Glock Employee Says Aaron Hernandez Holding Gun In Video

FALL RIVER, Mass. — A Glock Inc. representative testified Wednesday that surveillance footage, captured minutes after the 2013 killing of Odin Lloyd, shows former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez holding a gun that he identified as being the same make and model as the murder weapon.

“In my opinion, the firearm shown in the video stills is a Glock pistol,” said Glock district manager Kyle Aspinwall, after viewing a series of still frames from the surveillance that showed Hernandez standing in his foyer with a large black object in his hands.

Hernandez was standing next to an open doorway that leads to his basement “man cave,” where investigators say he stashed guns after the Lloyd shooting. The surveillance was captured at 3:34 a.m. on June 17, 2013 – about 10 minutes after Lloyd sent his last text to his sister. The victim’s body was found in an industrial park less than a mile from Hernandez’s $1.3 million North Attleborough mansion. The murder weapon was never recovered, but prosecutors have used testimony from ballistics experts to establish that it was a .45 caliber Glock 21, a black semiautomatic pistol.

Aspinwall spent the first 20 minutes of his more than two hours on the witness stand describing the unique features of a Glock-manufactured firearm – setting the groundwork to later identify the item in Hernandez’s hands.

In the photos that Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Bomberg put on the courtroom monitor Wednesday, Aspinwall identified “salient features” that are unique to a weapon manufactured by Glock, and pointed them out to the jury on an unloaded gun, which he used as a reference in court.

“In this particular still photo you have a good idea of the curvature of the blackstrap of the pistol,” he said in one shot. In one of the final shots, where Hernandez is moving out of the frame, Aspinwall said, “in this particular photo you get a very good view of the trigger guard.”

Bomberg also played a video of Hernandez walking from his kitchen into his great room that was captured around 12:30 a.m. on June 17 – about three hours before the shooting. The two Bristol, Conn. men charged as his accomplices, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz, are trailing behind him.

In the video still, Aspinwall said, Hernandez was “holding what appears to be a firearm in his hand.”

“And what causes you to come to that conclusion?” Bomberg asked.

“Look at this particular photo,” Aspinwall said, using a stylus pen to direct the jury’s eye to specific parts of the gun on the screen. “You can see the backstrap, magazine well, top strap, front of slide, rear of slide.”

In the surveillance footage from before and after the shooting, there’s a “similarity…in how the weapon is transferred from hand to hand and how it’s carried,” Aspinwall said.

Prosecutors jumped ahead to the afternoon of June 17, about 12 hours after Lloyd was killed. They showed video of Hernandez and Ernest Wallace lounging beside the former Patriots tight end’s backyard pool. A shirtless Hernandez is then captured inside the house, again in the foyer area, with his back to the camera. A black rectangular object is in his right hand.

“It’s the general size and shape of a Glock 21 pistol magazine,” Aspinwall testified about the object.

Police found a .45 caliber Glock magazine in the console of a Hummer registered to Hernandez that was parked outside an apartment rented by the former NFL player. Jurors will not learn about the magazine because it was tossed out of evidence after Bristol County Superior Court Judge E. Susan Garsh ruled that police did not have the authority to seize it during a search of the apartment for Ortiz’s phone.

Defense lawyer Jamie Sultan, up until minutes before Aspinwall’s testimony about the surveillance video, had argued that the Glock representative should not be allowed to offer his opinion about the object in the footage.

Sultan said Aspinwall could “testify until the cows come home” about the uniqueness of guns manufactured by Glock, but said jurors should form their own opinions about what Hernandez was holding. Garsh, however, said Aspinwall should be able to testify about the surveillance footage because he has “extensive knowledge” of the weapon in question and his familiarity with Glocks likely exceeds that of anyone on the jury.

Sultan grilled Aspinwall about Glock “knock offs” and Glock “replicas,” suggesting to jurors that the item in Hernandez’s hands was something other than the murder weapon.

“Am I correct that there are other companies out there that have been manufacturing firearms that look like Glocks?” he asked.

“There are other manufacturers who make pistols that have some similar characteristics of the Glock pistol, but not identical, no,” the witness replied.

“That was not my question,” Sultan said. He asked Aspinwall if any companies manufacture products that resemble Glocks but are not real guns. When Aspinwall said no, Sultan mentioned a lawsuit that Glock filed against a company that makes soft pellet guns. Court adjourned Wednesday before Sultan finished cross-examining the witness.

Hernandez is accused of murder and two illegal firearms charges. He is accused in two more shootings – a double homicide in Boston in July 2012 and a nonfatal shooting in Florida in February 2013. Garsh has ruled that prosecutors are prohibited from mentioning either the Boston slayings or the Florida shooting at trial.

The Bristol County District Attorney’s office filed a petition with the Supreme Judicial Court this week asking the state’s highest court to allow testimony about the Florida shooting – which injured East Hartford, Conn. native Alexander Bradley. Bradley is expected to testify at trial, but, according to a ruling by Garsh last month, is not allowed to tell jurors that Hernandez shot him in the face.

Bradley previously was a close friend of Hernandez, and is a cooperating witness in the Boston case, in which the former Patriots tight end faces two counts of murder. He says Hernandez shot him in February 2013 after an argument over a bill at the strip club.

“The Court’s ruling on the evidence relating to the Bradley shooting would essentially allow the defendant to establish a fictionalized view of reality – one in which the defendant, like most people, does not shoot his friends,” Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Roger Michel Jr. wrote in the filing.

Prosecutors say Hernandez’s defense lawyers “opened the door” to testimony about the Bradley shooting when they argued in opening statements that Hernandez could not have killed Lloyd because the two men were such close friends. The facts in the cases are similar: both men were shot late at night and left to die in an industrial area.

Garsh’s ruling to block the Bradley testimony was flawed, Michel argued, because she based it on the fact that there was a “provocation” in the Bradley case – the argument at the strip club – whereas in the Lloyd case, there was not. A dispute over a tab is a “trivial” provocation, Michel wrote, and an inadequate basis for denying the motion.

In the same filing, prosecutors also appealed a ruling by Garsh to prohibit testimony from Robert Paradis, a hometown friend of Hernandez. Paradis was in California with Hernandez six weeks before the Lloyd shooting. He testified at a hearing last month that Hernandez said he had “heat” or “fire” – and said that at one point the former Patriots player mentioned a .45 caliber firearm.

Garsh ruled that jurors could not reasonably infer that the gun Paradis would testify about was the same weapon used to kill Lloyd. In the absence of proof or direct evidence to that effect, she said, such testimony would be prejudicial.

Michel wrote that Garsh’s ruling “does not conform to the law, the evidence or the inferences a reasonable juror would be likely to draw.” He said the testimony should be admissible to demonstrate that Hernandez possessed the same type of weapon used to kill Lloyd, regardless of whether he actually used that weapon to do so.