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Late NFL Star Aaron Hernandez Made A Bet With His Attorney Jose Baez Before His Death
The bet is now off. Attorney Jose Baez represented former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez in the appeal for his murder trial for the 2013 death of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. But they didn’t have just a lawyer-client relationship, they also became over the years. Now, Jose is opening up about the Aaron he knew in his latest book, Unnecessary Roughness: Inside the Trial and Final Days of Aaron Hernandez — and Jose revealed the bet that he made with Aaron before his death last year.
“I told him that I had played baseball and football when I was younger,” Jose told People. “And he asked me, ‘Were you any good?’ And I said, ‘Hell yeah. I was really fast.’ He didn’t believe me.”
Aaron then bet Jose that he couldn’t run a 40-mile dash in 4.8 seconds, which is just a little bit longer than Aaron’s own personal record of 4.64 seconds. So Jose started to train in preparation for their bet.
“It took me a month and a half, but I wanted to do it for Aaron,” he says. “And then I finally did it. And I had it videotaped so I could show it to him.”
But Jose never got to show Aaron the video of his 40-mile dash because Aaron died before he could show it to him. “It was really a blow,” says Baez. “I wanted to show it to him. It was a way to keep his mind off everything else that was going on.”
On April 19, 2017, correction officers found Aaron’s body in his jail cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Facility in Lancaster, MA which is where he had been serving a life sentence for Odin Lloyd’s murder, according to CNN. His cause of death was ruled suicide by hanging, and he wrote three suicide notes: one to his then-fiancée Shayanna Jenkins, his daughter Avielle Jenkins-Hernandez, and one for Jose.
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