A famous sports star is alleged to have killed a close acquaintance after they accused him of being bisexual, but he later had his conviction for the crime overturned, then reinstated once again
Despite reaching heights of success as a professional sports star that most people can only dream of, one major figure in American Football spent a lifetime dodging trouble with the law.
Until, after one alleged crime too many, he ran out of luck. Aaron Hernandez was a star on the New England Patriots when he was arrested in 2013 for the murder of a close acquaintance: Odin Lloyd. It has been alleged that Lloyd discovered that Hernandez was bisexual, and the sports star killed him out of fear that he would tell others about his sexuality.
Lloyd had been dating Shaneah Jenkins, who was the sister of Hernandez’s fiancèe, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, at the time of the murder. It has been claimed that shortly before his murder, he taunted the sports star after learning that Hernandez was having an affair with a male friend.
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Semi-professional football player Lloyd was shot in an industrial park near his home in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, and at the time of Hernandez’s arrest, the star boasted a $41 million contract as a tight end for the top American football team.
Ernest Wallace, who was a co-defendant in the murder case and was sentenced to four years in prison for helping Hernandez get rid of the murder weapon, claimed that Lloyd used what he saw as a homophobic insult to Hernandez, dubbing him a “schmoocher”.
Wallace was reported to have said he wouldn’t have helped get rid of the gun used to kill Lloyd if he had known the sports star was a “limp wrist.”
Aaron and his fiancèe Shayanna, who he had known since primary school, shared daughter Avielle Janelle Hernandez, and investigators looked into the possibility of whether or not the football star had killed Lloyd out of panic that he might inform his girlfriend of the rumoured affair, and that she in turn would tell her sister. Hernandez had known
The football star was convicted of murder in the first degree for Lloyd’s killing in a Massachusetts court in 2015.
He was also accused of a double murder whilst being investigated for Lloyd’s murder, but he was acquitted of this crime. However, within days, further tragedy struck.
Rumours that he was homosexual began to emerge in sports media, and two days later, less than a week after his acquittal, he was found dead by suicide in his prison cell, he was 27 years old.
He had tried to block the door with cardboard in his cell, which he lived in alone, poured shampoo over the floor, and hanged himself with a bedsheet that he attached to the window. Prison guards discovered him at 3.05 am, and attempts were made to save his life, but they were unsuccessful.
Hernandez was, it has been reported, in a relationship with a fellow prisoner at the time: Kyle Kennedy, who was then 22 years old.
The football star is said to have left three suicide notes in his cell, one to his partner, Shayanna Jenkins-Hernandez, one to his daughter Avielle, and another to his lawyer.
He is reported to have given lavish gifts to Kennedy, including a $50,000 (£39,000) watch, and his lover is said to be the last person who ever saw him alive.
At the haunting scene of his suicide, Hernandez is said to have written “John 3:16” on the wall of his cell in blood, and in ink on his forehead, referencing a Bible verse that says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Due to a point of law, because Hernandez was still in the process of appealing his conviction when he died, his conviction was initially overturned. This was a principle called “abatement ab initio” – which returned his legal status to the initial presumption of innocence.
However, after a long-standing legal saga, the conviction was reinstated in 2019 after an appeal from the victim’s family.
Shayanna, his long-term partner, has since expressed sorrow that Aaron never discussed his “struggle” with his sexuality with her, and that now he is dead, they won’t be able to have a conversation about it. “Aaron was very much a man to me. I saw no indication he was gay or homosexual. I wish I had known how he felt, just so we could have talked about it. I wouldn’t have disowned him.
“I would have been supportive,” she said. “I can’t fault him if he was feeling that way. When you love someone so much you just want to be there to support them. The fact that he felt he couldn’t come out to me or he couldn’t tell me these things hurts, because we had that bond. I’ve accepted that he may have been the way he was said to be, or that it may not be true. Regardless, I won’t know.”
After his death, many people who had known him have claimed that he had secretive relationships with men, and the Boston Globe has reported that Hernandez himself admitted it on the phone, saying it made him “angry” that he was attracted to men.
Lloyd’s killing would end up becoming the defining narrative of Hernandez’s life, but since his death, those who knew him as a youngster have come forward, revealing the sad truth that violence marked his life from a very young age.
The football star’s brother revealed that Aaron was molested as a small boy, and that their father, Dennis, routinely beat them. Dennis died after getting an infection from a routine hernia operation when Aaron was 16, but before his death, he is said to have regularly used homophobic slurs in the household, and “long had concerns that Aaron, as a boy, had a feminine way about him”.
He blocked Aaron from becoming a cheerleader, the football star’s brother has said, “My dad made it clear that … he had his definition of a man,” and he admitted that being homosexual would have been totally unacceptable to their violent father.
These factors created internal struggles in Aaron from a young age those who knew him have said.
He also had a fraught relationship with his mother, with the Boston Globe reporting that in one jailhouse phone call, he berated her for never properly helping him address his ADHD or getting him medication. “Yeah, I knocked you over the head with a frickin’ hammer. That was your medication,” his mother, Terri, is said to have replied.
After his death, it was discovered by medical researchers that Hernandez had a degenerative brain disease called CTE, and his brain displayed the most severe case ever seen in a person his age.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) occurs when someone has suffered repeated head traumas, and links between the NFL and the disease are becoming more and more well known.
Neuropathologist Dr Ann McKee from Boston University discovered Hernandez had Stage 3 CTE. “In this age group, he’s clearly at the severe end of the spectrum,” McKee said. “There is a concern that we’re seeing accelerated disease in young athletes.
“Whether or not that’s because they’re playing more aggressively or if they’re starting at younger ages, we don’t know. But we are seeing ravages of this disease, in this specific example, of a young person.”
His brain had serious damage to the frontal lobe, a shrunken hippocampus, and holes in other areas.
“We can say collectively, in our collective experience, that individuals with CTE, and CTE of this severity, have difficulty with impulse control, decision-making, inhibition of impulses for aggression, emotional volatility, rage behaviors. We know that collectively,” McKee said.