In the summer of 2013, Aaron Hernandez lived in a 7,100-square-foot, four-story mansion in the Boston exurbs, a 20-minute drive from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., where he played football for the New England Patriots with rare agility and striking versatility.
Just a year earlier, the team had rewarded him with a lucrative contract extension, $12.5 million upfront. He told reporters he was a changed man, different from the 20-year-old whose off-field incidents at the University of Florida had raised concerns about his character. He had just proposed to his girlfriend, Shayanna, who was pregnant with their first child, a baby girl they would name Avielle. He was 23 years old, handsome and rich, settling down and growing up. He had everything.
Early Wednesday morning, correctional officers found Hernandez’s limp body hanging from a bedsheet affixed to a window inside a prison cell inside Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Mass. The state said he jammed the door shut from the inside, to buy an extra few minutes in case anyone tried to keep him from dying. Hernandez was 27, and he had lost it all.
For as long as sports have occupied a central place in American culture, athletes have experienced dizzying, public falls from grace. None has come as swiftly and stunningly as Hernandez’s. In February 2012, Hernandez caught a touchdown pass from Tom Brady in the Super Bowl. Five years and a couple months later, he died in a single-person cell in a maximum-security prison.
In between, he signed a $40 million contract and, in April 2015, was convicted for the murder of Odin Lloyd, a friend and semi-professional football player.
A man who grew up in Bristol, Conn., became a star in Gainesville, Fla., and reached the pinnacle of his sport died alone in Massachusetts, serving a life sentence without parole, as Prisoner W106228.
Wednesday morning, hours before his former team visited the White House to celebrate another Super Bowl victory, those close to Hernandez expressed shock.
“There were no conversations or correspondence from Aaron to his family or legal team that would have indicated anything like this was possible,” said Jose Baez, Hernandez’s attorney. “Aaron was looking forward to an opportunity for a second chance to prove his innocence. Those who love and care about him are heartbroken and determined to find the truth surrounding his untimely death.”
His football agent, Brian Murphy, rejected the notion Hernandez killed himself. “Absolutely no chance he took his own life,” Murphy wrote on Twitter.
Hernandez, though, had grown expert at living a double life, disguising dark impulses underneath a charming veneer.
A legal technicality redeemed Hernandez, at least for the record, in death. Because he had not exhausted his appeals, the murder conviction against him will be vacated under a Massachusetts legal principle that dates to pre-Revolutionary times.
He died, in the eyes of the state, an innocent man.
Nobody knows exactly what Hernandez thought in his final moments.
Not so long ago, he was a man who had everything and who, in the end, was reduced to nothing.