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Shooting survivor, bouncer back on stand in Hernandez murder trial

BOSTON — The jury in the Aaron Hernandez double murder trial is receiving a detailed play-by-play of what happened the night when two men were shot and killed after leaving a Boston nightclub in 2012.

Witnesses on the stand described the bloody and gruesome scene inside the car where the victims were killed, and a bouncer at the club described the initial confrontation that prosecutors said led up to the shooting.

That bouncer, Ugochukwu Ojimba, was back on the stand Thursday.

Ojimba worked at Cure and his job involved scanning the crowd for anything out of place. It was an interaction between Hernandez and two men, with a fourth man standing over Hernandez’s shoulder, that caught his eye.

“Nothing came of it, so I moved on,” he said on the stand Wednesday.

The jury saw video of Hernandez and two other people leaving the club just after it closed at 2 a.m. Soon after, the bouncer got into a car with other nightclub workers heading to where his car was parked.

That’s when he said they saw a BMW stopped on an overpass.

“We saw glass on the ground,” he said. “We saw car doors open.”

Thinking the car was involved in a crash, Ojimba and another man went to the car to see if they could help.

They soon realized that they couldn’t.

“There were bullet wounds to the head and chest,” Ojimba said. “They were the two men I saw interacting with Aaron Hernandez earlier in the night.”

Aquilino Freire and Raychide Sanches survived the shooting inside the BMW. He and Raychide Sanches described the horror of how they watched Safiro Furtado and Daniel D’Abreu die.

“(D’Abreu) was trying to talk,” Freire said. “He was dying. I was just trying to talk to him.”

While Sanches was on the stand, Hernandez defense attorney Jose Baez attempted to portray him as a Dorchester gang member, but that line of questioning was quickly shut down by a judge.