The chill that ran down my spine stemmed from the sense that a convicted murderer’s eyes were locked on me.
The forthcoming sixth episode of the AppleTV+ documentary “The Dynasty: New England Patriots” wastes no time diving into the dichotomy of Aaron Hernandez, who “snookered” team owner Robert Kraft with father-son-like kisses on the cheek but scared teammates long before he was found guilty of killing Odin Lloyd in 2013 and accused (found not guilty) of two other murders.
The opening scene shows Hernandez at a casual photo shoot, laughing at instructions to “show a lot of attitude” before he folds his arms and stares straight into the camera, holding a tough-guy pose that can’t help but be interpreted differently now than how it was originally intended.
When he breaks character, Hernandez is all smiles.
The events that led to Hernandez’s not-so-secret-from-teammates lifestyle of drugs and violence — and ultimately to the execution-style shooting of Lloyd — have been chronicled in many forms, but “The Dynasty” packages rare behind-the-scenes footage with memories of haunted former Patriots.
The Post was granted screener’s access to review episodes, four of which currently are available.
“I have some moments where I’m just like, ‘You should’ve seen that,’” Deion Branch, Hernandez’s neighbor and self-described closest friend on the team, said in an episode that will be released Friday.
Foreshadowing the harrowing events is the sight of Hernandez standing in a crowd of players at the 2010 NFL Rookie Symposium to ask Cris Carter how he turned around his once-troubled life and became a Hall of Famer.
“I told my old friends, ‘Don’t call me,’” Carter responded. “This should be the fork in the road right now for a lot of you all to get your stuff together before you get popped — because you are going to get caught.”
The message never reached Hernandez, who was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder when he committed suicide in 2017.
Tragedy is the lens through which it must be viewed when Hernandez is later asked in a seemingly joking tone by an unseen and unidentified cameraman on the street about the price of a bounty on his head, during a scene presented without context.
The documentary’s copyright holder is “Kraft Dynasty LLC 2024” and all 10 episodes are very much presented from ownership’s viewpoint.
There is the Hernandez that Kraft saw — or chose to see: Someone who “has a good heart,” Kraft told head coach Bill Belichick during an undated conversation at a practice; who donated $50,000 to the Myra Kraft Fund Giving Back Fund after signing his $40 million contract extension in 2012; who Kraft thinks saw him as a paternal figure; who Kraft trusted when he said that he did not commit the murder, to the point that the billionaire initially offered to pay for Hernandez’s defense lawyer.
And then there is the Hernandez that teammates warned each other not to hang out with outside of the facility for their own safety; the one that Tom Brady enraged by kicking out of a practice walk-through one day when was goofing around; the one that Brandon Lloyd — given a locker next to Hernandez after signing as a free agent — remembers being told by teammate Wes Welker to ignore it when he would “fondle his genitalia in front of you” or “talk about bathing with his mom.”
“It was like Wes had seen a ghost, the way he was looking at me,” Lloyd said. “In the locker room, we get away with saying a lot of offensive and disturbing things. But what Aaron was saying deviated far off the norm of locker-room bulls–ting around.”
Ultimately, the episode’s underlying question is whether the Patriots — particularly, Belichick — put too much trust in “The Patriot Way” of players buying into a team-first culture and the locker room policing itself, and treated Hernandez by a different set of rules because he was important to winning at a time when the Patriots were in a Super Bowl drought.
It was Belichick, according to Patriots president Jonathan Kraft, who still was reluctant to release Hernandez even after his televised arrest, preferring to let the legal process play out for the sake of competitive advantages.
The Patriots cut Hernandez on the same day as his arrest, but his presence clearly still haunts many who knew him.
The episode ends on a moment unlike any other in the series.
No championship celebrated, no relatively foolish football-only controversies explained.
Life and death.
“We messed up in this one,” Robert Kraft admits. “For those of you who feel pain, I apologize.”
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
