Carol Bailey is a retired biology professor who still lives next door to Aaron’s old apartment in Franklin. On warm days, she sits out in the courtyard, minding her two cats and getting to know her neighbors.
“It’s an apartment complex,” she explains. “I was in number 11. He was in number 12. We shared a common wall in the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and one of the bedrooms. Because the wall is made out of cement blocks, and extremely insulated, I wasn’t able to hear anything. But the hallway doors are not soundproofed at all. I had to pass his unit on the way out of the building. When I did, I could hear and smell anything from inside.
“Number 12 had been empty for a while. Then it was bought by a local real estate agent. I would see him coming and going. A certain amount of work went into the place. I knew they were getting ready to rent it. Somebody mentioned that someone connected to the New England Patriots would be moving in.
“Well, this is a not the high-rent district. This is an affordable area. I pictured a statistician moving in, or a groundskeeper. Goodness knows, I didn’t picture a football player! But one day, I went out into a courtyard and an SUV—a big one—drove in. I didn’t recognize it and thought, ‘Oh, this is someone who doesn’t live here.’ Then that person parked the car and got out. I said, ‘Hi! Are you moving in?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Oh, you must be my new neighbor!’ He said, ‘I’m moving in with my cousin, Aaron,’ but it didn’t register with me. He might as well have said ‘Alan,’ or ‘Adrian.’ But he was very pleasant, we had a very nice chat, and then he went in.”
Bailey’s new neighbor told her that his name was “George.” Then, a day or two later, another vehicle that Bailey did not recognize drove into the courtyard. “This was a great, big, black Hummer,” Bailey says. “The guy who got out was tall. He’s got gray sweatpants and a gray hoodie. I said, ‘Hi! You must be my other new neighbor. You must be George’s cousin!’
“He looked at me and grunted. That was it. I could see his face very clearly, and a little later I went online, looked up Patriots players, and saw one named Aaron Hernandez who looked exactly like the man I had seen.”
Sometimes “George” and Aaron would come in together. Sometimes they came and went separately.
“Whenever I would see George,” Bailey says, “he would give me a great big smile and wave and say pleasant things: ‘Nice day’ or ‘How’re you doing.’ Every time Aaron came or went and I said anything to him, he either ignored me or grunted. I didn’t see him very often. He probably came in later in the evening, when I had come in from the courtyard. But then I’d be sitting here, getting my supper, and all of a sudden, a strange smell would come in under my door from the hallway.
“At first, I didn’t know what it was. It smelled like a skunk, and I’m a wildlife biologist, so I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! There’s a skunk in the neighborhood!’ But when I went out on my balcony and sniffed, there was no skunk smell outside, and as I got closer to my living room door, the smell got stronger. When I opened the door into the hallway, it was considerably stronger. I thought, ‘That’s funny. That skunky smell is coming from the hallway. Then, I began to notice that the smell would happen late in the afternoon, early in the evening, or later in the evening.
“At some point, I asked a young couple who were neighbors in the complex: ‘There’s a strange smell in the hallway and it seems to be coming from my new next-door neighbors. It smells sort of like skunk.’ They looked at each other and made funny faces. One said, ‘That’s pot.’ The other one said simultaneously, ‘That’s weed.’ I thought, ‘My gosh, that’s strange because that’s not what it smelled like when I was in college.’
“One thing I neglected to mention is that, from that very first day that he walked by and grunted, wearing the hoodie and all, it occurred to me that my neighbor didn’t want it to be known who he was or that he was living here. I thought, ‘I will respect his privacy. I won’t say anything.’ If people asked I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ But no one asked. No one said anything. I got the feeling that other people didn’t know—or that, if they did know, they did like I’d done. They wanted to respect his privacy, too.
“Then I found out that he had a mansion in North Attleboro and realized this was his getaway. He didn’t want to smoke pot at home with his baby and his girlfriend, so he came here to hang out and do guy things. There wasn’t so much smoke that it bothered me, and George was always very pleasant. I live on the third floor. If I was carrying heavy groceries, he was happy to help. One day he knocked on my door. He had a plug-in air-freshener in his hand and two little glass vases with liquid and sticks in them. He said, ‘Do you mind if I put these in the hallway? Because sometimes it smells out here and these might help. He put the plug-in at one end of the hallway, and the vials with the liquid and sticks coming out at the other end. One of those vials is still out there.”
A few weeks later, Bailey recalls, “I was coming home and two reporters came out of their car. They said, ‘We have a video clip to show you from Florida.’ They opened up their laptop, or whatever the heck it was. They didn’t say anything else—they just showed me the video. It was someone being arraigned in front of a judge. The judge was saying, ‘Give us your full name please.’ He was talking to a black man with salt-and-pepper hair, like George had. The man looked to be about the same age as George. When the man said, ‘My name is Ernest George Wallace,’ I thought: ‘By golly, that’s George!’”