Welcome to the Inquiry, with me Paul Connelly.

Each week, one question, four expert witnesses,

and an answer.

At 4am on the 19th of April 2017,

Aaron Hernandez, a former American football player,

was found dead, hanging from a bedsheet

in his prison cell in Shirley Massachusetts.

He was just 27 years old

and was serving a life sentence

for the murder of his friend Odin Lloyd.

His fall from grace was as dramatic as it was public,

swaying from a doored sporting hero,

the universally-loathe murderer

in just a few short years.

Five months after Aaron's death, however,

his brain was examined.

He was posthumously diagnosed

with chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE,

and degenerative brain disease that can result

from repeated head trauma.

Trauma, such as concussion,

that American football players

...