Jose Baez had studied the testimony that Bradley had given, in the Odin Lloyd murder trial, carefully.
“I thought he could hurt us,” the lawyer would say. “This was no ghetto superstar. He was going to come across well.”
Bradley did come across well. He made no bones about having been a professional drug dealer. He described the night of the murders in great detail. He described the night Aaron Hernandez had shot him.
Bradley was wearing a button-down shirt and square, rimless glasses. The prosthetic eye in his right eye socket seemed to stare straight ahead, eerily, as he went, point by point, through the text messages that he and Hernandez had exchanged in the wake of that shooting.
When the prosecutor asked Bradley why he had refused to tell police in Florida who the shooter had been, he said, “I didn’t want to tell. That’s not the route I wanted to take. I didn’t want to tell on Mr. Hernandez, I wanted revenge…I wanted to make it even.”
Watching him testify, it was easy to understand Hernandez’s anxiety and paranoia.
“I didn’t want to talk to the police,” Bradley said. “I wanted Mr. Hernandez. I wanted his life.”
When it came to Alexander Bradley, Hernandez’s paranoia had been justified.
Jose Baez began his cross-examination by calling Bradley a liar.
“Mr. Bradley, this whole spilled drink incident is something you’re completely making up, isn’t it?” he asked.
Bradley did not rise to the bait. He remained calm and polite, addressing the lawyer as “Mr. Baez” and “Sir” as he denied each and every allegation.
Hernandez pulled on his lip, nervously, as he followed along.
“Now,” Baez asked, “after being shot in Florida, you did not cooperate with the police?”
“Correct,” Bradley replied. “Correct.”
“And that’s because you didn’t know who shot you.”
“That is incorrect.”
“You know who shot you?”
“Most certainly.”
“And you knew the details of who shot you, and how?”
“Extensively.”
“Okay. And you refused to cooperate with the police…You then consulted with a lawyer…and then you sent all those text messages that we went over, right?”
“At some point, yes.”
“And your intent was to get money from Aaron Hernandez.”
Bradley hesitated for a moment, then said, “At a point that became my intent, yes.”
“And I know—we know—you wanted to kill him, too, right?”
Bradley hesitated again before he leaned into the microphone.
“Yes,” he admitted, and Baez pounced.
“Because you’re a killer,” the lawyer said.
The DA objected.
The judge said, “Sustained.”
But Baez had made his point.
According to Baez, the Florida shooting was another example of yet another drug deal gone bad. Bradley denied it. But, he went on to concede, death was an occupational hazard in his line of work.
“Dealing drugs is a very violent business, is it not?” Baez asked.
“It can be,” Bradley admitted.
All in all, Bradley spent three days on the stand. Before letting him go, Baez scored one more point that would resonate with the jury.
Had Bradley sent his lawyer a text: Now u sure once I withdraw this lawsuit I wont be held on perjury after I tell the truth about me not recalling anything about who shot me?
Bradley did his best to explain: There were no circumstances under which Bradley wanted to bring criminal charges against Hernandez. But how could he appear before a grand jury, and deny any knowledge of the shooting, after filing civil charges that contradicted the very same claim?
“I’m not perjuring myself,” Bradley insisted. But a shadow of a doubt would linger over the drug dealer’s testimony.
The prosecution called Bradley’s baby mama, Brooke Wilcox, next. She told the jury that, in the wee hours of the morning, on the night of the double murder in Boston, Bradley and Hernandez had come to her door.
In the privacy of Brooke’s bedroom, she said, Bradley had told her, “This crazy motherfucker just did some stupid shit.”
“Could you tell who he was referring to?” the DA asked.
“Yes. To Aaron.”
On March 30, Shayanna Jenkins took the stand.
“I played my role,” Shayanna Jenkins told the jury. “I learned to keep my mouth shut.”
Though she seemed to remember even less than she had at Aaron’s trial in 2015, Shayanna did recall that she had never asked Aaron about Alexander Bradley being shot.
“I pick and choose my battles,” she said.
A man named Robert Lindsey testified the next day. He described a phone call he’d gotten on Valentine’s Day, 2013—the day after the Florida shooting.
“It was my cousin…” Lindsey said. “Alexander Bradley. He told me—excuse my language—he told me that, ‘This faggot-ass nigga Aaron shot me in the eye.’”
In the few days that followed, more forensics experts were called to the stand. So were a slew of witnesses who had come up from Belle Glade: Tyrone Crawford, Deonte Thompson, Je’rrelle Pierre.
They recalled even less than Shayanna had.