Aaron Hernandez death: How did Aaron Hernandez die? What happened to Aaron Hernandez?

Aaron Josef Hernandez was a convicted murderer and tight end in the National Football League. He was a three-year starter for the New England Patriots in the National Football League (NFL), but his career was cut short after his arrest and conviction for the murder of Odin Lloyd.

Correctional officers discovered Hernandez hanging with bedsheets from the window in his cell at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2017, at 3:05 a.m. EDT, five days after he was acquitted of the 2012 Boston double homicide of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado.

At 4:07 a.m., he was taken to UMass Memorial Hospital-Leominster, where he was pronounced dead. Within thirty hours of his death, he had been smoking K2, a psychoactive drug.  Investigators learned that a fellow inmate had spent the previous two days smoking the synthetic cannabinoid.

Hernandez’s brain was released to Boston University at his family’s request to be examined for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive degenerative disease that affects people who have suffered a severe or repeated blow to the head. Hernandez’s body was cremated after his brain was removed, and the ashes were given to his family.