HadebeM10

jesus christ. He signed a $40 million contract with the New England Patriots, and ten months later he shot a friend in an industrial park a mile from his own house. After he died, doctors opened his brain. At 27, it looked like a man's in his 60s. That's him in the video, in the Patriots locker room in 2012, all smiles, talking about an injury: "Broke, but it healed, and I'm better now." Then the day a jury decided what he was, and the doctor who studied what was left of him. Aaron Hernandez grew up in Bristol, Connecticut, with a father who beat him and his brother when they didn't try hard enough. His father died when Aaron was 16, and people who knew him said he never got over it. He became a college champion at Florida, then, at 20, the youngest player in the NFL. Next to Rob Gronkowski he played in a Super Bowl. In August 2012 the Patriots gave him the biggest signing bonus a tight end had ever gotten. By 2013 he was paranoid. He hired a friend as a 24-hour bodyguard, filled his house with cameras, and asked Bill Belichick to trade him across the country. On June 17, Odin Lloyd, a semi-pro player dating his fiancée's sister, was found shot in the back and chest. Nine days later Hernandez was charged with murder, and the Patriots cut him within about 90 minutes. From jail he told a friend: "There's no way I'm sitting in here forever." In April 2015 a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, by "extreme atrocity or cruelty." Life without parole. His own mother told him on the phone she couldn't visit: "I love you, but I can't see you like that." Two years later he was acquitted of a separate double murder. Five days after that, he was found dead in his cell, with John 3:16 written on his forehead. His family gave his brain to Boston University. The diagnosis: CTE, stage 3 out of 4, from years of hits to the head. Dr. Ann McKee said he was the most severe case they had ever seen at his age. Nobody ever proved why he killed Odin Lloyd. Twenty-seven years old. Stage 3 of 4. One man dead in an industrial park. Was it the brain football gave him, or the man he already was?