Aaron Hernandez once asked prison authorities to let him shack up with his alleged jailhouse lover in his cell, according to a report Tuesday.
But officials turned down the former NFL star’s request to share his two-person cell at the maximum-security Souza-Baranowski Corrections Center with 22-year-old Kyle Kennedy.
“Aaron Hernandez had requested to the prison that my client, Kyle Kennedy, be his cellmate,” Lawrence Army Jr., managing partner of the Boston law firm Army & Roche, told the Daily Mail.
Kennedy, who was one of three people for whom Hernandez left a letter before hanging himself in his cell last week, wasn’t opposed to moving in with the ex-football star, Army said, adding, “If he was going to be in with someone else, why not Aaron Hernandez?”
Hernandez’s cellmate request, which he made last September, was initially approved — but the prison’s superintendent ultimately decided the former New England Patriots tight end shouldn’t share a cell with another inmate.
Hernandez’s lawyer, José Baez, has insisted, “Rumors of a letter to a gay lover, in or out of prison, are false.”
Meanwhile, it emerged that the 12 jurors who acquitted Hernandez of a double murder just days before his suicide were invited to his private funeral in Bristol, Conn., on Monday.
“I was invited, but I decided ultimately not to go,” Robert Monroe told the Boston Herald.
Defense attorneys filed a motion Tuesday asking that Hernandez’s first-degree murder conviction for the 2013 killing of semi-pro football player Odin Lloyd be dismissed now that he’s dead.
In Massachusetts, a defendant’s conviction can be vacated if his or her appeal is still pending when they die, as was the case with Hernandez.
With wires