Witness says he was with Hernandez the night of double homicide, source says

Author: By Susan Candiotti CNN

CNN) –
A witness sources have described as Aaron Hernandez’s “muscle man” says he was with the ex-New England Patriot the night of a 2012 Boston double homicide that police say may be linked to Hernandez, said a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation.

The witness, Alexander Bradley, has filed a civil lawsuit accusing Hernandez of shooting him in the face during an argument after they left a Florida strip club in February. Bradley lost sight in one eye because of the incident, according to the lawsuit.

In what could be a crucial account for the prosecution, Bradley is telling investigators that he was at Boston’s Cure nightclub — with Hernandez — on July 12, 2012, before Daniel Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, were fatally shot in their car, the law enforcement source said. Bradley and Hernandez were also captured on the nightclub’s security camera, the source said.
Bradley has testified before a grand jury in Boston after being arrested last week because he failed to show up for a court proceeding about a grand jury subpoena.

A Boston grand jury has been hearing evidence allegedly linking Hernandez to the double homicide, sources have told CNN.

Among the evidence is a .35 caliber handgun sources describe as the murder weapon in the double homicide.

In addition, a silver SUV driven by Hernandez was discovered covered with dust in his uncle’s garage, law enforcement sources say. Law enforcement sources say the SUV is believed to be linked to the deaths.

Hernandez’s lawyers have not commented about the investigation.

The SUV was found as investigators searched the uncle’s home in Bristol, Connecticut, in connection with another shooting death, that of Odin Lloyd. Hernandez is charged with Lloyd’s murder and has pleaded not guilty. He appeared in court Wednesday for a pretrial hearing in that case.

Prosecutors say Hernandez orchestrated Lloyd’s June 17 execution-style shooting.

Authorities have said that Hernandez, Wallace, and a third man, Carlos Ortiz, picked Lloyd up from his Boston apartment in a rental car shortly before his death.

Surveillance cameras then captured the rental car leaving the crime scene and Hernandez carrying a gun as he returned to his home minutes later. He was with two other people. Lloyd was not among them.

BRISTOL, Conn. (AP) — Two friends of Aaron Hernandez were hanging out at the blue Cape-style house in Bristol when the NFL star beckoned them for an outing that ended with another friend’s slaying, authorities said. Days later, police searching the small home found an SUV, rented in Hernandez’s name, that Massachusetts authorities were seeking in connection with a July 2012 shooting that killed two people near a Boston night club.

As investigators work to unravel both murder cases, the house at 114 Lake Ave. appears to hold answers about the other side of the man once known to the public only as a talented tight end for the high-powered New England Patriots offense. Hernandez himself never lived at the house, which belongs to his uncle, but it was home to many people close to him who have since come under intense police scrutiny.

”It seems like people came and went at different times,” said Lt. Kevin Morrell, the head of the Bristol Police Department’s Criminal Investigation Division. ”We have Mr. Hernandez as a frequent guest. He would spend a night, but we don’t have him ever living there.”

Hernandez, who grew up not far from the house in Bristol, is charged with murder in the shooting death of 27-year-old Odin Lloyd, whose body was found June 17 not far from Hernandez’s mansion in North Attleborough, Mass. He has pleaded not guilty.

Ernest Wallace, one of two friends also facing charges related to the shooting, had been living at the Lake Avenue house, and the other, Carlos Ortiz, had spent time living there, according to police. The men, who each had criminal records, returned to the house after Lloyd was killed, according to court filings.

Ortiz and Wallace, police say, apparently were part of a group of friends that included Hernandez’s cousin Tanya Singleton and her husband, Thaddeus Singleton III, a man known to police as T.L.

Thaddeus Singleton died June 30 when the car he was driving went off a road in Farmington, went airborne and become lodged inside a country club building. Police have ruled the death accidental. He was in the car with the mother of one of his children, police said.

At the time of his death, Singleton was facing charges stemming from a February arrest in Clarendon County, S.C., that included heroin trafficking.

”He was very well known to us,” Morrell said. ”He has a lengthy record for all kinds of things, including drugs. He was a suspected dealer.”

But up until the start of the Hernandez investigation, Morrell said police had been to the house on Lake Avenue only once before, in 2010 for a medical call the night Hernandez’s aunt died.
The house belongs to Tanya Singleton’s father, Andres ”Tito” Valderamma, Hernandez’s uncle by marriage. His late wife, Ruth, was the sister of Hernandez’s father, Dennis. Valderamma lives in the home with Tanya, another daughter, Jennifer ”Gina” Thebarge, and their families.

Lately, Tanya Singleton has been staying in a Massachusetts jail. She was indicted on a criminal contempt charge after prosecutors say she refused to testify before the grand jury hearing evidence in the case that led to a murder indictment against Hernandez. Prosecutors said she refused to testify even after prosecutors offered her immunity.

Tanya Singleton was previously married to Jeffrey Cummings, another Bristol resident with a lengthy criminal record, who divorced her and later married Hernandez’s mother, Terri. He was later charged with assaulting Terri Hernandez, who subsequently divorced him.

It’s unclear what Tanya Singleton’s relationship is with Ortiz and Wallace. But during his bail hearing in Attleboro District Court in July, Wallace mouthed ”I love you” and ”I miss you,” apparently to Singleton, who was watching the proceeding.

In searching the Lake Avenue home, police turned up 100 cartridges of .38-caliber ammunition, as well as the SUV sought in the 2012 shooting, in which Daniel Jorge Correia de Abreu and Safiro Teixeira Furtado were killed in Boston’s South End.

Another relative of Thaddeus Singleton III, John Alcorn, testified last week before a grand jury in Boston’s Suffolk County. Alcorn, whose nickname is ”Chicago,” is the man mentioned in a Massachusetts police report in June as the possible owner of a .38-caliber gun seized from a car after an accident in Springfield, Mass., Morrell said.

Tito Valderamma and Gina Thebarge have not spoken publicly about the case. Gina said when she answered the door at the home earlier this month that the family was ”not ready to do that yet.”

”But thank you for asking nicely,” she said. ”And God bless you.”

Prosecutors looking to establish a tie between a 2012 double homicide in Boston and former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez expect to hear Thursday from a Bristol, Conn., man linked to the handgun reportedly used in the killings.
John A. Alcorn, who goes by the street name “Chicago,” is one of two men ordered to appear before a grand jury in Boston investigating the drive-by shooting on a highway overpass. Alcorn has ties to a cousin of Hernandez’s and also has been linked to a .38-caliber handgun reportedly used in the July 16, 2012, shooting deaths of Safiro Furtado, 28, and Daniel Abreu, 29.

That handgun was discovered in a briefcase in the trunk of a car involved in a three-vehicle crash June 21 in western Massachusetts. When state troopers questioned the woman driving the car, she said she had given a ride to several friends who are football players and that they left their belongings in her trunk.

She identified one of them as a friend she knew only as “Chicago.”

Alcorn, 21, is known by the street name “Chicago,” according to court documents on file in Bristol, where he was arrested in 2011 for disturbing the peace and failure to appear in court.

He also is a relative of a man who was married to a cousin of Hernandez. The cousin has been jailed for refusing to testify before a grand jury, the Associated Press reported.

The latest ruling adds another layer to a convoluted case involving Hernandez, a Pro Bowl tight end for the Patriots who was cut by the team hours after his arrest on murder charges.

Hernandez, 23, has been indicted in the June 17 slaying of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player. Hernandez’s fiancee and the woman Lloyd was dating are sisters.

Prosecutors allege that Hernandez, angered that he had seen Lloyd talking with people that he had problems with, summoned two friends from his hometown of Bristol to Massachusetts and then took them with him as he drove to Boston and picked up Lloyd. From there, Hernandez allegedly drove Lloyd to a secluded field near his home in North Attleboro, Mass., and shot and killed the man.
The two men with Hernandez also face charges. Ernest Wallace Jr., 41, has been indicted by a grand jury on a charge of being an accessory after the fact, and Carlos Ortiz, 27, has been charged with possession of a gun by a previous offender.

According to court documents, Ortiz has cooperated with investigators and detailed the sequence of events in the hours leading up to Lloyd’s murder.

Also facing a charge is Hernandez’s cousin, Tanya Singleton, 37. She was indicted on a contempt charge after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating Lloyd’s death.

Prosecutors want to hear from Singleton because Ortiz allegedly discussed Lloyd’s killing with her, and because one of her credit cards was used to purchase Wallace a bus ticket as he fled to Florida in the days after the killing. Prosecutors have also alleged that she might have helped dispose of the gun used to kill Lloyd.

Alcorn is related to Singleton’s late husband, Thaddeus Singleton III. Singleton, whom police were interested in talking to, was killed June 30 in a high-speed car crash. Although police have said that crash appears to be an accident, it remains under investigation.

In addition to Alcorn, Judge Joan Alexander also issued an arrest warrant for Alexander Bradley, 31. Bradley, whose whereabouts are not known, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida alleging that Hernandez shot him in the face in February after a dispute at a nightclub
In the wake of that shooting, which cost Bradley an eye, he told police he did not know who shot him.

Hernandez has not been charged criminally in that case.

Bradley did not appear at a court hearing Tuesday, at which he was ordered to show why he should not testify before the Suffolk County grand jury investigating the 2012 killings.

That 2012 double homicide — in which another man was wounded and two others escaped unharmed — had been unsolved for nearly a year when a possible link to Hernandez was discovered. Witnesses told police the killer fired multiple shots from a gray or silver sport utility vehicle with Rhode Island license plates.

Then came the June 21 crash on Interstate 91 near Longmeadow in western Massachusetts and the discovery of the handgun, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, in the trunk, along with a locked box. The driver of the car in which the gun was found, identified by Massachusetts State Police as Jailene Diaz-Ramos, 19, told officers the gun was not hers.

According to a police report, Diaz-Ramos “stated that a few days ago she gave a ride to a friend named ‘Chicago’ and his buddies. She stated that they are football players and they put all their belongings in the trunk.”

Investigators ran a ballistics check on that gun and found that it matched ammunition fired in the 2012 case, according to a multiple media reports citing unnamed law enforcement sources. The contents of the locked box have not been revealed.

The Hartford Courant, also citing unnamed police sources, has reported that surveillance video shows Hernandez, Furtado and Abreu were in the same Boston nightclub hours before the two men were gunned down on as they were stopped at a streetlight.

In addition, during a search of Tanya Singleton’s home in Bristol, investigators found a rented Toyota 4Runner with Rhode Island plates parked in the garage.

Alicia Jessop, Contributor Forbes Magazine

Life certainly has changed for former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez over the off-season. Rather than joining his Patriot teammates for training camp this summer, Hernandez spent his days incarcerated, facing a first-degree murder charge and five weapons charges. Hernandez’s next court appearance will take place on September 6, when he will appear in the Bristol County (Mass.) Superior Court to be arraigned.

His arraignment will mark Hernandez’s third time appearing before the court in the case against him related to the death of Odin Lloyd. What then, does this court hearing entail?

According to Massachusetts law, arraignment includes several components. Namely, the judge will read verbatim to Hernandez the charges against him. This may not happen if Hernandez’s attorneys waive the judge doing so. Defense attorneys differ in their preference as to whether or not they waive the judge reading the charges. Some waive the reading of charges, as they have previously advised their client on the nature of the charges. Others prefer to have the judge read the charges, so that there is a clear record that the defendant (in this case, Hernandez) was provided notice of the charges against him.

After the reading of the charges, the judge will take Hernandez’s plea to the six charges against him. Media reports differ as to whether or not Hernandez entered pleas to the charges against him at the indictment phase. However, given that arraignment is typically the juncture at which a defendant enters pleas, it is likely that Hernandez has not plead to any of the charges as of yet.

Thus, the big question looming as Hernandez’s arraignment approaches, is what pleas will he enter? This big question can likely be summed up relatively easy: It would be shocking if he plead anything other than not guilty.

While the prosecution has utilized the media to inform the public about its case against Hernandez, Hernandez’s defense has maintained its client’s innocence to the media. Additionally, given the consequences Hernandez is facing–a lifetime imprisonment if he is convicted of first-degree murder–it is highly unlikely that his attorneys would advise him to plead anything other than not guilty.

Why would a defense attorney advise their client to plead not guilty to a first degree murder charge? At the most basic level, the first reason would be that the attorney’s client did not commit the crime. To add to this reason, the attorney and his client may also believe that the prosecution’s evidence does not prove the elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Hernandez’s attorneys have made comments of this regard to the media in this case.

What then, does the prosecution need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt for a jury to convict Hernandez of first-degree murder? The elements of first-degree murder in Massachusetts are as follows:

1. The unlawful killing of a human being with deliberate premeditated malice aforethought; or

2. Murder committed with extreme atrocity or cruelty; or

3. Murder committed in the commission or attempted commission of certain felonies; or

4. Murder committed in the commission or attempted commission of a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of imprisonment for life.

To date, the prosecution has not presented any evidence to the general public alleging that Hernandez was committing a felony when he allegedly committed the crime. Similarly, no evidence has been presented to the public related to extreme atrocity or cruelty. As such, one could assume that the prosecution will proceed under the first prong. The issue with the first prong is proving the mens rea, or intent, element of the crime which is deliberate premeditated malice aforethought. It is this element that is oftentimes the most difficult hurdle for the prosecution to overcome in securing a conviction.

After pleas are entered, the judge will provide Hernandez with other advisories as required by law. Hernandez’s attorneys may make a motion for his release on bail. It is unlikely that motion will be granted, as in June, the judge denied bail for Hernandez.

After arraignment, a jury trial date will be set. It is possible that the prosecution will offer a plea bargain to Hernandez to avoid going to jury trial. However, given the publicity this case has received and Hernandez’s defense counsel’s continual denial of their client’s guilt, it is unlikely that this case will plea bargain before trial.