Dateline Aaron Hernandez: The Loss of His Father and Mother Destroyed Him

by Patrick H. Moore

Last week we posted a short piece on Aaron Hernandez describing how his adventures with Angel Dust/PCP transformed a angry, volatile young man into a highly paranoid, angry, volatile and heavily-armed young man who rarely went anywhere without a gun. All along, however, the question in my mind has been “Why?” Why did this supremely talented uber-athlete throw it all away to hang out with petty thugs and criminals? Why did this heavily-muscled tight end with flypaper hands and the speed of a wide-out choose to wreck his life (and allegedly take the lives of several other individuals) for absolutely no reason other than the fact he couldn’t seem to control himself?

Although we still don’t have a definitive answer, the new Aaron Hernandez article in the current issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, “The Gangster in the Huddle,” makes a convincing argument that the twin blows of losing his father to sudden, unexpected complications following a routine hernia surgery combined with losing his mother to drugs and infidelity served as a kind of double whammy from which Aaron never recovered.

Paul Solotaroff and Ron Borges of Rolling Stone describe how Aaron’s rough-cut father Dennis Hernandez survived growing up in Bristol, Connecticut as one of the only Puerto Ricans in an Irish-Italian town:

Aaron’s father, Dennis, ruled those fields before his son followed in his footsteps. In the Seventies and Eighties, Dennis and his twin brother, David, became local sports heroes. Enormous for their age and fast and tough, they took to football straightaway and were happier running through, than around, you. They’d be three-sport stars in high school and draw scouts to their games, though as good as they were at football, they were better in street fights, say friends: Nobody fucked with the Hernandez boys.

“They were the roughest kids by far in Guinea Alley,” says Eddy Fortier, who went to Bristol Central with them in the Seventies and is a former youth counselor. “They had to be tough – they were about the only Puerto Ricans in an Irish-Italian town,” says Fortier’s brother, Gary, a reformed ex-con who’s now a painter and assistant pastor at a Bristol church.

After flaming out at the University of Connecticut where he had the chance to play college football, Dennis Hernandez returned home to Bristol where he and his brother David continued to “scrape the edges” right up until 1990, around the time Aaron was born:

The twins were pinched for small-change crimes – assault and petty larceny – in the decade after they both left UConn. As late as 1990, Dennis was busted for burglary, though neither brother seems to have done prison time. Friends say they also occasionally smoked crack, beat up dealers for drugs and cash, and bet way over their heads on sports. As for their pal Testa, he was caught in the act while robbing a house with his uncle, who shot and killed a cop while they tried to escape. “The rumor on the street was Dennis and David were there too,” says Sassu, “but we couldn’t make the case.”

Although it was probably not a case of instant cause-and-effect, both Aaron’s father and his uncle put the thug life behind them once they became parents:

…parenthood seemed to scare the twins straight. Both became fathers, found steady work and had no further truck with Bristol cops… Dennis married Terri Valentine, a school secretary in Bristol, and got a job on the custodial staff at the other of the town’s two high schools, Bristol Eastern. They bought a small cottage on Greystone Avenue and produced two wildly gifted sons: DJ, now 27 and an assistant football coach at the University of Iowa, and Aaron, three years younger but bigger and faster, the apogee of the family’s genetics.

Each surpassed his father, both on the field and off, in part because Dennis took elaborate pains to keep them on the straight and narrow. Dennis built a gym in the family basement, paved a chunk of the backyard over for a half-court and staged three-on-three tourneys there, and peppered the boys with can-do slogans, burning them in through repetition. “Some do, some don’t,” he was always telling them. “If it is to be, it is up to me,” went another. He was bent on getting his sons to do everything right, whether it was making the proper blitz read or handing homework in on time, perhaps because he’d squandered his own chance.

As long as Aaron’s father was there for him Aaron did fine and — despite his obvious gifts — had a reputation as a polite and humble young man:

“Best athlete this city’s ever produced, and a more polite, humble kid you couldn’t find,” says Bob Montgomery, a columnist for the Press and the town’s official historian. “He’d be in here with his father being interviewed as Athlete of the Week, and there was never any swagger or street stuff from him, just ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, sir’ and ‘Thank you.’”

There is no doubt that Aaron and his brother DJ, despite their natural gifts, worked hard to make the most of their talent:

Friends say DJ was fiercely protective of his happy-go-lucky lug of a kid brother, and taught him what hard work really looked like. They’d be out running suicides in the dead of summer, and rising early to do squats in the basement. “Aaron was driven by DJ, who was like his second dad,” says Beam. “He really wanted to make Dennis happy.”

Oddly, up until his father’s untimely death in January of 2006, what family turmoil there was centered around Aaron’s mother Terri:

“She was good about schoolwork and that sort of stuff,” says a friend of the family, “but she brought drama into that house – starting with the bust for taking bets.” In 2001, when Aaron was 12, Terri was arrested in a statewide sting for booking bets on sports. The matter was handled quietly and she did no time, but she cast shame on the boys and dug a rift with Aaron that deepened over the next several years. Friends say Terri had begun cheating on Dennis with a physically abusive coke dealer named Jeffrey Cummings, who was married to Dennis’ niece, Tanya Cummings.

Terri’s relationship with Cummings, whose nickname is Meathead, was a bottomless source of grief for the sons. There was an ugly spectacle in the stands at a UConn game, says a family friend. Terri, on hand to watch DJ play, was angrily confronted by her niece and slapped in the face. The aftermath, says the friend, “hurt Aaron bad and broke his heart.”

Aaron might still have been held it together despite his mother’s erratic behavior if his father had been there to see him through. But tragically, this was not to be:

…in January 2006, Dennis checked himself in for a hernia repair at a local hospital. Something happened on the table, though, and he contracted an infection; two days later, he was dead. He was 49, in otherwise splendid health, and beloved by virtually everyone in town. His funeral, at the Church of St. Matthew, was like an affair of state: 1,500 mourners packed the biggest church in Bristol, and hundreds more waited to view the body. DJ was inconsolable, sobbing over the casket, but Aaron, 16 and shocked beyond tears, sat stone-faced. Friends tried to console him or draw him out; instead, he locked down, going mum. “He’d open up the tiniest bit, then say nothing for weeks, like it was a sign of weakness to be sad,” says Beam. “His brother was at college, and the only other person he would really talk to was the one who was taken away.”

Heartsick and furious, Aaron seemed to implode. He also began spending a lot of time with family across town, in a roughneck stretch called Lake Avenue:

His father’s brother-in-law, Uncle Tito, had a house up the block from the projects, where he lived with his grown daughter Tanya – the woman Cummings had ditched to be with Terri. Aaron and Tanya, first cousins bonded by loss, drew close very quickly, friends say. (He has the name of her son – Jano – tattooed on his chest, and has supported them both financially since college.) Among the dubious people hanging around the house were goons like Ernest Wallace and T.L. Singleton, an older-but-not-wiser drug dealer who’d been in and out of prison since the Nineties… Along with fringe hustlers like Carlos Ortiz, the angel-dust tweaker, they filled the heart-size hole Dennis left, bolstering Aaron with bromides about family love and vowing that they’d always have his back – which is another way of saying they sunk their claws in. Their motives couldn’t have been plainer if they’d hung them in neon: Here was a kid with can’t-miss skills, a malleable man-child who’d be rich one day and fly them out of the hood in his G-5. All they had to do was get him high and gas his head, inflame his sense of grievance at life’s unfairness.

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Despite his father’s sudden death and his mother’s infidelity and quasi-desertion, one might still express surprise over the fact Aaron’s response to these disasters — unlike his brother DJ who somehow weathered the storm — was to align himself with lowlifes, whether relatives or his “new trusted friends.” Based on my experience representing criminal of all types, I’m convinced that an individual’s decision to “turn wrong” rather than “stay right” is — more often than not — integrally connected to issues of self-esteem. A person with healthy self-esteem will naturally “just say no” to the lowlifes and a life of crime, whereas an insecure person, an individual with self-esteem issues, will make precisely the opposite choice which, in turn, often leads to disaster, which is precisely what has befallen Aaron Hernandez.