Safiro Teixeira Furtado, a 28-year-old male immigrant from Cape Verde, was killed in a drive-by shooting in Boston, Massachusetts on July 16, 2012. In the early morning hours, Furtado and his friend, Daniel de Abreu, were passengers in a BMW when an SUV pulled up alongside them at a red light. Multiple shots were fired from the SUV into the car, killing both Furtado and de Abreu.
The attack was described by authorities as a senseless act of violence, as neither Furtado nor de Abreu had any known connections to gangs or crime.
The incident began with a minor altercation inside the Cure Lounge, a Boston nightclub. One of the men had accidentally bumped into former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, causing him to spill his drink. Prosecutors in a later trial would argue that Hernandez felt disrespected by this encounter. It was alleged that Hernandez and a friend, Alexander Bradley, later followed the vehicle carrying Furtado and de Abreu. As the victims' car waited at a traffic light, Hernandez allegedly pulled up beside them and opened fire. An eyewitness who survived the shooting with a bullet wound to the arm later identified Hernandez as the shooter after seeing him on television following a separate arrest.
For a time, the murders of Furtado and de Abreu remained unsolved. However, the investigation gained momentum when Hernandez was arrested in June 2013 for the murder of Odin Lloyd. Evidence developed during the Lloyd murder investigation led police to re-examine the 2012 double homicide. Investigators found the SUV believed to be at the scene of the shooting in the garage of one of Hernandez's relatives and later recovered the alleged murder weapon. In May 2014, Aaron Hernandez was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu.
The prosecution's case largely depended on the testimony of Alexander Bradley, who claimed he was in the SUV with Hernandez when Hernandez fired the fatal shots. The defense, however, argued that Bradley, an admitted drug dealer, was the actual killer and that the motive was a drug deal gone wrong, not a spilled drink. Hernandez's lawyers attacked Bradley's credibility, highlighting an immunity deal he had received from prosecutors. In a surprising turn of events, a jury acquitted Hernandez of the murders in April 2017, convicting him only of unlawful possession of a firearm. Just days after his acquittal, Hernandez took his own life in his prison cell, where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of Odin Lloyd. Following his death, the families of Safiro Furtado and Daniel de Abreu settled a wrongful death lawsuit against Hernandez's estate.
