National Football League

Hernandez's cousin evasive in answering prosecution's questions

Published Mar. 24, 2015 11:49 a.m. ET

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Aaron Hernandez’s cousin -- called to the witness stand Tuesday against her will -- repeatedly said she could not remember conversations with him or her sister about the death of Odin Lloyd.

“I don’t remember,” Jennifer Mercado said to one question after another -- bout statements her sister, Tanya Singleton, and Hernandez made to her in the wake of Odin Lloyd’s June 17, 2013, slaying.

“I don’t recall,” Mercado said at other times.

Once, when lead prosecutor William McCauley illuminated inconsistencies in statements she previously made to a grand jury with what she said on the stand Tuesday, Mercado answered, “I remember what I remember.”

Mercado, whose mother and Hernandez’s father were siblings, had been expected to be one of the wild cards at the murder trial of the former New England Patriots tight end -- she was forced to testify after Judge E. Susan Garsh signed an order in January granting her immunity from prosecution. Her sister, Singleton, was jailed after refusing to testify before a grand jury and still faces a charge of conspiracy to commit accessory after the fact to murder, an allegation based on the assertion that she helped one of Hernandez’s suspected accomplices flee to Florida.

Mercado said she takes medication for depression, anxiety and stress and that it affects her recall of events -- and it appeared that McCauley grew frustrated at times during her testimony.

But he kept circling, and after Mercado had been on the stand for nearly an hour he returned to the subject of her communications with her sister -- and, specifically, Singleton’s appearance before a grand jury investigating Lloyd’s death. Singleton refused to testify in that instance, even after she was granted immunity, and she was jailed for months and ultimately convicted of contempt and sentenced to home confinement.

McCauley probed Mercado about her conversations with Hernandez.

“What conversation did you have with the defendant about your sister?” he asked at one point.

“That she shouldn’t be in there,” Mercado answered.

“And what did he say?” McCauley asked.

“I don’t remember,” she answered.

“Well, how many times did you talk to him about this?” McCauley asked.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

But when he asked when her sister was jailed for contempt, she named the date -- Aug. 1, 2013.

Prosecutors allege that Aaron Hernandez “orchestrated” Lloyd’s murder after growing angry with him at a Boston nightclub two days earlier.

Prosecutors have asserted that Hernandez arranged to meet Lloyd and at the same time summoned two associates, Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace Jr., from his hometown of Bristol, Conn., to his mansion in North Attleboro, Mass., late the night of June 16, 2013. From there, the trio allegedly set out for Boston -- roughly an hour’s drive -- about 1:10 a.m. on June 17.

After picking up Lloyd in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, Hernandez allegedly drove the group back to North Attleboro, turning off the road and into a field that was less than a mile from his own home. Lloyd’s body was discovered in that field later the same day.

Hernandez faces one count of murder and two firearms charges in the slaying of Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player who was dating Shaneah Jenkins, the sister of Hernandez's fiancee.

Much of Mercado’s testimony focused on her sister, Ortiz and Wallace -- and their relationship.

She told jurors, for instance, that Wallace didn’t work and often stayed at her family’s home in Bristol -- “sometimes he would be there for a couple of days; sometimes he would stay for a couple of weeks.”

But as McCauley moved closer to the day of Lloyd’s killing, she faltered.

For instance, he asked her about seeing Wallace at her home that day.

She hesitated.

“I think he was just in the room watching TV,” she said. “He may or may not have been -- I don’t actually, like, remember for sure.”

She later described seeing Ortiz and Wallace outside her home late the night of June 16 -- “it was dark,” she said -- at a time when prosecutors allege they were preparing, at Hernandez’s request, to make the roughly two-hour drive to his home in North Attleboro. She described where Ortiz and Wallace were standing in her yard, that they waved to her and that they ultimately left in a silver four-door car.

A little later, McCauley asked her about being questioned by the grand jury.

“I remembered what I remembered,” she said.

“Well,” McCauley said, “you still remembered who you saw outside your home when you went to walk your dog that night?”

“Yes,” Mercado said.

But again and again he was frustrated in his effort to pin her down.

It was clear in court Mercado felt affection for Hernandez. She smiled at him after first making eye contact with him and did so again after McCauley asked her to identify her cousin.

Several times, she looked over at Hernandez before answering.

At different points, McCauley showed Mercado statements she had made before the grand jury. Each time, she said the records did not refresh her memory. He asked her repeatedly about phone calls -- at one point, showing records on the video screens in the courtroom detailing calls from Hernandez to her after Lloyd’s murder.

Each time, she said she had no memory of the calls.

And then there was a mysterious text message that she received while her sister was on the road with Wallace, allegedly helping him flee to Florida.

Although McCauley did not disclose the content of that message, he asked Mercado if it led her to do something.

“I relayed the message, I believe,” she said.

“First of all,” he asked, “who did you relay it to?”

“I don’t remember,” she said.

Asked who she received the message from, she also said she didn’t remember.

At one point, Judge Garsh rose and instructed the jury that they could consider the fact that Mercado had been granted immunity while determining whether to give weight to her testimony.

“The testimony of an immunized witness should be scrutinized with particular care,” Garsh said.

Prosecutors have not said who they believe fired the shots that killed Lloyd, and Ortiz and Wallace also have been charged with murder and will be tried separately. Under a Massachusetts law often referred to as “joint venture,” a person can be convicted of murder even if someone else carried out the actual killing. To prove that, prosecutors would have to convince the jury that Hernandez knowingly participated in the killing and did so with intent.

Under cross-examination from defense attorney Charles Rankin, Mercado described how close she and her sister are to Hernandez -- that they were constant presences in each other’s lives. Hernandez, she said, was like a surrogate father to her sister’s two sons.

She had little difficulty remembering details in response to Rankin’s question -- at one point naming the exact date that Hernandez’s father, her “Uncle Dennis,” died: Jan. 6, 2006.

And she also suggested that Ortiz and Wallace frequently used drugs, including PCP -- which she said left them acting “jittery” and “crazy” and sweating profusely and wiping themselves with towels. They would smoke it, she said, in marijuana cigarettes -- something she could tell because it smelled not like pot but like burning plastic.

“He,” she said, describing Wallace, “would act crazy, erratic, argumentative, would just sometimes scream, like, I don’t know, mumbo jumbo like it wasn’t even English.”

Defense attorneys have hinted that they will argue that Ortiz or Wallace -- high on PCP -- killed Lloyd.

But after Rankin finished his questioning, McCauley went on the attack -- getting Mercado to admit that Hernandez regularly smoked marijuana at her house, and that he had done it there with Wallace and Ortiz.

The implication? If they were smoking PCP, he could have been, too.

And then McCauley played a video from Hernandez’s home surveillance system that showed Wallace and Ortiz arrive at his house early the morning of June 17, 2013. That was a few hours before the murder. The video showed the two of them walking around their car, reaching in for belongings and changing shirts. They appeared calm, and there was no indication they were sweating.

McCauley asked whether she saw them acting jittery.

Mercado said they were -- that the behavior on the screen was what she was talking about.

She is due back on the stand Thursday morning. McCauley is expected to play another video then -- perhaps the one of Hernandez arriving back at his house with Wallace and Ortiz just minutes after prosecutors allege that Lloyd was gunned down less than a mile away.

And he may ask Mercado again to say whether their behavior on that video qualifies as “jittery” and “crazy.”

Hernandez has separately been indicted on multiple murder and assault charges in the July 16, 2012, shooting that killed Daniel De Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, in Boston. Another man was wounded.

Garsh has ruled that jurors will not hear any testimony about that case.

In the Boston killings, prosecutors have alleged that Hernandez became enraged after a man bumped him on a nightclub dance floor, spilling his drink and failing to apologize. They allege that Hernandez later followed the man and his friends as they drove away from the club, then pulled up next to their car at a stoplight and opened fire with a .38-caliber revolver.

That trial originally was scheduled to begin May 28, but the judge there indicated recently he would push it back given the anticipated length of the trial in the Lloyd case. No new trial date has been set.

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