Aaron Hernandez has a very troubled past that many people consider to be disturbing. We may not know the half of it.
What we already know is that Hernandez’s father died when he suffered a fatal infection following a routine hernia surgery when Aaron was 16 years old. His mother, Terri Hernandez, told USA Today Sports in 2009 that Hernandez was “very angry” after losing his father and would “rebel” against her. She said that by 2009 he had become “my Aaron again,” but another traumatic event that took place the following year may have caused some of that anger to return.
In June of 2010 — less than a month after Hernandez signed his first contract with the New England Patriots — Terri Hernandez was stabbed by Jeffrey Cummings, the man she married three years after the death of Hernandez’s father. According to The Daily Beast, Bristol police responded to a 911 call to find Hernandez’s mother bleeding and trembling.
Cummings, who was an ex-con with a criminal record that included assault on a police officer and 19 failed drugs tests for marijuana and cocaine between September 2009 and June 2010, allegedly assaulted and slashed Terri during a verbal argument. Hernandez’s mother said the altercation became physical when Cummings shoved her to the ground and she scraped her knee.
“Terri stated that she got up and asked him, ‘What did I do? Why did you do that?’” a police report obtained by The Daily Beast read. “She stated she was surprised. She walked into the living room and sat on the chair crying because she was upset.”
Terri Hernandez said she then walked into the kitchen when Cummings approached her with a large kitchen knife and put it to her throat. The report stated that she was “scared for her life” and that Cummings then began stabbing a stand-up fan with the knife. He then approached her with the 8-inch blade.
“He came back over to Terri with the knife and started to jab the knife into the chair she was sitting on,” the officer’s report stated. “Terri told me that at that time she started to bleed from her face. While he was hitting objects with the knife, he was saying something to the effect of ‘I don’t care if I go back to prison.”
Terri had fled to a neighbor’s house where police found her with a 3 1/2-inch wound on her face and wounds on her left wrist and right shoulder. Cummings was convicted of assault and sentenced to two years in prison on October 15, 2010. Terri divorced him in December 2010 while he was being held in a correctional facility.
Any anger Hernandez had learned to cope with after losing his father may have returned after his mother was attacked by his stepfather. Police reportedly believe Hernandez killed Odin Lloyd over trust issues, which is a motive that would make even more sense after learning that his mother was slashed by her husband. Hernandez losing his father and hanging out with the wrong crowd clearly only scratches the surface of the drama that has gone on in his life outside of football.
[Related: All LBS stories about the Aaron Hernandez murder investigation]
H/T Wesley Lowery
