Ex-New England Patriot player Aaron Hernandez finally taken down by a 5-foot-tall lesbian operations manager

[Yahoo News]

FALL RIVER, Mass. – Lesa Strachan stands a little over 5-feet
tall, wears her hair short and works as an area operations
manager here in the small towns of southeastern Massachusetts.
She is everyone. She is no one.

She is not, for sure, rich or famous or celebrated, like Aaron
Hernandez, the NFL star turned murder defendant who was standing
across a Bristol County courtroom from her Wednesday morning.

Lesa Strachan was the forewoman in Hernandez's murder case,
personally selected by the judge because her intelligence and
seriousness and leadership were easy to identify. As part of her
job, Strachan had to rise up, look at Hernandez and read the
verdict. She had to do something for perhaps the first time ever.

She had to hold Aaron Hernandez accountable for his actions.

"Guilty of murder in the first degree," Strachan said to the
court.

Moments later, Hernandez was forced by a court officer to sit
down, no longer afforded the right to stand like the presumed
innocent. He was just another convict now, just another
prisoner, just another punk … life without parole at age 25.
Lesa Strachan, slight of stature, dropped Aaron Hernandez like
no linebacker ever could, called his bluff like no one else ever
apparently would.

She ended his pretend gangster life of guns and tattoos and
pseudo-toughness and shipped him off to prison, shipped him off
to Walpole, just around the corner from Gillette Stadium where
they once cheered his name and handed him $40 million contracts.

Hernandez tried to hide his emotions but couldn't quite pull it
off. He shook his head at the jury and mouthed, "You're wrong,"
in a last futile attempt at intimidation. He looked at his
sobbing fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, and his mother Terri, and
told them to "stay strong, stay strong." Neither one was,
fleeing the court before he was even sentenced.

Finally, there was a brief moment. He was seated between his
attorneys, with two burly bailiffs eyeing his every move before
they threw ankle and wrist shackles on him.

Hernandez sort of leaned back and emitted a soft sigh, the first
flash of reality finally settling in.

____________________

Aaron Hernandez had gotten away with everything, forever,
perhaps even a couple of murders. A sucker punch back in 2007 at
a University of Florida bar that left a bouncer with a ruptured
eardrum ended with no one pressing charges because, well, it's a
college town and he was a potential football star.

An incident in 2007 where two men were shot in their car after a
dispute with some Gator players, including a man described as a
muscular, heavily tattooed "Hawaiian" who matched Hernandez's
description, didn't go far either.

Up in Boston, as a New England Patriot, police knew Hernandez,
back in 2012, was at the same club as a group who upon leaving
were ambushed at a stop light, leaving two dead, one wounded.
Hernandez wasn't considered a suspect because, why would one of
Tom Brady's favorite targets be involved in that?

In February of 2013, the shooting of a friend right between the
eyes after a night at a South Florida strip club, went nowhere
because the friend wouldn't testify; he just wanted to sue
Hernandez for some riches, figuring he'd get a settlement
because he was present for the Boston drive-by.

This was the absurd life Hernandez lived at a million miles an
hour. Failed drug tests in college meant nothing. In the pros,
the NFL system was just too easy to beat. Fame earned him the
benefit of doubt, and if that wasn't enough, the ability to make
everyone money bought him silence.

He never had to be responsible for anything. He treated half his
family like dirt, his friends like employees and his fiancée
like a doormat.

One of the narratives of Hernandez that proved inaccurate in the
face of three months of court testimony is that his hometown of
Bristol, Conn., and the gangsters and criminals from it, dragged
him down. None of that was true.

He wanted that life, coveted that life, embraced that silly
life, where the slightest sign of disrespect meant blasting
away. The people he was around, the "gang" if you will, were
cheap criminals and small-town thugs – Fish, Charlie Boy,
Alexander Bradley, he of the now one eye? They took their orders
from Hernandez, glomming onto his NFL millions, not the other
way around.

Catching Super Bowl passes wasn't enough for Hernandez. The $1.3
million, 7,100-square-foot home in suburbs wasn't either. The
loyal girlfriend and beautiful baby meant nothing. The fame and
adulation were taken for granted.

Hernandez wanted to be tough, or some warped definition of the
term. He wasn't tough. He isn't tough. He could ink up all the
"Blood Sweat Tears" he wanted across his body but he didn't know
the meaning of tough.

Sucker punches and drive-by shootings and needing three guys and
a Glock .45 to attack an unarmed landscaper in a deserted field
in the middle of the night is the opposite of tough.

It's pathetic.

He just played the part and caught the passes and for so long
that was enough. That was all anyone cared about. All behavior
was either excused or not pursued or ignored all together. He
could play football, so the Patriots owner hailed his personal
growth – "He's a super player and really a first-class guy,"
Robert Kraft said in 2012, a month after the double homicide in
Boston – and the schools down in Bristol got him to cut a video
to lecture young students about the values needed to get out, to
climb up.

"Make sure you listen to your teachers," Hernandez told them,
according to the New York Daily News.

____________________

Even his defense team tried to wish it all away. He'd paid the
group a bundle and they were damn fine lawyers, but there was
nothing here to work with. They had to admit he was at the
scene. They had to acknowledge he drove the car that night. They
could only attempt to claim that maybe it was a remote control,
not the murder weapon, he was carrying in the home videos.

Even some of the best legal minds in Massachusetts were left
falling back on the oldest of excuses for young talent, the
lamest of get-out-of-trouble free cards, that he was just dumb
and naïve and deserving of a second chance.
"He was a 23-year-old kid who witnessed something shocking – a
killing committed by somebody he knew," defense attorney James
Sultan argued, blaming it on someone else and mimicking who
knows how many others from Hernandez's past.

Lesa Strachan and her fellow jurors didn't buy it, didn't buy a
word of it, didn't, it seems, buy anything that the defense was
selling for weeks. When the jury members met with the media
after the verdict and was asked what part of the Hernandez smoke-
screen defense was compelling, they offered weak smiles and
nervous laughs and a "no comment."

"The evidence was compelling," juror Sean Traverse said.

Did they consider the defense argument that it was the other
guys with him, hopped up on PCP? Please. How about the testimony
from Shayanna Jenkins about how when she hauled a box with who
knows what in it to a who-knows-where dumpster, it was just an
innocent coincidence? More nervous laughs and shaken heads.

Deliberations, they said, took a week because there was so much
evidence to go through – 135 witnesses, 439 exhibits. They
wanted to be fair to Hernandez. They wanted to follow the
guidelines. They wanted to be precise with the law.

Doubts and debate, there didn't appear to be much of either.

____________________

He'd gotten away with everything, forever, until his arrogance
got the better of him – killing his own friend right near his
home, leaving footprints and DNA behind, returning a rental car
with a shell casing in it, failing to erase his own home
security system. It was a mountain of self-created evidence.

His own stupidity proved to be the prosecution's best witness.

"You're wrong," Hernandez mouthed toward the jury as Shayanna
wailed in pain and apparent disbelief, although that could've
been just another act, too.

The jury never flinched. Not a single one of them.

Aaron Hernandez wasn't as tough as he thought. His tattoos and
vicious looks didn't scare anyone anymore. His ability to catch
passes over the middle carried no value.

Not when he was staring up at Lesa Strachan, no-nonsense Lesa
Strachan, with a verdict sheet in her hand.

“It was the hardest thing that I've done in my life,” Strachan
said.

So hard it sat Aaron Hernandez down, sat him down and out
forever.

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by-a-5-foot-tall-operations-manager-223034962.html