Ursula Ward, mother of murdered football player Odin Lloyd, teared up as she talked to reporters flanked by Rep. Evandro Carvalho and attorney Doug Sheff. [Photo: Sam Doran/SHNS] By Katie Lannan
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, JAN. 30, 2018…..Ursula Ward prepared herself to dedicate the rest of her life to making sure the person who killed her son, Odin Lloyd, was brought to justice.
Ward, a Boston resident, told the Judiciary Committee Tuesday that one thing she had not been able to prepare for was the “devastating” news that the murder conviction against Aaron Hernandez would be erased after his prison suicide last year.
“I felt as if I was burying my Odin again,” she said.
At times pausing to fight back tears, Ward joined Rep. Evandro Carvalho to testify in support of his bill (H 3835) that would end the practice known as abatement ab initio — where a conviction can be wiped out if the defendant dies before exhausting the appeals process — in cases when the defendant dies by suicide.
Carvalho said he did not wish to be insensitive to the issue of suicide, but he believes a defendant “shouldn’t make a decision like that to take away the rights of the survivors to get that justice.”
“When your son is tragically murdered like this, you go through a public humiliation, and then, boom — it disappears,” Carvalho said, referring to a conviction. “It goes, as the process says, it goes to the beginning, as if it never even happened.”
Hernandez, a former New England Patriots player, was found guilty of murder more than two years after the 2013 death of Lloyd, a semi-professional football player.
Days after being acquitted of a separate double homicide, Hernandez in April 2017 was found dead in his cell at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center, where he was serving a life sentence for Lloyd’s murder. His death was officially ruled a suicide.
Ward and others at the hearing wore T-shirts bearing a picture of Lloyd and the slogan “Legends Never Die” on the front and his number, 53, and the nickname “Big O” on the back.
Ward described Lloyd as a “loving, giving man with a heart as big as the world.” She said she knew a murder conviction would not bring her son back, but could offer her some peace.
The bill, she said, would not change anything for her family, but could prevent others who face similar situations from having “to deal with the retraumatization of a vacated conviction upon suicide,” she said.
“I feel as if Odin has not been able to rest in peace, and I have not been able to properly grieve my son,” Ward said.
The issue of vacated convictions has come before Beacon Hill before. In 1997, after the suicide of John Salvi, who had been convicted of murdering two women at Brookline reproductive clinics, the Senate passed a bill that would prevent courts from erasing the convictions of people who die before their appeals are heard, but the bill never became law.
