The Best American Sports Writing 2014 by Glenn Stout Read Free Book Online

backseat and couldn’t say exactly what happened, a contention everyone but his government-appointed lawyer laughs at. The dust-addled Ortiz, the only one of the three men not indicted, is now the star witness in the case against Hernandez, and his account is probably worthless if he takes the stand. Meanwhile, Hernandez is paying a team of strong lawyers to defend him in his first-degree murder and weapons charges, and there’s speculation he’s paying the legal bills for Wallace, who is being charged as an accessory. It will shock no one if Aaron Hernandez tries to save himself by turning on his friend Ortiz. He and Wallace could tell the same story in court: that it was Ortiz who shot Lloyd out of misplaced panic, and that all they’d meant to do was rough him up.
    Whatever went down in that industrial park, Hernandez’s motive remains unclear. Had Lloyd, one of the few people Hernandez hung with who wasn’t mobbed up or in the drug game, done something else that night to set him off? Did Hernandez mistake Lloyd’s West Indian cousins for some of the Cape Verdeans he’d come to blows with? Or did the argument begin as one thing and end as another, broadening into a beef over drugs and money, as was widely conjectured?
    â€œDon’t matter what it’s about: Aaron’s out of his mind,” says one friend of the family. “He’s been twisted on dust now for more than a year, which is when all of this crazy shit started.”
    The friend has an intimate knowledge of the player’s family and his thug-life cohorts from Bristol. He also knows plenty about angel dust, or phencyclidine, the scourge of the 1970s. Before crack came along in the mid-’80s, dust was the madman’s drug of choice. First marketed in the ’50s as a surgical anesthetic, it was banned for its psych-ward side effects: mania, delirium, violent hallucinations. Cops shake their heads in awe at the crazy-making powers of dust: “Kids fighting four of us and running naked down the street because their body temp is going through the roof,” says Morrell, the Bristol detective. For his department, alas, dust isn’t a dead letter; it’s still one of the drugs of abuse in Hernandez’s hometown. “We have been experiencing a resurgence in the use of angel dust. We deal with it all the time.”
    As befits a crime studded with gross stupidities—killing Lloyd minutes from Hernandez’s house, drawing a bread-crumb trail of texts and calls to the victim’s cell, then leaving that phone on the dead man’s body for the cops to find—the story ends with an idiot run by Wallace and Ortiz. They would lead cops back to Uncle Tito’s house in Bristol—the very place from which Hernandez’s life vectored off course—leaving evidence out for the cops to bag up. Ortiz was picked up a week later, while Wallace had the sense to leave the state, at least, fleeing to Georgia, then Miramar, Florida, where he was arrested; Tanya Cummings-Singleton bought him a bus ride with her credit card. She, meanwhile, sits in jail for contempt and accessory charges, having refused to testify to the grand jury weighing murder charges against Hernandez. Her husband, T. L., was being sought by cops in connection with the double killing of the Cape Verdean men last July. But before detectives could come to take him in for questioning, he hopped into his car and took off with a former girlfriend sitting beside him. Hitting a curve at high speed, T. L. made no attempt to brake; he jumped the curb and flew 100 feet into a wall of a country club. The woman survived, but T. L. was killed on impact—a loose end neatly knotted; an accomplice who’d never flip.
    And so here we are now, a year out from trial, and the open-and-shut case against Aaron Hernandez probably won’t be as easy to prosecute as it seems. Without the gun used in the shooting, a persuasive