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Aaron Hernandez Allegedly Smoked K2 For Days Before Death
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Radar Online has reported that former New England Patriots tight-end, Aaron Hernandez, spent the last two days of his life using synthetic marijuana, and died by suicide while in a chemically disoriented state.
Documents viewed by Radar also suggested that a state investigation into Hernandez's suicide on April 19, 2017 at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Lancaster, Massachusetts withheld information about the 27-year-old's drug use for fear of compromising a separate investigation into drug use at the facility.
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Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for his role in the shooting death of semi-pro player Odin Lloyd in 2013.
Radar cited a redacted section of the 132-page public report that included quotes from an interview with an unnamed inmate on the day Hernandez died.
According to Radar, the prisoner is reported to have said, "Well, he's spent the last two days smoking K2 in his cell, and he wasn't in his right mind."
Two other inmates corroborated that story, while all three alleged that Hernandez appeared to be in a positive or even celebratory mood in the days prior to his death, possibly due to his acquittal on murder charges stemming from a separate double homicide in 2012.
Reports about Hernandez's alleged use of K2—a form of synthetic marijuana with a propensity for causing a host of symptoms from hallucinations to unconsciousness and in some cases, severe bleeding—surfaced almost immediately after his death.
But a 2017 toxicology report from the Massachusetts State Police found that Hernandez had no evidence of drugs in his system at the time of his death.
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But as toxicologist Marilyn Huestis told the Boston Globe, K2 can be easy to miss in test screenings. "These [synthetic marijuana strains] can be so potent, the doses so low, that when a person takes it, you can only measure it in their blood for a short period of time," she noted. "So labs will frequently miss it in the blood."
Those findings were rebuked by Hernandez's lawyer, Jose Baez, who in a statement to People, said, "The lack of professionalism exhibited by government officials and their employees during this entire process is unprecedented."
Another of Hernandez's lawyers, George Leontire, also condemned the state's handling of the investigation. "Any disturbing commentary about the state's investigation was clearly hidden from the public, Aaron's lawyers, and his family," he said to the Globe.
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Paul Gaita lives in Los Angeles. He has contributed to the Los Angeles Times, Variety, LA Weekly, Amazon.com and The Los Angeles Beat, among many other publications and websites.
