Nella mente di un killer: Aaron Hernandez

Wow. Watched this documentary gripped and dumbfounded as it all unfolded. Ended up constantly pausing to discuss and debate all the different aspects and conclusions. Just an extremely sad, interesting and bizarre case, one that leaves you unable to put it out of your mind for a long time. I found the documentary on a level to Making a Murderer and The Ted Bundy Tapes, Netflix knows how to get you hooked.

The story of Aaron Hernandez is quite captivating, a star football player with seemingly everything ahead of him, murders someone and ruins his whole life. Why? Unfortunately the series relies too much on people expressing their opinions and not on actual facts. The focus is on the wrong places and seems to cheapen the main purpose. It makes it more he said she said than a documentary.

As a psychologist myself, I feel I need to question the angle this documentary takes. It tells of an NFL player who commits a murder and the director attempts to find some explanations for his actions. There were also questions about his sexuality and it was spoken of a few times, but this still doesn't lead to an explanation for his motives. Then they talk about his sporting head injuries and propose this as an explanation. The documentary is a bit scattered and sometimes deviates from the central mystery of motive. But never the less, it's a compelling Netflix documentary and a lesson that we shouldn't assume that our sporting icons can't have a dark side.

Like everyone else I knew the headlines, but getting a detailed view of the whole case was interesting. There's no way to know if Hernandez made his decisions because of abuse, desperation to keep his sex life secret, CTE or was he simply a sociopath? Maybe all of the above. Unlike most documentaries this didn't seem to be driving an agenda, just presenting the facts. They didn't lock in on one reason it could have happened, they detailed many possibilities through their research, Hernandez's jail conversations and interviews with people that knew him. I highly recommend this documentary.

Being from Europe and not interested in American Football, I never heard anything about Hernandez. So I somehow stumbled over this Mini- Series on Netflix without reading or knowing anything about it.

This documentary is heart wrenching and once again shows pretty good the complex process of one ( above average gifted young) man's life gone totally wrong.

We learn, it may be the sum of many different events and experiences that can lead to devastating, bad decision making, and how important it is to have a safe social environment with truly caring and open minded people.