Photo Credit: CBS Boston
Aaron Hernandez is currently serving life in prison for the murder of Odin Lloyd but is now getting ready for a double murder case. In a pretrial hearing on Tuesday, a survivor from the 2012 shooting identified the former New England Patriots star as the man who pulled the trigger.
Raychides Sanches pointed to Hernandez when asked by one of Hernandez’s attorneys, Jose Baez, who fired the gun that killed Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu.
“What did the shooter look like?” Baez asked.
“Looked like him,” Sanches replied, nodding in the direction of the defense table where Hernandez was seated. “Hernandez.”
During more than an hour of dramatic testimony, Sanches told the court he watched his two longtime friends die before his eyes. He said “there was screaming, crying, crazy.”
Asked by Baez if he was splattered with blood, Sanches responded: “Hell yeah, a lot of blood.”
The shooting began, Sanches said, when a man approached their car, said “What’s up, Negro?” and opened fire, causing a car window to explode. He said the gunman was “light-skinned” with a “thin face, younger than him, clean-shaven and wearing a hat with a design on it.”
The second surviving victim, Aquilino Freire, said he was shot twice and remembered the shooter firing with his left hand. He described the shooter as light-skinned, with no beard and sporting tattoos.
Hernandez’s high-priced legal team, of course, does not want the survivors to take the stand when the trial starts Feb. 13. Baez questioned the witnesses on how much of their testimony was based on first-hand recall and how much was based on media coverage. Both witnesses said they watched television coverage related to Hernandez and saw a TMZ photo of the former NFL star taking a mirror selfie with the phone in one hand, and a gun in the other. The defense argued their testimony is unreliable and should be excluded.
Judge Jeffrey Locke said he would take the motion under advisement. The two sides are due back in court Dec. 27 to argue additional pre-trial motions.
