Guards flagged convicted murderer Aaron Hernandez for allegedly possessing a shank in his cell at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts.
Call it “unsportsmanlike conduct.” Or, perhaps more accurately, dub it very Aaron-like conduct.
Boston’s WHDH reports that guards found the improvised jailhouse knife during a shakedown of the former New England Patriots tight end’s cell. The guards moved Hernandez into a segregation unit to separate him from the general prison population. He’s a bad guy even among bad guys.
Whether Hernandez planned to use the shiv heroically to stop a jailhouse rapist as Tom Selleck did in An Innocent Man, to eliminate a rival from the streets as Esai Morales hoped to do to Sean Penn in Bad Boys, or to kill a guard in an escape attempt as Reese Witherspoon and a prison pal rather unrealistically did in Freeway remains unknown. What seems clear in hindsight is that all those tattoos on a man who rode neither a motorcycle nor a seafaring vessel should have screamed “villain.”
Certainly the former fourth-round pick appears as a less than model inmate. In May, Hernandez allegedly served as a lookout for a gang-related prison fight. He also violated prison rules by receiving a “LIFETIME” tattoo while incarcerated for, well, a lifetime. In early 2014, he reportedly got into a brief physical altercation with another inmate. If only the warden had watched The Longest Yard he might have figured out a way to solve his Aaron Hernandez problem.
Cops on the cold-case units of Bristol, Connecticut, Gainesville, Florida, and Foxborough, Massachusetts would be wise to trace Aaron Hernandez’s whereabouts on during crimes still in question. Earlier this year a jury convicted the national champion at the University of Florida of killing friend Odin Lloyd. He awaits trial for murdering two immigrants in a drive-by shooting in Boston in 2012. At least he never promised to find the “real” killers.
Over three NFL seasons, Hernandez caught 18 touchdown passes and accumulated 1,956 receiving yards. He snagged a Tom Brady touchdown pass during Super Bowl 46. Lining up in the backfield, split wide, or tight against a tackle, the hybrid weapon played as extraordinarily difficult to gameplan against. Shanks prove difficult to gameplan against, too.