He had spent a year in jail rather than plead guilty to a shooting in 2015 that he said he did not commit, and his case had become a rallying point for supporters of changing bail laws.
Eventually, the Bronx district attorney dropped charges against him in the shooting and a separate schoolyard assault. By December, he was set to go to college and even had a meeting with President Barack Obama on his schedule.
But on Sunday night, Hernandez, 19, was arrested again in the Bronx. The police said he was involved in a robbery and knife attack that left one man with a gash on his face that required 15 stitches.
Hernandez’s lawyers suggested the police and prosecutors were targeting their client and interfering with his ability to build a better life.
“If the system stays out of Pedro’s way, he is a unique kid with a bright future,” said Alex Spiro, Hernandez’s defense lawyer in multiple cases.
Julia Deutsch of the Bronx Defenders, which is representing Hernandez on the newest charges, said that Hernandez was the victim in the attack. She said his arrest is the latest instance of a pattern of harassment by law enforcement, and a series of false charges. Hernandez has been accused of three driving infractions since the 2015 shooting charges were dropped, twice for driving with a suspended license and once on charges he ran a red light.
“Mr. Hernandez has been a target of the NYPD,” Deutsch said in the statement, adding, “The details of this case will come out, and the truth will prevail.”
The police said that Hernandez and three other men walked up to two men who were waiting for a cab in the Bronx around 7 a.m. Sunday.
According to a criminal complaint, the two groups started yelling at each other. Hernandez said, “Oh, you want problems.” Then he brandished a knife, swinging it in one victim’s direction and striking the other across the face, the complaint said.
After that, one of the unidentified men with Hernandez beat the first victim with a silver baseball bat while the other ripped a Gucci watch and a gold chain from his body, the court document said.
In her statement, Deutsch said that Hernandez’s face had been slashed and that he had been stabbed in the back Sunday.
Hernandez was seeking medical attention, Deutsch said, when the police “arrived, arrested and forcibly removed him from the hospital.”
The police confirmed that Hernandez was arrested at the Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx. He was charged with multiple counts of robbery, assault, menacing and related crimes. He could face up to 25 years in prison on the top count, a felony charge of assault.
The Bronx district attorney’s office declined to comment. A spokesman for the Police Department, Phil Walzak, rejected Hernandez’s lawyer’s claim that the teenager had been unfairly targeted. “The facts of the case are crystal clear, and these allegations are flatly false,” Walzak said.
But Spiro linked the charges to a series of dismissed cases against Hernandez that he said exposed flaws in the criminal justice system.
“When someone has been falsely arrested as many times as Pedro, and every case has been dismissed, it doesn’t seem to warrant the comment I make over and over again,” he said.
Hernandez’s legal troubles attracted national attention after he was arrested in connection with a shooting in the Bronx in 2015. The victim, a 15-year-old boy, survived and said he did not see who had pulled the trigger. But Hernandez was arrested months later, and the judge in the case set an unusually high bail of $250,000.
Hernandez then became a cause célèbre for people seeking to abolish the cash bail system when he refused to accept a plea bargain that would have spared him jail time. Instead, he spent a year on Rikers Island, maintaining his innocence while a private investigator hired by his family worked to find evidence that could exonerate him.
The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights foundation eventually put up the bail to free Hernandez, saying that Hernandez’s case exemplified the injustice of cash bail. (This year, the Legislature eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies.)
The foundation, which did not respond to a request for comment, also solicited the help of Spiro, a prominent lawyer who has represented high-profile clients like the New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft.
The charges against Hernandez related to the shooting were ultimately dismissed in September 2017. Prosecutors said at the time that they lacked the evidence they needed, and that witnesses’ accounts were contradictory.
Hernandez and his family blamed the inconsistencies on detectives and an assistant district attorney, who they maintained had coerced witnesses to give false testimony. Hernandez has filed a civil-rights suit against the city, which is still pending.
Still, he hoped he would be able to move forward with his education, his lawyers said. Hernandez had completed high school in jail, and he said he had wanted to enroll in college last fall. But those plans had to be delayed, his family said, because he and his sister were still facing charges related to an unrelated robbery in a schoolyard in 2015.
Hernandez sought to get those charges dismissed, too, and succeeded last October. On Tuesday, Spiro confirmed that Hernandez had enrolled in college.
But Hernandez’s problems with law enforcement had not ended. Hours before he was scheduled to meet Obama at a gala in Manhattan in December, Hernandez was arrested again. He was accused of driving a car while his driver’s license was suspended.
On Sunday, the police picked him up at the hospital and charged him with the robbery. So far, Hernandez is the only person arrested in connection with the incident. City jail records show that he was released from custody Monday after posting bail.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.