National Football League

Housekeepers: Aaron Hernandez kept guns in his house

Published Feb. 23, 2015 11:34 a.m. ET

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Two of Aaron Hernandez’s housekeepers on Monday described seeing multiple guns in his house in the weeks before Odin Lloyd was shot and killed.

Each woman described one of the guns she saw as large and either black or dark gray. Though it wasn’t clear whether they both saw the same weapon, the testimony could be significant: Prosecutors allege that Lloyd was gunned down on June 17, 2013, with a dark .45-caliber Glock pistol.

Marilia Prinholato, a native of Brazil who grew up speaking Portuguese, testified first, telling the jury she was cleaning a guest bedroom in Hernandez’s North Attleboro, Mass., home when she pulled a fitted sheet off the bed.

“When I took it off, the gun pulled it off on the floor, fell on the floor,” she said.

Prinholato indicated she is familiar with weapons, describing the gun not as a revolver but as having a magazine — in other words, a semiautomatic. She described holding it in her hands, concluding that it was loaded, and then putting it back between the mattress and the box springs. She estimated its size at 30 to 40 centimeters and its weight at about 1 kilogram — a little more than two pounds.

The actual murder weapon has never been found. Prosecutors have filed court documents indicating that they believe Lloyd was killed with a Glock Model 21. According to specifications on the Glock website, a Model 21 measures approximately 25 centimeters from the tip of the barrel to the tip of the grip. The website also lists its weight at a little less than two pounds if it’s not loaded and 2 pounds 6 ounces if it is.

Prinholato also described seeing a small silver and black pistol in Hernandez’s bedroom after another housekeeper discovered it. Her description matches a .22-caliber pistol discovered in the woods not far from the murder scene that prosecutors suspect was discarded by Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, the day after Lloyd was killed.

That second housekeeper, Grazielli Silva, described seeing a large handgun — saying it was black or dark gray — in Hernandez’s sock drawer and discovering the smaller pistol after picking up a pair of his slacks.

“It was heavy, I thought it was a wallet,” Silva said. “And I put my hands inside and I felt it was a gun.”

She said she removed it and looked at it, then put it back in the pocket and put the pants back where she found them.

The judge repeatedly admonished the jury that testimony about the guns could not be considered proof that Hernandez committed murder. However, she also told them that if they believed the testimony they could consider it as evidence that Hernandez had the means to either arm himself and commit the crime or arm an accomplice to commit the crime.

Defense attorney Michael Fee got Prinholato to acknowledge that she didn’t know the manufacturer of the black gun and that she saw it in a guest bedroom. He challenged Silva, who acknowledged she is in the country illegally and admitted that she hoped her cooperation with authorities would help her immigration status.

She denied, however, that anything she said wasn’t true.

“To me it would have been better if none of this would have ever happened,” she said when lead prosecutor William McCauley got the chance to ask her a second round of questions. “But to me, whether I’m helping to help or harm in this case, it wouldn’t make any difference in my immigration. ... I know that I have to answer what you’re asking me and it has to be the truth. That’s what I’m doing.”

Fee, however, got the last word, reading from a text message Silva sent to a state trooper: “I don’t know if you remember me but I worked on the domestic staff at Aaron Hernandez’s house and I cooperated with your investigation into his crimes my immigration attorney wants to speak with you or someone in charge of that case because my cooperation with you can help my immigration status.”

Hernandez, the former star tight end of the New England Patriots, faces one count of murder and two firearms charges in the slaying of Lloyd, who was gunned down in a secluded field used to store dirt, asphalt and gravel. Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-professional football player, was dating Shaneah Jenkins, sister of Hernandez's fiancée.

Prosecutors have alleged that Hernandez summoned two associates from his hometown of Bristol, Conn., to his Massachusetts home late the night of June 16, 2013, and simultaneously made plans to meet with Lloyd. Hernandez then allegedly drove the other two men, Carlos Ortiz and Ernest Wallace Jr., to the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, picked up Lloyd and returned to North Attleboro.

According to court documents, Hernandez allegedly drove into the field at 3:23 a.m. on June 17, 2013. There, Lloyd was shot multiple times moments later, according to prosecutors.

Although prosecutors have not said who they believe fired the fatal shots, they have asserted that Hernandez "orchestrated" the killing. Ortiz and Wallace have also been indicted on murder charges but will be tried separately. The prosecution does not plan to call either as a witness in the trial.

Monday — the 14th day of the trial — saw testimony from seven witnesses. The first two took jurors to the morning Lloyd was killed.

Both Barbara Chan and Michael Ribeiro worked the overnight shift at NeedleTech, a company that manufactures medical needles and is located a few hundred yards from the field where Lloyd died. And both had retreated to their cars around 3 a.m. that morning during a 30-minute lunch break on the 11 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift.

Chen described climbing into her car, reclining her seat, setting her alarm and pulling a blanket over her to grab a quick nap — but her slumber was interrupted by gunfire.

“I heard a loud bang, maybe four or five times,” Chan testified. “I thought it was fireworks.”

She described it as “two slow ones and three fast ones.” She could not estimate when in her break the gunshots occurred.

Ribeiro was in his car in the company’s parking lot, listening to the radio on his break, when he heard “a loud banging sound, like fireworks going off … it was about 6 or 8 sounds.”

Chan and Ribeiro were not on the stand long — they were there to help affix the time of Lloyd’s murder.

According to court documents, prosecutors allege that he was gunned down at 3:27 a.m.

Earlier in the day Monday, defense attorney James Sultan took on a police officer who drove from Hernandez’s home to Lloyd’s and back, attempting to see how long it took.

In one case, the drive from Lloyd’s home back to Hernandez’s took 53 minutes — the exact time prosecutors allege it took the former NFL star on the night of the murder.

Sultan suggested that “wasn’t a coincidence” that police already knew the time Hernandez allegedly left Lloyd’s home and returned to his own mansion in North Attleboro, and that it was merely a recreation.

But Sgt. Christopher Ciccio didn’t yield.

“It was a recreation to determine if our time matched,” Ciccio said.

McCauley followed up by asking Ciccio whether it was unusual to drive a route in a criminal investigation to see if it was “possible” the trip could be completed in a specific span of time.

Ciccio said it wasn’t unusual at all.

Also Monday, prosecutors won a significant legal victory when Judge E. Susan Garsh announced that she had reconsidered a ruling on Friday that barred Lloyd’s sister from testifying that she received four text messages from him in the last 20 minutes of his life.

Garsh ruled in December the contents of those texts — in one of which Lloyd said he was with “Nfl” and then added “just so you know” in another — was off-limits because it amounted to hearsay. But prosecutors wanted Lloyd’s sister, Shaquilla Thibou, to testify that she received the texts, both as a way to establish the time of the murder and to also use data from Lloyd’s phone to establish his location when each message was sent.

Friday, Garsh said that was off-limits, too, and told McCauley he could use phone records to make his point, sparking a heated back and forth between them.

McCauley considered filing an appeal — but Monday morning, Garsh made that moot when she said she’d thought more about the issue over the weekend.

Hernandez’s attorneys objected, but the judge ultimately reversed herself.

It is not clear when Thibou will be called — McCauley indicated it would not be until at least Tuesday.

Testimony is scheduled every day this week, with two abbreviated days — Wednesday and Friday — when the judge plans to dismiss the jury at 1 p.m.

Hernandez has separately been indicted on multiple murder and assault charges in a July 16, 2012, shooting in South Boston that left two men dead and another wounded.

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 failed to apologize. They alleged 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, killing Daniel De Abreu, 29, and Safiro Furtado, 28, and wounding another man.

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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