It was a little past nine in the morning, on February 25, 2014, and Aaron was in his cell in the Special Management unit.
On a previous occasion, as corrections officers were locking him in for the night, Hernandez had beaten his chest like King Kong. “I’m like that truck,” he had said. “Tough. I’m built for this shit.”
Now, Aaron set out to prove how tough he was.
Exiting his cell, which was unlocked at that hour, he approached Corrections Officer Kevin Sousa, who was escorting a shackled inmate down a set of stairs.
According to Sousa, Hernandez “had a smile on his face.”
Still, Sousa was suspicious. He ordered Hernandez to back up and return to his cell. But Hernandez refused the order, and punched the shackled inmate in the face.
Another corrections officer called a Code Blue. Two COs restrained Hernandez, who turned to the inmate he had punched and said, “Go ahead, run your mouth now!”
When the scuffle was over, the inmate Hernandez had punched explained that, on a previous occasion, Hernandez had passed by his cell and said, “Why you looking at me?”
“I’m a Patriots fan,” the inmate had said.
According to him, the beef was just “typical jail shit.”
“I don’t want to press charges against Hernandez and you will never get me in court to testify,” the inmate told the COs. He had a bruised elbow and a bump on his head. (“I could give two shits about a bump and a bruise,” the inmate said.) But he was proud of getting in the last word.
“You’re a bitch,” he’d told Hernandez, as they were being separated. “I still look good enough to fuck your girl.”
Afterward, Hernandez was charged with assault and battery and given two weeks of straight-up solitary confinement. Publicly, Sheriff Hodgson voiced his surprise over the incident. “We were so worried about protecting him,” he said, “we never thought that he would be the aggressor…”
Privately, Hodgson had already gotten to know Hernandez well enough to see just how troublesome he could be.
Within a few weeks of arriving at the jail, Hernandez had been led out into the hall for a routine search of his cell. Watching the officers going through his correspondence, he had gotten upset.
“You’re not allowed to read my legal mail,” Aaron yelled.
Three times, Hernandez had to be told to back away.
When the search ended, the officers asked Hernandez about a piece of paper he was holding in his hand. They had seen what Aaron had written on it: “MOB.”
Hernandez told them that the acronym meant “Money Over Bitches.”
The officers told him that, in prison, “MOB” meant “Member Of Bloods.”
Hernandez became enraged. “What if I don’t give this back to you?” he asked. “What the fuck you all gonna do about it?”
The officers told Hernandez that he would be given a disciplinary report.
“I don’t give a fuck about no disciplinary report,” he replied. “I’ll eat the motherfucker.”
In the end, Aaron did get the report—and, to the officers’ amazement, he did eat it.
When Sheriff Hodgson found out, he went to see Hernandez in his cell.
“I walked through the door,” Hodgson would say, “and I looked at him and just went, ‘I am so disappointed in you. I can’t believe that you acted the way you acted.’”
“Well that’s bullshit,” Aaron replied, testily. “They was going through my stuff!”
“Excuse me,” the sheriff said. “Why are you yelling at me? Am I yelling at you? What I’m seeing right now, that’s not the Aaron Hernandez I know.”
Aaron calmed down. He had grown to respect the sheriff, even to trust him to an extent. On several occasions, the men talked about their lives, their faith, and lessons imparted by their fathers. But while Hodgson administered pep talks, it fell to his staff to discipline Hernandez.
Once, after Aaron had been placed on disciplinary detention status, he managed to have a care package delivered from the jail’s commissary: cakes, breakfast bars, and two dozen honey buns.
“I’m smart, dude,” Aaron told Major James Lancaster, the following day, when corrections officers asked him about the delivery. “I knew you were going to be coming this morning for this stuff.”
When Lancaster told Hernandez he was not allowed to order food in detention, Hernandez said, “I know. That’s why I ate as much of the food as I could before you came in.”
Major Lancaster ended up confiscating four honey buns. True to his word, Hernandez had eaten the other twenty and kept the wrappers to show the officers, in case they accused him of passing honey buns out to other inmates.
“Could I eat the last four honey buns?” Aaron asked.
“No.”
“Why?” Hernandez said. “I am so hungry!”
Other infractions were far more serious. One month after testing positive for Neurontin, Hernandez was cited for possessing paraphernalia signaling his allegiance to the Bloods. Five weeks later, when a corrections officer denied him an extra meal, Aaron called the officer “a scared bitch” and said that, when he got out, he would kill the officer and shoot his family.
“After stating this, inmate Hernandez appeared to make a noise that sounded like a machine gun,” the officer wrote in his report.
“I did not say I was going to kill him or his family,” Hernandez said, in his own defense. “I said if I see COs that act tough in jail, out of jail, I’m going to slap the shit out of them.”
Several disciplinary reports describe fights that Aaron got into with other inmates, and occasions when he was found with improvised tattoo guns, or “fishing lines” that were made from torn sheets and tubes of toothpaste, and used by prisoners to pass notes.
“He is constantly kicking his cell door and screaming at the top of his lungs,” corrections officer Joshua Pacheco wrote in one report, “utilizing profanity at times when he wants something, regardless of how minuscule it is. It is not uncommon for Hernandez to kick his cell door constantly until an officer approaches his cell merely to ask the officer for the current time, this to him is comical, causing a disruption in normal operation within the unit.”
All in all, in the course of ten months that he spent in the Bristol County jail’s segregated unit, Hernandez racked up 120 days in solitary confinement.
He seemed to hold Officer Pacheco in special contempt. Once, while Aaron was in the middle of one of his workouts, he told the officer that he had a peculiar dream:
Thanks to a disciplinary report that Pacheco had given him, Aaron had dreamed that an upcoming visitation with his daughter had been canceled.
“But,” Aaron told the officer, “the dream changed locations. You and your family were on vacation and I was chasing you.”
Hernandez was glaring hard at Pacheco as he said this. The only weapon at Pacheco’s disposal was a canister of Mace. He was thinking of reaching for it when Aaron said, “then the dream ended,” and turned back to his workout.
Pacheco reported the incident as a threat to his family. Aaron denied this: “It was just a dream,” he explained. “Was not meant to be threatening and was taken out of context.”
Hernandez got off with a verbal warning. But a month later, in July, he had another run-in with Pacheco.
Lunch for the Special Management inmates arrived in Styrofoam containers. The stench of the gray food inside crept into every corner of the unit. On July 5, it was Officer Pacheco’s turn to deliver it. As Hernandez saw the officer approach, he yelled: “I need to be your father figure and show you how to be a man! Show you how to have your balls drop! I didn’t know the Army created little boys and not men!”
When Pacheco left the unit, Hernandez called out again: “I haven’t had any more dreams about you,” he hollered.