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Yvonne Abraham

Lives taken, lives unseen

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez. Nancy Lane/POOL/POOL

What on earth happened to Aaron Hernandez?

How did the kid who got so many breaks end up here, in Courtroom 906 at Suffolk Superior Court, convicted of killing one man, accused of killing two others, and of shooting yet another between the eyes in a Florida alley, leaving him for dead?

Hernandez got so many lucky breaks, some of them, like his surreal athleticism, genetic accidents. But his recklessness jeopardized his life and career even before they got started. He should have been a first-round draft pick, but he found so much trouble playing at the University of Florida that he dropped to the fourth round. The Patriots knew he was a huge risk but signed him anyway.

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On the stand, his former friend Alexander Bradley — the one who supplied him with pot and a gun, the one he said he loved but allegedly tried to execute — described how Hernandez told him to “Go, go, go,” after they left a club early one July morning in 2012, ordering him to catch up to a car containing two Cape Verdean immigrants with whom he’d had a brief and stupid bar encounter. Bradley said Hernandez leaned across him and emptied a gun full of bullets into the other car, killing Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. A few weeks later, Hernandez was signed to a massive new $40 million contract with the Pats. About a year after that, Hernandez murdered his friend Odin Lloyd. And in between, he allegedly tried to kill Bradley.

Watching Hernandez listen to the testimony — still looking so young and strong, but destined to spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what happens in this courtroom — you find yourself running through the possibilities. What explains his murderousness, his monumental self-destructiveness, the breathtaking waste of this life?

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Maybe it was losing the father he adored, suddenly, and too soon. Maybe it was his mother’s remarriage that made him rebel. Maybe the crowd he fell in with in his hometown, Bristol, Conn., led him astray. Maybe it was drugs, including, some have suggested, PCP. Maybe he was sick with paranoia. Maybe — and with good cause — he thought he was invincible.

Hernandez was rich and famous, so we wonder these things. He was rich and famous, so we know about his victims’ lives, too: Odin Lloyd was not just some faceless black man lying dead in an industrial park in North Attleborough, but a landscaper and semi-pro football player whose family adored him. The two men Hernandez is accused of killing in the South End had night jobs cleaning, and they didn’t get out much. They had families who treasured them.

Because he was rich and famous, we can’t get enough of this case. The waste on display in Courtroom 906 is infinitely more compelling than, say, that laid bare in the trial that recently wrapped up in Courtroom 815, just downstairs.

There, Raymond Arroyo, 24, was convicted of killing 44-year-old Jose Maldonado. Prosecutors said Arroyo ambushed Maldonado in Mission Hill on the morning of March 31, 2014, shooting him four times on the street, apparently in retaliation for a robbery.

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But that’s just another story of one brown-skinned man killing another. Nobody involved was famously gifted. Nobody had gained the kind of success we agree matters, and thrown it all away.

And so we don’t ask what led Arroyo to the offenses of his youth, what drove him to the point where he’d take another person’s life. If we’re being honest, most of us don’t really care. We don’t know that Maldonado, whose family called him Cay, protected his six younger siblings growing up in Roxbury’s Mission Hill projects, that he was an imperfect but loving father of three, that he was competitive and funny and good at fixing things.

Are Maldonado’s and Arroyo’s lives any less wasted for the absence of big money and fame? Certainly, the people who loved them are no less pained by their absence, but to the rest of us, they are invisible.

Unlike the drama in Courtroom 906, from which we cannot look away.


Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yvonne.abraham@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @GlobeAbraham.