Two months earlier, on June 21, Jailene Diaz-Ramos had been involved in a four-car collision on I-91 in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Jailene was taken to a hospital nearby. But when her car was searched, as was customary when cars were towed from accident scenes, the police recovered a Smith & Wesson revolver—a .38 Special—from its trunk.
Jailene was from Bristol, Connecticut. She had been busted several times, for assault, disorderly conduct, forgery, criminal impersonation, larceny, failure to appear in court (twice), and driving with a suspended license.
Now, the police were charging her with possession of a firearm without a license.
As she was being booked, Diaz-Ramos told the police that the gun belonged to a friend—a football player named “Chicago.” A few days earlier, she said, she had given Chicago and a few other football players a ride, and they had left all of their stuff in the trunk.
Chicago’s government name was John Alcorn. Like his girlfriend, he had been arrested before, for disturbing the peace and failing to appear in court.
He turned out to be a cousin of TL Singleton.
The next day, June 22, an anonymous caller had contacted North Attleboro PD.
The caller—who was later identified as Sharif Hashem, a bouncer at Rumor, the nightclub in Boston—said that he had information about a double murder. He gave specifics regarding the time and location.
He mentioned an SUV with Rhode Island plates.
And he said that the murder was connected to the Odin Lloyd investigation.
When the dispatcher asked the man how knew all of this, the man said, “someone accidentally spilled the beans in front of me.”
On June 26, several cars full of police officers had arrived at Tanya Singleton’s house on Lake Avenue.
“From the surveillance video, we identified Wallace and Ortiz,” Trooper Jeremiah Donovan remembers. “We knew there were ties to Bristol. And when we got to the house, Wednesday evening, they were actually having a house party.”
The little blue house was full of people. Out in the yard, more people had gathered around the grill.
Aaron’s Uncle Tito stood in the doorway, watching the police arrive, with a tumbler of vodka in his hand. Detective Peter Dauphinais knew Tito. He walked up and said, “Hey, Tito, we have a search.”
“Any search is antagonistic,” Trooper Donovan says. “It’s not like police show up at your house and you make them coffee. But we didn’t show up with a SWAT team or anything like that, and the party was winding down anyway. I wouldn’t say people were running away. It wasn’t like a bunch of gang members sitting there, drinking forties on the porch. It was more like a family cookout.
“While searching the house, we saw a picture that someone ended up selling to TMZ—a selfie Aaron had taken, where he’s holding a Glock up in front of a mirror. So we knew there was a connection to Aaron. But more importantly, there was a garage. The windows were painted over, but somebody had done a crappy job so we could see inside, and we saw a Toyota 4Runner. The garage was part of our search warrant, so we asked Gina whose car it was.”
Hernandez had left the car there a year earlier, Gina said. No one had driven it since. That much seemed true: The SUV had been detailed, but it was covered in dust and cobwebs. Its battery was dead. But the license plate number—635035—matched the number on a 4Runner that could be seen on surveillance footage taken from Cure, the nightclub in Boston, on the night of the double murder.
“We wrote the license plate down,” Donovan says. “A Rhode Island registration. We had no idea what it meant. And we were there in Bristol all night.
“The next day, we had a meeting. No matter where you were, you either called in to the meeting or tried to get to it. Mike Elliott was there. Eric Benson was there. Bill McCauley, the Bristol County DA, was there. McCauley had spoken with Patrick Haggen, the Suffolk County DA, and Pat had told him, ‘Hey, Hernandez was at a club last summer where there was a shooting, and we’re looking for a silver SUV with this license plate.’ It wasn’t even official—it was casual, Pat had just happened to mention it. But when Bill mentioned this, I looked at my notes and thought, Ah, what do you know? This is the car that we found in Bristol.”
In the course of their search of the house on Lake Avenue, police recovered a DOC intake sheet for Ernest Wallace, a Connecticut Prison ID card for Carlos Ortiz, a Kel-Tec gun box, a box of Speer Lawman brand .38-caliber cartridges (containing forty-seven shells), a box of Punta Hueca brand .38-caliber cartridges, four child’s drawings—and a bag full of clothes that matched the ones Aaron had been wearing that night.
But the police had more than the car Aaron had been driving on the night of that murder, and more than the clothes he had worn.
As soon as ballistics came in on the .38 Special, they also had a murder weapon: the gun recovered from Jailene’s car was the same one that had been used to kill Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. By June 27, the day of Hernandez’s bail hearing for the Odin Lloyd murder, the results of the parallel investigation into the 2012 murders had leaked, with Boston’s Fox affiliate breaking the story.
“Hernandez being looked at in connection to double homicide in Boston,” the headline read.