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Aaron Hernandez was reportedly miserable in prison: 'He was an easy target'

Aaron Hernandez reportedly miserable in prison: 'He was an easy target'

Aaron Hernandez's time in prison was not the cake walk he expected.

Despite alleged claims that he would "run this place," Hernandez reportedly was "miserable" as he served a life sentence for the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd.

Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel described Hernadez's prison life on 98.5 The Sports Hub's Toucher and Rich, via CBS Boston, and said Hernandez was a target for other prisoners and tried hard to befriend the guards for some sense of normalcy.

"This was not the movies where he was cutting up garlic slices and getting fast food delivered or anything like that. Prisoners were fighting him, he was a target, they were trying to extort him for money, they were putting pressure on him," Wetzel said. "He was stressed out, he was both arguing all the time with guards and then seeking out their friendship, I think, because they were a little bit more of a peer group.”

Wetzel cited the nearly 300 pages of incident reports of Hernandez's time in prison and said Hernandez was part of more than 100 incidents during his four years in prison. Allegedly, many other inmates wanted to see if they had what it took to fight the former Patriots tight end.

“These were vicious fights. One, they had guards trying to pull him and and another inmate apart, and they had to mace them, basically, to get them to stop fighting,” Wetzel said.

“There’s another weird or interesting scene where he gets in a fight and he goes back to his cell, and a guard comes in and sees him, and he’s kind of sitting on the bed, his hands are all red from punching somebody, he’s got some marks on him, and he’s kind of breathing heavy and is just sort of despondent that he had to get in this fight. I just think that … if you read it all, the picture I got was not somebody who was doing well with this at all. He was surviving, but it was pretty miserable."

Hernandez reportedly looked forward to his court hearings because it was a break from the prison life and he could actually talk to people like a normal person. He supposedly dreaded going back to prison after these appeals and hearings.

Wetzel guessed that these fights and the fact that there was no end of the misery in sight is what led to Hernandez to commit suicide in April.


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Aaron Hernandez commits suicide, authorities say

“I think when that ended, it was very depressing for him. Whether he won or lost, it was just like, ‘It’s never going to be this good again, and I’m 27 years old, I’ve been in for four years, and I’m not getting out until I die,’" Wetzel said.

"You’re looking at 50 or 60 years. ... I think that’s a huge factor that some people just aren’t looking at. It’s like, ‘I just want to get out of this situation.'”