With his old team about to play in the Super Bowl, former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez went on trial on murder charges Thursday, watching from the defense table as prosecutors showed the jury security-camera footage from his own home to tie him to the crime.
Hernandez’s lawyer countered by arguing that police and prosecutors “locked” in on the NFL player as a suspect from the very beginning, ignored evidence and conducted a “sloppy and unprofessional” investigation.
Hernandez, 25, is charged in the 2013 shooting death of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semiprofessional football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancee. Lloyd’s bullet-riddled body was found in an industrial park near Hernandez’s North Attleborough home, not far from Gillette Stadium.
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Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, sat behind him with Hernandez’s brother, DJ, who coaches college football in Iowa.
Prosecutors say Hernandez and two friends, Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace, picked Lloyd up at his home in Boston, drove him to the industrial park and shot him. Ortiz and Wallace will be tried separately.
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