FALL RIVER, Mass. —
There are two doors at the back of Courtroom 7, and through nearly 36
hours of deliberations in the Aaron Hernandez murder case, the metallic
clack of a door handle would get the attention of everyone in the room.
It
happened countless times each day. A court clerk entering to do some
work. A security officer returning from a break. A court reporter
stepping in to grab something off her desk.
Each time, the
reporters occupying three rows on one side of the courtroom would look
up, recognize the moment for what it was — an innocuous tension-breaker —
and return to their laptops or their reading.
Wednesday morning,
the door snapped open, and Mark Ferriera, an assistant clerk in Bristol
County Superior Court, stepped in. Ferriera, who sometimes looks casual
when court is not in session, had a blue and green tie cinched tight,
and he was followed by Jennifer Donahue, a public affairs officer for
the court system.
It didn’t feel like just another innocent entry to the courtroom, where the former New England Patriots tight end had been on trial since Jan. 29 in the 2013 slaying of Odin Lloyd.
It didn’t feel like just another innocent entry to the courtroom, where the former New England Patriots tight end had been on trial since Jan. 29 in the 2013 slaying of Odin Lloyd.
“I think something’s up,” said Travis Andersen, a reporter for the Boston Globe.
Court
officer Ralph Tavares, famous for his and his four brothers'
Grammy-winning rendition of “More Than a Woman” from “Saturday Night
Fever,” walked to the short wall that separated the court and the
attorneys from the public.
“We have a verdict,” he said simply.
It
was precisely 10:07 a.m. The jurors — seven women and five men — had
been out for parts of seven days, considering the testimony of 135
witnesses and 439 exhibits, some of them hundreds of pages long.
***
Through
47 days of the trial, Hernandez would swagger into the courtroom each
morning and take a seat at one of two tables on the defense’s side of
the room, next to one of his attorneys, Charles Rankin. Sometimes he’d
offer defense attorney Michael Fee a fist bump.
Hernandez had
lived a comfortable life for a man being held without bail and facing a
first-degree murder charge. Judge E. Susan Garsh referred to him,
always, as “Mr. Hernandez.” Tavares and other court officers tied his
tie each morning — he preferred a double windsor and didn’t know how to
pull that off. He poured himself water into a plastic cup when he was
thirsty. He joked and laughed when the jury wasn’t in the room.
He turned around often to mouth, “I love you,” to family members in the front row of the gallery.
Now
he was brought in through the side door that leads to the secure
section of the courthouse where inmates are kept, and kept standing.
Several court security officers surrounded him.
Defense attorney
James Sultan, a bulldog whose combative style was on display during his
cross examinations of numerous police officers, spoke.
“Your honor, may we stand with our client?” Sultan asked.
“You may, of course,” Garsh said.
One of the doors at the back of the courtroom opened. The jurors filed in. Not one of them looked in Hernandez’s direction.
The
jury’s foreperson — a woman named Lesa Strachan — handed a shuffle of
papers to a court officer, who handed them to Ferriera, who handed them
to the judge. After Judge Garsh looked over the papers, she handed them
back to Ferriera.
“Madam foreperson,” Ferriera began, “on
indictment 2013-983-A, charging the defendant, Aaron Hernandez, with
murder, what say you madam foreperson? Is the defendant not guilty, or
guilty of murder in the first-degree, or guilty of murder in the second
degree?”
“Guilty of murder in the first-degree,” Strachan
answered, and an audible gasp of relief and emotion erupted from several
members of Lloyd’s family in the front row, where they had maintained
their vigil throughout the trial, closest to the jury box. Among them
was Shaneah Jenkins, the young woman who put herself through college and
is now attending law school, the young woman who was dating Lloyd and
whose emotional testimony had riveted the courtroom.
Fewer than 15
feet away sat her sister, Shayanna Jenkins — Hernandez’s fiancée and
the woman suspected of secreting the murder weapon out of the home they
shared. Shayanna burst into uncontrollable sobs and collapsed against
Hernandez’s mother, Terri Hernandez, who cried quietly.
It was
oddly quiet in the courtroom, and one other sound could be heard as
Ferriera continued to read through the charges of gun possession and
ammunition possession — guilty on both:
The jangling of chains as a court officer shackled first Hernandez’s wrists, then his ankles.
***
It
was a little after noon when the prosecutors and Lloyd’s family emerged
through the glass-and-aluminum façade of the Fall River Justice Center
to address the horde of reporters, some of whom had been here since jury
selection began Jan. 9, some of whom had raced the 45 miles from Boston
to this former mill town.
Ursula Ward, Lloyd’s mother and a
stalwart presence in the first side of the front row on the
prosecution’s side of the courtroom, stepped to the microphone.
Earlier
in the courtroom, Ward told Judge Garsh that Lloyd was her only son,
that she would never know the joy of seeing him married, never know the
serenity of holding his children.
Now, as she thanked the police
investigators and prosecutors and jurors, a cacophony arose out on the
street in front of the courthouse. A police officer’s siren whooped, and
a white van carrying Hernandez to prison, where he will spend the rest
of his natural life, pulled past. Along the sidewalks, people cheered —
some derisively, some apparently out of genuine affection — for the man
who not so long ago dazzled them with his ability to catch passes, break
tackles, score touchdowns.
A short time later, two of Hernandez’s
attorneys, Fee and Sultan, left from the building, and as they walked
to their cars a handful of photographers broke free from the crowd and
chased them while reporters peppered them with questions.
Neither said a word.
***
First
Assistant District Attorney William McCauley is a slender man with a
shaved head and a pleasant demeanor outside the courtroom.
In the
courthouse hallways, he would stop and say, “Good morning,” when he ran
into reporters. One day, he stopped Brian Fraga, a reporter for the
Herald News in Fall River who has lived this story since Hernandez was
implicated in Lloyd’s murder.
Fraga had come down with the same crud that infected nearly everyone in the courtroom at one time or another.
“Are you feeling better?” McCauley asked him.
McCauley
and fellow prosecutors Patrick Bomberg and Brian Griffin had been
consumed by this case, often spending weekends in the office preparing.
And
inside the courtroom, McCauley was stern and serious, seldom backing
down even in moments when it was clear he had tried the judge’s
patience.
Now, as he stood among the throng of reporters and
cameras and microphones, someone asked him what was going through his
mind in the moment that he heard the word “guilty.”
McCauley allowed himself a smile.
“It was quite a relief,” he said. “It was quite a relief.”
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