Netflix subscribers have found a gripping new documentary series in Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez, which searches for meaning in the life and death of the former NFL player. Although there’s not much new information in the three-part series directed by Geno McDermott and based on reporting by sports journalists Kevin Armstrong and Dan Wetzel, fans are still intrigued by the dark story.
The trailer for the series, which premiered on Netflix on Wednesday, includes a chilling statement: “No one has allegedly murdered two people then played an entire season as a professional athlete.” The clip also includes a recording of a call from Hernandez in jail to his mother, where he blames her for his problems.
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“I was the happiest little kid in the word, and you f—ed me up,” he said, to which his mother replied, “I ain’t living with that.”
“You did,” he insisted. “I had nobody. What’d you think I was going to do? Become a perfect angel?”
The former New England Patriots tight end died by suicide at the age of 27 while serving a life sentence in prison after being convicted of masterminding the 2013 murder of Odin Lloyd, his fiancée’s sister’s boyfriend.
The documentary also investigates the traumatic childhood of the football player, who revealed his father was physically abusive to him as a child. “Our father would hit us for anything from a bad grade to disrespectful behavior to sheer clumsiness,” Hernandez’s brother, Jonathan Hernandez, told PEOPLE last week. Jonathan also said without revealing any specific details that Aaron suffered sexual abuse when he was young.
“He had a lot of things happen, both good and bad,” Jonathan said. “People think they know about my brother, but they really don’t. They know what they saw in the news, but they don’t know all the struggles he had.”
The documentary also explores the claims from Hernandez’s attorney that he suffered chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease that has been linked to head trauma from playing football — which the NFL has denied.
“This isn’t just the Aaron Hernandez story,” the trailer said. “There were a lot of lives affected by this guy.”
Netflix fans took to social media to share their early reactions to Killer Inside, which dropped Wednesday.
This Aaron Hernandez doc got me like 😦
— 𝓢♡ (@sarahmezaa) January 15, 2020
Yeah this Aaron Hernandez shit is significantly more wild than I expected. Curveballs
— Pete (@gambleandbattle) January 15, 2020
I shouldn’t have started this Aaron Hernandez doc series cause now it’s 4:15 and I wanna finish watching it cause it’s good af
— Felix (@FGC_FELIX) January 15, 2020
Photo credit: Jared Wickerham / Staff / Getty
