It was January of 2006. Tim Washington, who had played football with DJ in high school, had gone on to college. But, during the winter break, Tim had gone to work out with his old high school running backs coach.
“One day, I was in the car with the coach,” Washington recalls. “He got a call: ‘Hernandez died.’”
Washington’s first thought was that David Hernandez had died.
“Dave had been battling cancer for as long as his daughter, Davina, and I were together,” he says. “He had been in remission, and then the cancer came back.”
A moment later, the coach’s phone rang again.
“No,” the coach said, “it’s not Dave! It’s Dennis!”
Why would anyone have thought it was Dennis? Dennis couldn’t die. Too many people in Bristol loved him. DJ and Aaron needed him.
Dennis hadn’t even been ill.
“What the hell happened to Dennis?” people said when they found out.
“Everyone was devastated,” Washington remembers. “Every time you’d say, ‘Dennis died,’ they’d look at you and say, ‘You mean Dave?’”
A few days earlier, Dennis Hernandez had gone in to the hospital for a hernia repair. Immediately afterward, he contracted a fatal bacterial infection. The death was stupid, shocking, out of the blue, and impossible to process.
The largest funeral parlor in Bristol was too small to host the thousand-plus people who turned out for the man who was known around town as “the King.”
“The funeral was absolutely gigantic,” Washington remembers. “I waited in line for over an hour just to get in—and I was there pretty early. There was a line for as long as you could possibly see. Dennis was that well-respected.
“They were a staple in Bristol, the Hernandez family. They always had been. Good people, they’d give you the shirt off their backs. They’d give you a ride if you needed it. Get you something to eat if you needed it. Give you advice. Talk to you about sports, how you could get better. They were great, down-to-earth people.”
Chapter 6
DJ was nineteen at the time. He was a few inches shorter than his younger brother, and thirty pounds lighter, but Aaron and DJ had the same strong jaw, the same dark, piercing eyes, the same wide, toothy smile. It wasn’t hard to mistake one for the other.
But the brothers were not the same.
At the funeral home, DJ broke down and sobbed over his father’s coffin.
Aaron, who was sixteen, had trouble expressing his grief.
“He was lost,” DJ would tell Sports Illustrated. “He cried, but [only] at moments. Crying is not always the answer, but being an emotional family, for him to put up a wall during the services…He was holding everything in. Our bodies just reacted differently.”
On the night after the funeral, Aaron scored thirty points in a basketball game against Windsor. The following night, in a game against South Windsor, he scored thirty-one.
“That night after the funeral, when he decided to play in his basketball game, it ended up being very emotional,” says Tim Washington. “He dunked. The whole crowd went crazy. Aaron made the best of it, but it was a tough time. A very tough time, that’s for sure.”
Hernandez continued to work out. On the football field, he was unstoppable. As a sophomore, he had begun to feel more comfortable inside his oversized body. As a junior, he’d set the state record for receiving yards in a single game. The following year, Aaron would tie the state record for career touchdowns. Two ranking services would rate him as the nation’s number-one tight end. Aaron already had a verbal agreement with UConn’s coach, Randy Edsall. He told fans and reporters that he could not wait to play football with DJ again.
Scouts from powerhouse teams like the Florida Gators were also beginning to show up at Aaron’s games. But at home, Aaron began to rebel. “It was very, very hard, and he was very, very angry,” Terri told USA Today. “I didn’t know what to do with him. He wasn’t the same kid, the way he spoke to me. The shock of losing his dad, there was so much anger.”
The silence left by Dennis’s absence created its own series of shocks. It was just Terri and Aaron at home—and the comfort that Aaron could take in his mother was undercut by the knowledge that, a few months earlier, she had betrayed his father with Jeffrey Cummings.
With DJ and Dennis both gone, Aaron did not know who to turn to. He did not know what to do with himself. “Everyone was close to my father, but I was the closest,” Aaron would say. “I was with him more than my friends. When that happened, who do I talk to, who do I hang with?”
Before long, Aaron was hanging out on the wrong side of town, at a house on Lake Avenue that belonged to Tito Valderrama—“Uncle Tito,” who had married Dennis and Dave’s sister, Ruth. There, he bonded with his cousin Tanya, the woman who had slapped Terri at DJ’s UConn game.
He grew close to Thaddeus “TL” Singleton, a drug dealer Tanya had taken up with after Cummings left her for Terri Hernandez.
He picked up new running mates: a drug-addled townie named Carlos Ortiz and an older man named Ernest Wallace.
Narcotics officers in Bristol knew Wallace (whose nickname was “Bo”) as one of the petty criminals they’d seen around a housing unit on Lillian Road and Lake Avenue. The police believed that Ortiz—who went by “Charlie Boy”—had ties to a Bristol gang called the Doo Wop Boys, who were themselves affiliated with the Bloods.
Aaron still held it together in public. His mask stayed intact. But privately, friends and mentors like Coach Pina grew worried.
They knew that there was a dark side to Bristol, Connecticut, and it seemed to them that Aaron Hernandez was hell-bent on working his way to its center.
Chapter 7
“Hernandez Still on Track for UConn”
—Hartford Courant, February 8, 2006
“Misdirection Play: Hernandez to Gators”
—Hartford Courant, April 23, 2006
“D.J. Hernandez Tries Draw Play; But Brother Stands By Choice”
—Hartford Courant, September 10, 2006
Football fans across Connecticut were stunned: three months after his father’s death, Aaron announced his intention to back out of the verbal agreement he’d made, as a sophomore, with Huskies coach Randy Edsall.
Although that commitment had been publicized, Aaron had never stopped getting calls—from Boston College, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Miami.
At first, Aaron had been firm about his commitment to Edsall.
“They’ve most all been sending stuff, but they’ve been calling more lately,” he told the Hartford Courant. “They call my coach and he tells me. I just tell him to tell them I’m going to UConn.
“It’s my dream to play with my brother in college,” Aaron said. “But it’s not a huge thing. I think I would still be going to UConn even if my brother wasn’t there. Since he’s there, it just makes it a better fit. Whether my brother is starting or not, he’s still going to push me and make me be better just being there. He’s a big motivator for me.
“Since my freshman year, UConn has been coming after me. They offered after my sophomore year. That was before anybody was going after me. So that makes me feel better.
“UConn is like family. They were there for me when my dad passed away. It’s tough, though. I wish my dad was here now that more schools are coming. Notre Dame just came on recently and it really makes you think. It just makes me think more. My dad would have been able to help me out even more. But I’m pretty sure he would have wanted me to go to UConn. My family wants me to go to UConn and my heart’s at UConn.”
Then, the Florida Gators made their full-court press.
“We don’t typically recruit in Connecticut,” says Urban Meyer, who was the head coach in Florida at the time. “But I remember watching the videotape. I’m always looking for that hybrid player. We’re not looking for a big, slow tight end. We want a guy that can do a lot of things.”