Growing up, Aaron shared a bedroom with DJ—Dennis John—who was three years his senior. Sometimes, it felt as if everyone in the family was living right on top of one another. But Aaron’s parents, Dennis and Terri, were proud of the home and took even more pride in DJ and Aaron. They were determined to keep the boys on the straight and narrow.
“I met the Hernandezes in second grade, or third grade, when I began to play football,” a family friend named Tim Washington remembers. “Aaron and DJ lived near the high school, in a rural type of area off of Union Street. They had a nice house with a nice finished basement. Their dad had a little gym set up down there for them to work out. It had some weights and a weight bench. There was an in-ground pool and the basketball court right behind that. Aaron and DJ played basketball and home run derby in the woods off to the back of the house.
“Dennis and his brother, Dave, were on the coaching staff for the Bristol Bulldogs and the Pop Warner league. Dennis was the janitor at my middle school. And in high school and college, I dated Dave’s daughter, Davina. We were very close. Dennis would always tell me, ‘My boys are coming up! You need to watch out for my boys. You need to protect my boys.’
“Dennis knew that those boys were going to be special in any sport that they played. And Aaron was driven to make his dad proud.”
Dennis woke DJ and Aaron at dawn so that they could work out. The boys practiced their layups for hours on end. They ran countless suicide drills up and down the hills around their home. All the while, lessons their father had instilled in them rang in their heads:
If you do anything great in life, it will come from within, Dennis would tell them. And, If it is to be, it is up to me.
Aaron and DJ worshipped Dennis. And if Dennis was overprotective of them, it was because he had come close to living out his own dreams.
Dennis Hernandez had played for Bristol Central back in the 1970s. Like his son, he’d been triple-varsity, running track and playing basketball as well as football. Along with his twin brother, David, he’d been big and fierce: a dominant player. For decades to come, Dennis held on to his high school nickname—“the King.”
Along with David, Dennis had gotten a full football scholarship to the University of Connecticut. But, in his youth, he had also gotten into a fair deal of trouble.
As one of the only Puerto Rican kids in a hardscrabble, Irish-Italian town, Dennis had spent his youth proving his mettle, on and off the football field. A wild kid with a chip on his shoulder, Dennis drank and partied. Along with his brother, and a friend and teammate named Rocco Testa, he got into fights, broke into strangers’ houses, and stole. Surrounded by friends from the wrong side of town, both twins ended up dropping out of UConn.
Testa came to a bad end. A few days before Thanksgiving, in 1977, he and his uncle, a petty criminal named Gary Castonguay, were burglarizing a house in Plainville, Connecticut. When a police officer named Robert Holcomb arrived, responding to a call about a burglary in progress, Castonguay shot him four times and left him to bleed to death. Officer Holcomb was twenty-eight, with a three-year-old son. Castonguay was thirty-three, with a long rap sheet. Testa was twenty. When Castonguay was arrested, two weeks after the shooting, Testa was given immunity from murder and burglary charges in exchange for testifying against his uncle.
For David and Dennis, this story would serve as a cautionary tale. But fatherhood was the thing that straightened the brothers out for good. David became a corrections officer. Dennis got his job as a janitor at Bristol Eastern. Dennis’s wife, Terri, who’d been a majorette, a few years behind him at Bristol Central, became an administrative assistant at a Bristol elementary school.
The young couple scrimped and saved to buy the cottage on Greystone Avenue. They had their boys, and a white German shepherd named “UConn.” They loved their lives. But money would always be an issue for them.
Dennis and Terri saw to it that Aaron and DJ had everything that they needed to be safe and comfortable. Still, they couldn’t afford the designer clothes and fancy toys that other parents bought for their kids. Watching her boys go without, and suffering for it, caused Terri to make poor decisions. In 2001, the Bristol police came to the house and placed her under arrest: Terri had gotten involved in a bookkeeping operation run by a local restaurant manager named Marty Hovanesian.
“She was the phone operator,” Hovanesian’s lawyer told the Boston Globe. “A minor player, not the brains.” But the operation was serious enough that Hovanesian was convicted of felony racketeering and professional gambling. “I’m not saying it was right, what she did—at all,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “I don’t think it is. But this woman did this because I was crying every single night. She didn’t do it for the thrill. She didn’t do it to pocket the money. She did it to provide for me and Aaron.”
The case against Terri never went to trial. But in Bristol’s close-knit community, word got out. Before long, the whole town seemed to know about Terri’s arrest.
Aaron was twelve at the time—an innocent, outgoing kid who liked pranks and practical jokes. But despite his popularity, and DJ’s, Aaron and his brother were teased about the incident, and if DJ was quick to forgive, Aaron was more of a cipher. He kept his feelings to himself. But try as he did to mask his embarrassment, Aaron’s relationship with his mother grew strained as he entered his adolescence—and decisions Terri made as the years went by only increased the distance between her and her younger son.
Chapter 4
By all accounts, Aaron kept up appearances. His former classmates describe a likable, well-behaved teenager. The worst thing that Bristol law enforcement has to say about Aaron, in his youth, is that once, at a party, he ran up onto a car and put a slight dent in the roof.
On that occasion, the Bristol police had called Dennis Hernandez.
“Dennis came down and rode a hard line on him,” an officer remembers. “The old man made him do the right thing. Made the kid apologize. And the kid wouldn’t say ‘boo.’ He was reserved. Not a bad kid at all.”
Now, as Aaron finished out his last year of middle school, there was no doubt that he would be joining DJ on the BCHS varsity squad. Aaron’s grades up to this point had been good. (In high school, Hernandez would make the honor roll.) His football game was already exceptional.
Though he preferred basketball, Aaron seemed to have a sixth sense for the sport, leaving spectators with the feeling that he was seeing the field from above.
Dennis Hernandez watched everything that Aaron did on the field from the stands, just as he had with DJ.
Whenever one of his boys scored or made a beautiful play, Dennis was not ashamed to cry tears of pride. But back at home, the family dynamic was changing.
Dennis’s brother, David, was struggling with cancer, and the family had braced itself for bad news.
His son DJ, who had preceded Aaron as a superstar player for the Rams, was heading off to UConn (where he would excel as a quarterback and wide receiver for the Huskies).
His wife, Terri, had become romantically involved with a married man named Jeffrey Cummings.
Cummings’s wife, Tanya, was the daughter of Dennis’s sister, Ruth—which made Aaron and Tanya first cousins. Because the Hernandezes were a tight-knit family, Terri and Jeffrey had to be extra-careful. At first, they were, and no one found out about their relationship. But, in September of 2005, an ugly incident occurred at a UConn football game.
While DJ was down on the field, Tanya came up to Terri and slapped her, right there in the stands.
Now, the family affair was pried open for Aaron and others to see.
Given the chance, Aaron’s parents might have gotten past the unfortunate incident, patched things up, and moved on with their lives and their marriage.
Instead, tragedy struck.
Chapter 5