National Football League

Housekeeper: Hernandez worked on surveillance system after Lloyd's death

Published Mar. 3, 2015 10:49 a.m. ET

foxsports

Prosecutors have long alleged that Aaron Hernandez’s fiancée, Shayanna Jenkins, followed his orders the day after Odin Lloyd’s killing and spirited the murder weapon out of the basement of their home.

Tuesday, a housekeeper told jurors in Hernandez’s murder trial that on the same day she saw him fiddling with a security camera in the home’s basement.

Glaucia Santos, a native of Brazil, arrived in the United States a little less than three months before Lloyd’s June 17, 2013, murder. And she cleaned Hernandez’s home three times -- twice in the weeks before Lloyd’s murder and again the day after the killing.

That day, she testified, she was working on a bathroom in the basement when she noticed Hernandez in the corner near a home theater.

Lead prosecutor William McCauley asked Santos what Hernandez was doing.

“He was using his hands for 3-5 minutes up on that camera,” Santos testified through a Portuguese interpreter.

Santos said that she finally “made a noise” so that Hernandez would know she was there and that he then “stopped immediately” and left the room.

Jurors already had been told there was no surveillance video from Hernandez’s basement the day after Lloyd’s killing -- a cable marked “man cave” was disconnected from the system.

It was left to jurors to decide what Hernandez might have been doing with that camera – whether, for instance, he could have been making sure it was off before Jenkins went into that room. Court documents show that on that day Jenkins headed to the home’s basement with a black trash bag and later emerged with it loaded with, among other things, an object that was “rigid” and “consistent to a lock box or safe.”

Prosecutors have alleged that the murder weapon was in that box, and last week they showed video from three different cameras at Hernandez’s home that showed Jenkins seeming to struggle as she carried the bag to her sister’s car. She drove away, then returned about 35 minutes later.

The trash bag and its contents were gone.

Santos acknowledged to defense attorney Michael Fee that she did not watch Hernandez the entire time he was messing with the camera and found no broken glass or plastic beneath it.

The implication: Whatever Hernandez was doing did not involve destruction of the camera.

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

Although prosecutors have not said who they believe fired the fatal shots, they have asserted that Hernandez “orchestrated” the killing.

Under a Massachusetts law known 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 prove that the person knowingly participated in the killing and did so with intent.

In earlier testimony Tuesday, jurors saw the text message sent from Aaron Hernandez’s BlackBerry that prosecutors allege was the precursor to the meeting with Lloyd that ended in his murder.

Ray MacDonald, an attorney and official for T-Mobile, testified on the 20thday of the murder trial for the former New England Patriots tight end, walking jurors through records from Lloyd’s phone, which was discovered in one of his pockets after his body was found.

Prosecutor Patrick Bomberg, working with a ruler to highlight specific lines in the records from Lloyd’s phone and alternately displaying the phone with a projector, drove at an assertion that he and colleagues have repeatedly made: that Hernandez “orchestrated” Lloyd’s murder.

The first text message, sent at 9:05 p.m. on June 16, 2013, went from Hernandez’s phone to Lloyd’s: “I’m coming to grab that tonight u gon b around I need dat and we could step for a little again.”

Earlier testimony showed that Lloyd frequently supplied marijuana to Hernandez and that the two of them had gone out to a nightclub a couple of days earlier.

At 9:37 p.m., Lloyd answered: “Aite, where.”

Two minutes later, a message was sent from Hernandez’s phone to Lloyd’s: “idk it don’t matter but imma hit u when I’m dat way like Las time if my phone dies imma hit u when I charge it which will be in a lil.”

“Aite,” Lloyd responded at 10 p.m. “idk anything going on.”

The next text from Hernandez’s phone was sent at 10:13 p.m.: “I’ll figure it out ill hit u on way”

More than two hours passed with no communication between the two. Then, at 12:22 a.m. on June 17, 2013, Lloyd sent a message to Hernandez’s phone: “We still on”

Over the next 90 minutes, five calls were placed from Wallace’s phone to Lloyd’s – at 1:22 a.m., 1:52 a.m., 2:24 a.m., 2:25 a.m. and 2:32 a.m.

MacDonald detailed those calls in his testimony.

The jury has already seen surveillance video from a neighbor’s home showing a rented Nissan Altima pull up in front of Lloyd’s home at 2:32 a.m. Prosecutors allege Hernandez was driving, Wallace was in the front passenger seat and Ortiz was in the back seat on the driver’s side. Lloyd climbed into the back seat on the passenger side, and the car drove away at 2:33 a.m.

Prosecutors have asserted that Lloyd was shot and killed at 3:27 a.m. in a secluded field less than a mile from Hernandez’s North Attleboro home.

Although the bulk of MacDonald’s testimony was about Lloyd’s phone, Bomberg at one point displayed Hernandez’s phone in the courtroom. It showed that Lloyd’s phone number was listed in Hernandez’s contacts under “O.”

He also showed that none of the text messages to Lloyd was in Hernandez’s phone – leaving it to the jury to conclude that they had been erased. But Bomberg was able to show them to the jury because they still exist in Lloyd’s phone.

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.