On Thursday, March 26, a bomb threat was called in to the courthouse.
The evacuation was orderly, if tense.
“There is absolutely no reason to believe that the interruption was in any way related to this case,” Judge Garsh assured the jury, after the building had been swept for explosives and cleared.
The call was a hoax, it turned out. But the bomb threat set the stage for a sensational turn in the case: After months of speculation, in the media as well as the courtroom, about whether Shayanna would be called to the stand, it was revealed that same day that Jenkins would be testifying on Friday.
The trial had gone on for two months already. But, as yet, there was no smoking gun.
In fact, there was no gun at all.
According to Assistant DA Bomberg, this was because Shayanna had disposed of the murder weapon. As a result, circumstantial evidence was all that Assistant DA Bomberg had to work with. But as that evidence kept piling up, it seemed, more and more, to point to Aaron.
Shayanna had been there for most of the trial—though she was conspicuously absent when the nanny, Jennifer Fortier, testified. Shayanna wore the big engagement ring that Aaron had gotten her. She and Aaron smiled at each other whenever the opportunity arose. They blew kisses. They mouthed the words “I love you.” And when Shayanna did take the stand, she proved herself to be utterly loyal to Aaron.
The prosecution had a problem: Lawyers are not allowed to call a witness whose testimony they know to be false—and, following her testimony before the grand jury, Shayanna had been indicted for perjury. As a result, Aaron’s lawyers argued, the DAs could not call Jenkins to the stand—unless the DA had reason to believe that her testimony would be substantively different on matters that she had been charged with lying about. Judge Garsh agreed, and ruled that the prosecution would only be allowed to question Shayanna about matters that were not elements of the perjury charges. Because Shayanna had been accused of lying about twenty-nine specific matters, this restriction put the prosecution at a distinct disadvantage. But Jenkins was at a disadvantage as well. Weeks earlier, at the prosecution’s request, she had been granted immunity from prosecution as an accessory to murder. But this also meant that she could no longer plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid incriminating herself. As a result, both sides had to tread carefully. Nevertheless, Jenkins’s testimony was more dramatic than anything that the jury had heard.
The DA began by asking Shayanna about the night after Odin Lloyd’s murder.
Shayanna described driving Aaron to the police station. Afterward, “when he got home from the police station,” she said, “when I had found out that Odin was murdered, I asked him if he did it. He said, ‘No.’ And that was the extent of our conversation.”
She also recalled a text message Aaron had sent her, asking her to get rid of a black box that they had in the basement.
She described a black gun she had found in a junk drawer, and the “stern look” she gave Aaron afterward.
When she went back to the junk drawer, she said, the gun was no longer there. But when the DA showed her a still from a video of Hernandez holding a similar gun, she said the image was too vague to make out—“only a black blob it looks like”—and when he showed her an actual Glock, she recoiled.
“It’s a secured firearm?” she asked, as the gun was placed in front of her.
When the DA asked Shayanna if she and Shaneah were “close, as sisters,” Shayanna winced and did not answer.
“Have you been in the past, ma’am?” the DA persisted.
Shayanna grimaced. “I, I mean we’re…estranged, kind of,” she said.
When the DA played the video surveillance footage of Shayanna and Shaneah embracing, Shaneah ran out of the courtroom in tears.
When Shayanna resumed her testimony, on Monday, Shaneah was not in the courtroom. Whatever bond the two sisters still shared had been shattered, once and for all.
The DA dove right in, asking Shayanna about her role in disposing of evidence that was crucial to the prosecution’s case against Hernandez.
Specifically, the DA had in mind a black box that, he believed, contained the Glock .45 that Aaron had shot Odin Lloyd with.
“I was instructed to take it out of the home,” Jenkins said.
“Was it important to him for you to get rid of it?” the DA asked.
“Yes.”
“You were also asked [by a grand jury] whether you had taken certain steps to cover or conceal or hide the box when you removed it from the home?”
“Yes.”
“Do you recall doing that?”
“Yes.”
“In fact, when you took that box out, and concealed it, were you attempting to do that in a way so people didn’t know what you were doing?”
“That’s correct.”
Jenkins said that the box weighed about forty pounds and smelled “skunky.” She had assumed it contained marijuana. But when Bomberg asked her if she had looked inside of the box she said, “No.”
When she was asked how she had disposed of it she said, “A dumpster.”
When she was asked to be more specific she said, “I can’t remember.”
Over the course of ten hours of testimony, Shayanna had uttered the phrases “I can’t remember,” “Not that I can remember,” “I can’t recall,” “I’m not sure,” and “I have no idea,” so many times they began to sound like a mantra.