Aaron Hernandez yuks it up as jury deliberates on his fate down the hall

FALL RIVER, Mass. – Down the hall, seven women and five men were deciding his fate. Whether Aaron Hernandez was capable of comprehending that, or cared enough to bother, the odds are it probably wasn't going too well down there.

Not that he seemed too concerned either way.

Late Tuesday afternoon, with Hernandez's murder case off to jury, the former NFL star spent about an hour and a half leaning back in his swivel chair at a defense table here in this fifth-floor courtroom, spinning around to chat with his fiancée and an aunt and uncle in the front row. He got to hang out until court was officially adjourned for the day, in other words until the jury called it quits at about 4:30 p.m. ET

So hang out he did.

He smiled. He laughed. He quietly swapped stories.

He looked at ease, comfortable and carefree, not like someone who any minute could get word that a jury had deemed him a cold-blooded murderer, sending him to prison for the rest of his life. Even if the 25-year-old former football player believes he'll be acquitted, the strain from the magnitude of the moment would presumably crush most mortals.

That's been his demeanor throughout this case though, starting with the day he was arrested and hauled out of his 7,100-square foot home, with the backyard pool and basement man cave featuring a New England Patriots-logoed pool table.

The Bristol County Sheriff said they put everyone facing serious charges into protective custody, with a suicide watch, because the realization of the situation rocks even the most hardened criminals. They cry. They scream. They panic. Not Hernandez though.

"He didn't seem at all nervous," Sheriff Thomas Hodgson told the Washington Post at the time.

That what-me-worry disposition continued across weeks of jury selection and testimony, Hernandez making himself at home at his own murder trial. He always looked upbeat, attentive and well-rested. He took notes. He chatted with his attorney. It wasn't an act. Even when the jury wasn't around, he never broke mood.

Court officers said he expressed excitement about the lunches – even though they consist of just a simple sandwich and six ounces of off-brand cola. Maybe every place is great compared to 21 hours a day in a 7-by-10-foot cell.

At one point this week, when his water pitcher was empty, he looked at a court officer and tapped its side to signal the need for a refill, like he might have once summoned a waitress for another round of cocktails at some Boston nightclub.

This was Tuesday afternoon though, the arguing done, time dwindling, stakes rising.

Much of his defense had fallen apart. Day after day, as snowdrifts formed and then thawed across this New England winter, his high-profile, high-priced legal team had fought the prosecution's 132 witnesses tooth and nail, challenging everything about the night Odin Lloyd wound up dead in a field near Hernandez's North Attleboro, Mass., home.

During closing arguments, though, attorney James Sultan waved the white flag on much of it. He essentially admitted that the cellphone tower pings and surveillance video and tire marks and shoe imprints were correct all along. If he'd done this back in January, he could've spared the jurors about six weeks of tedium.

Yes, Sultan acknowledged, Aaron Hernandez was there in an undeveloped plot of industrial park as Lloyd was pumped full of bullets and left to rot in the early morning hours of June 17, 2013.

Heck, Hernandez had even driven the car to get there. Oh, and yes, Sultan acknowledged, it is possible that was a gun his client was carrying in home video minutes after the murder, just like, it is possible that the box Hernandez's fiancée spirited out of the house the next day to some dumpster she conveniently can't recall may have even held that same gun.

He didn't do the killing though. He was just there. And you can't be sure the gun is a .45 Glock, Model 21 semiautomatic pistol. As sure as it might be, it might also not be. And there's no proof about what's in that box, as suspicious and ridiculous as Shayanna Jenkins' story is.

"This is a court of law,” Sultan said, smoothly, during Tuesday's closing argument. "This isn't a mystery show."

Beyond a reasonable doubt, he kept saying, which sounds good, but it meant this entire game was being played inside Hernandez's own five-yard line, a dangerous bit of turf on which to fight.

When not hammering reasonable doubt, Sultan fell back on the oldest of excuses for a star athlete: He's young and he made a mistake. He isn't a bad guy; he's just a little dumb. Please, give him another chance.

"Did he make all the right decisions? No,” Sultan said, parroting who knows how many football coaches gone by. "He was a 23-year-old kid who witnessed something shocking – a killing committed by somebody he knew. He didn't know what to do, so he just put one foot in front of the other."

Hernandez didn't look offended by the argument that he was a helpless adolescent who shouldn't be held accountable for his actions, despite being a multimillionaire pro athlete who fashioned himself some kind of off-field gangster, what with the guns and the weed and the supposedly grown-man "Blood Sweat Tears" tattoos.

Pretty much the whole defense hinges on the Hail Mary that a juror or twelve will actually buy the idea that an alpha dog such as Hernandez was actually nothing more than little, lost child (albeit rich and famous) to a couple of cheap Connecticut drug dealers, Ernest Wallace and Carlos Ortiz, who got hopped up on PCP that night and unexpectedly killed Aaron's good buddy Odin.

It doesn't explain the next day, though, when Hernandez sat around his house at ease with a couple of guys who are supposedly capable of slipping into a drug-fueled homicidal rage. They splashed around the pool. They kicked it around the man cave. They drank smoothies together.

Later Hernandez gave them a rental car to leave the state and had his fiancée, with his infant daughter in the backseat, meet them in the middle of the night at a random spot off an interstate to hand over hundreds of dollars.

At different points, video even shows Hernandez passing that baby girl to Wallace so he could hold and cuddle her. Hernandez then left the room.

Maybe he's just unusually trusting of supposed PCP killers.

"This defendant has his 8-month infant and is handing her to Wallace, apparently the guy, the crazy man who apparently killed Odin the day before?" railed prosecutor William McCauley, exasperated at the ridiculousness. "Handing her to Wallace?

"… Settle this case on the evidence," McCauley demanded to the jury. "Not, 'Oh yeah, there was a fox out there, maybe there was a fox hunter in the neighborhood, maybe he shot Odin Lloyd.' "

The fox in the courthouse didn't seem too worried about McCauley's rants or what the jury might be contemplating or the fate of his young family or regret over all that was lost, including his undoubtedly dwindling (depleted?) bank account.

Aaron Hernandez must have spent a fortune, perhaps his entire fortune, on this trial, so why not enjoy it.

Sure it was his fate that was being hashed out, but since all the attorneys were relaxed and congenial, and court workers discussed comp time and well-earned vacations, he too might as well lean back and laugh with his girl Shay.

Truth is, he may never again have it this good, still technically presumed innocent.

"That's funny," he mouthed after hearing one of her stories, a fine spring afternoon melting away.