Ex-Patriot Hernandez goes on trial for murder

FALL RIVER, Mass. — With his old team about to play in the Super Bowl, former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez went on trial on murder charges Thursday, watching from the defense table as prosecutors showed the jury security-camera footage from his own home to tie him to the crime.

Hernandez’s lawyer countered by arguing that police and prosecutors “locked” in on the NFL player as a suspect from the very beginning, ignored evidence, and conducted a “sloppy and unprofessional” investigation.

Hernandez, 25, is charged in the 2013 shooting death of Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semiprofessional football player who was dating the sister of Hernandez’s fiancée. Lloyd’s bullet-riddled body was found in an industrial park near Hernandez’s North Attleborough home, not far from Gillette Stadium.

Hernandez — who had a $40 million contract as a tight end with the Patriots but was cut by the team just hours after his 2013 arrest — could get life in prison if convicted. On Sunday, the Patriots will meet the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX.

In a separate murder case that has yet to come to trial, Hernandez was charged last year in Boston with killing two men in 2012 after someone spilled a drink on him at a nightclub.

Prosecutors in this trial have suggested that Lloyd may have been killed because he knew too much about that crime. But the judge has ruled that prosecutors cannot tell the jury about those slayings.

In opening statements Thursday, District Attorney Patrick Bomberg took jurors through what he said was the sequence of events that led to Lloyd’s killing.

He played before-and-after footage that he said showed Lloyd getting into a car driven by Hernandez, then video taken shortly afterward at the NFL player’s home, without Lloyd in the car.

Defense attorney Michael Fee told the jury that Hernandez is an innocent man.

“Aaron never had a chance,” Fee said. “They locked on Aaron and they targeted him.”