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FALL RIVER – Prosecutors delivered their opening statements in the murder trial of Aaron Hernandez on Thursday, telling jurors that the former NFL star's DNA was found at the scene of Odin Lloyd's murder and surveillance video shows him and two accomplices preparing for the crime.
In the early morning hours of June 17, 2013, Lloyd was shot six times. Prosecutor Michael Bomberg said forensic evidence shows all six bullets were fired from a Glock .45, and Hernandez's own home surveillance video shows him carrying that type of gun.
The same security system, Bomberg said, showed Hernandez, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz preparing to kill him.
Records show Hernandez texted Wallace on June 16 and asked him to come from Bristol, Conn., to Massachusetts. Ortiz "tagged along," according to Bomberg, and the pair waited in Hernandez's basement for him to come home.
Bomberg said the three left after 1 a.m. in a rented Nissan Altima with Wallace driving. They headed south, and called Lloyd with Wallace's phone 5 times. Records from cell phone towers showed they turned north after the first phone call.
At some point, Hernandez took over as the driver and they picked up Lloyd, Bomberg said. They headed west on the Mass. Pike and went through the Weston tollbooth without paying, so a photo of the license plate was taken automatically.
Lloyd died minutes later, Bomberg said, and the three alleged killers returned to Hernandez's home in the Altima, which was now missing a side view mirror. Hernandez later traded that car for another one, which Wallace drove back to Bristol. A shell casing was recovered from the Altima and matched to the same bullets that killed Lloyd, he said.
His body was found at the North Attleborough Industrial Park by a high school freshman, Matthew Kent, who was running home from a nearby gym.
Defense attorney Michael Fee was dismissive of the prosecution's case, calling it "not true."
"Be on the lookout for evidence ... that is twisted or the evidence they ignored or when they only tell you part of the story," said Fee. "We're going to point those out to you."
He characterized Hernandez, whom he called Aaron throughout his opening statement, as a loving fiancé and father, a great athlete and a generous friend. Fee said it was not suspicious that Hernandez rented cars.
"Aaron was always renting cars!" he said, adding he had rented 25 cars from Enterprise in the year-and-a-half prior to the murder, five of which were Nissan Altimas. "It wasn't part of a murder plot. It was part of his everyday existence. Sometimes he loaned them to his friends."
Fee also disputed the idea that Hernandez was filmed holding a gun at his home, saying it could be an iPod, a television remote control or anything else.
"And if you think it's a gun, what kind of gun is it? If you think it's a gun, does that mean it belongs to Aaron Hernandez?" he said.
Fee argued that if Hernandez had anything to hide, he could have disabled his own cameras or deleted the video, which he did not, even though he had sole control of the hardware and the files for two days after the murder.
"Odin Lloyd was one of Aaron's friends," Fee said.
They met in 2012 because Lloyd was dating Hernanez's fiancée's sister and Lloyd provided Hernandez with marijuana, according to Fee. Hernandez's lifestyle was not unusual for a 23-year-old, unmarried professional athlete. He drank, smoked marijuana, and went to nightclubs with his friends, including Lloyd, he said.
Fee accused police of wanting Hernandez to be guilty of the murder and mistreating those whose statements differed from their narrative.
The night before the murder, Hernandez "was just itching to go out with the guys," said Fee.
The day of, he texted his friends Father's Day greetings. He and his family went to the zoo and had a picnic. Hernandez, Jenkins and two other couples went to dinner and "lingered for several hours," he said, before showing jurors a photo of six people, including Hernandez, with their arms around each other.
"You decide (if he is) the subject of the story you just heard" from prosecutors, he said.
A storm was rolling in when police arrived at the crime scene, prosecutors said, so they collected as much evidence as possible and covered the rest to protect it from the elements. They allegedly found a marijuana "joint" with Hernandez's and Lloyd's DNA on it, along with footwear impressions that matched Hernandez's shoes and tire tracks that matched the rented Nissan.
"Aaron Hernandez did not murder his friend Odin Lloyd, nor did he ask or orchestrate anyone else to murder him," Fee contended. "The police and the prosecutors targeted him from the very beginning."
"Why would Aaron Hernandez do this?" he said. "He had the world at his feet."
After opening statements, two witnesses testified: Lorne Giroux, the owner of the landscaping company where Lloyd worked, and Matthew Kent, the teenager who found his body.
Giroux said Lloyd was the kind of man who showed up to work 10 minutes early, and wore a tie to the job interview, which he called "unusual" for someone trying to get a job as a laborer. It was unusual that Lloyd did not show up for work on Monday, June 17, 2013, and he found out the next day that he had been killed.
Kent said he came across Lloyd's body when he took a shortcut home through the industrial park. He stopped about 20 feet away when he saw a man lying on his back. He asked if he was okay, but received no answer, and went for help.
วันศุกร์ที่ 20 ธันวาคม พ.ศ.2556 เวลา 17:30 น.