot in the air,’’ she said. “So the first thing I did was say, ‘Oh my God! Wait! Are they shooting at us? Or are we shooting at them?’ They laughed and were like, ‘Oh my god, this girl is gangster. She wasn’t even scared.’ ’’

But she was furious, she said. And concerned when she saw Hernandez smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine that night.

“You want to shake someone like that,’’ she said. “Like, how do you not know you’re in a bad situation?’’

The incident ended their relationship. She thought Hernandez needed help.

Such help, however, was unlikely to come from his mother. Hernandez and his mother, Terri, remained estranged after she dated his cousin’s ex-husband, Jeffrey Cummings. And things with her weren’t so stable: A few weeks after Hernandez signed on with the Patriots, his mother called police in Bristol, Conn., saying Cummings had been drinking and slashed her cheek with a knife during an attack.

Some who worried about Hernandez, including Florida teammate Tim Tebow and Tom Brady, did try to steer him from bad influences. In 2011, Brady was caught on videotape speaking to Tebow, by then the quarterback of the Denver Broncos, after a Patriots game in Denver.

Tebow had tried to mentor Hernandez in college and later asked Brady for help. It proved no easy task.

“I’m trying to watch over Aaron and Brandon,’’ Brady told Tebow, referring to another former Florida player, Patriots linebacker Brandon Spikes.

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Media microphones in 2011 picked up a short exchange between Brady (12) and Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow (15) about the challenges working with Hernandez and another player. (Jack Dempsey/Associated Press)
“I appreciate that, man. They’re good guys,’’ Tebow responded.

“Yeah,’’ Brady said. But they’re “a lot to handle.’’

Hernandez leaned on that support, at times. He would later say in a phone call from jail that he had once asked Brady, receiver Julian Edelman, and the team’s offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels how they would respond if he landed behind bars. Would they stand by him, or forget him?

Hernandez on his lack of jail visits from teammates
“They always say they love me,’’ Hernandez said in the recorded call. “I used to say, ‘If I was ever in jail, would you come visit me?’ They all said, ‘Yeah, this and that,’ but I knew those [expletive] wouldn’t.’’
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