On Tuesday, July 16, three weeks after Aaron’s arrival at the Bristol County jail, Sheriff Thomas Hodgson held a press conference to discuss his famous new inmate.
“Hernandez is locked in a seven-by-ten-foot cell for twenty-one hours a day,” Hodgson told the assembled reporters. “The rest of his time is spent in the exercise yard, making collect phone calls, or taking a hot shower. He doesn’t have any physical contact with other inmates, but that’s mostly for his own safety.”
Reporters were given a tour of the Special Management unit, where Hernandez was being held in near-solitary confinement.
“We’re assessing how the inmates are reacting to him right now in this smaller unit,” Hodgson said as he ushered the reporters into a gray cell.
General population inmates were allowed outside, the sheriff explained. They could see trees and grass, and interact with other inmates. But for his own safety, Hernandez had been denied these privileges. He was allowed outside for just one hour a day, and during that hour he was alone, in a cement yard that contained three chain-link cages topped with tin roofs and razor wire. He worked out in one of the cages, running extremely short laps and doing push-ups, squats, and sit-ups as a corrections officer watched.
The reporters wanted to know: How did Aaron Hernandez like this arrangement?
“I think he’d like to be out in general population playing basketball,” Hodgson admitted.
One of the several reasons that Aaron had not been put into general population was that Sheriff Hodgson was trying to determine whether rumors about his gang ties were true.
“My gang investigators went in and interviewed him,” Hodgson says. “When they came out, they said, ‘We think he probably is tied into the Bloods. But we can’t be absolutely positive.’”
Hodgson, who prided himself on his skills as an interrogator, decided that he would investigate the matter himself. On Saturday, his day off, he arrived at the jail in shorts and a golf shirt and sat down to speak with Hernandez.
“I started talking casually to him,” the sheriff recalls. “About life and his family. Then I said, ‘I want to talk to you about those tattoos.’”
“Oh, no, it’s not the Bloods,” Aaron said. According to Hernandez, the tattoos advertised a local gang from Bristol, Connecticut.
Then Aaron said, “Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” the sheriff replied.
“Did you wear those shorts in here to get me to relax?”
“What are you, an idiot?” Hodgson said. “I’m on my day off. You think I’m going to get dressed up in a suit and tie to come and talk to you? You’ve got to be shitting me.”
Hernandez laughed, the sheriff remembers.
“Let me tell you something,” Aaron said. “I pay attention to what goes on. And I’m the best at reading people.”
“I bet you are, but you’re not the best,” Hodgson said. “You’re not better than I am.”
“Oh, yeah, I am.”
“Really? Do you know about the key motivations in people?”
“What do you mean?”
“There are three different types of motivations in people: kinesthetic, auditory, and visual.”
Hernandez looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“You’re a visual type.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because every time I talk to you, you’ll say, ‘That looks good.’ If you were an auditory type, you’d say, ‘That rings a bell.’ If you were kinesthetic you’d talk about your feelings: ‘That feels good to me,’ you would say.”
Aaron was impressed. He said “Wow,” and Sheriff Hodgson felt encouraged to continue.
“You know how to overcome your behaviors?” he asked.
“No,” said Aaron.
“Let’s say that you’re overweight, and go by a Burger King. You’ve already lost ten pounds, but now you’re thinking about hamburgers. You haven’t had one in a while. And now your body’s reacting to what you’re thinking. You argue with yourself, but you lose. So you get your hamburger and some French fries, and you’re driving down the road eating them, thinking ‘Son of a bitch. I should not be eating these.’”
Aaron appeared to be paying close attention to the story.
“The way you overcome that,” Hodgson said, “is to shatter the picture you have and create a new one. Take a picture of yourself, from when you were twenty pounds lighter. Stick it up on your visor. And whenever you think about breaking your diet, pull the visor down and look at that picture. It will reframe you, and teach you to refrain from the things you want to refrain from.”
Aaron nodded. He said “wow” again. The sheriff may not have established the matter of whether he had ties to the Bloods, but Hodgson had taught Hernandez something about impulse control. And, of course, Aaron’s issues with impulse control were the very thing that had landed him in jail in the first place.