Aaron Hernandez. Started in the NFL in 2010. Three years later, convicted of murder. Just last week, hung himself by a sheet in his jail cell.

Hernandez was just like you and I once. He played football for his high school under the Friday Night Lights. He took the SAT's. He got accepted to college. He reached his goals, lived out his dream. He became the person he always wanted to be.

The difference between you and I and Aaron Hernandez is that you are here, reading this. You are alive, and he is not. He started out like just a normal kid, living his dream of playing college and later professional football. Somewhere along the road, though, he became different. He got involved in gangs, was on trial for one murder, and was soon to be on trial for two more. He did a lot of bad things, definitely, but did he start out as a bad person? Did he pop out of his mother as a murderer? Not only this, but he killed himself. He was so miserable in jail that he felt as though he should take his own life.

I'm not asking for you to feel bad for him. He did bad things, its up to you to decide if he deserves your sympathy. I'm just asking you to understand that he started out just like everyone else does in this world, and things like that can happen to anyone.

Some day, years down the road, we'll be reading the newspaper or watching the news and hear that someone we went to high school with was arrested. Maybe it was for something small like stealing. Maybe it was murder. Maybe it was suicide. In that moment, though, we will remember that that was someone we passed in the halls or sat next to in class or copied homework off of.

Aaron Hernandez once used to be that person. People passed him in the hallways. People sat next to him in class. Maybe people copied his homework, or maybe he was the one doing the copying. He once had a life outside of the gangs and outside of football and it proves that something like this can happen to anyone.

Things like this make me wonder whether or not one person really can make a difference or if that's just a bunch of bologna. If someone reached out to Hernandez and told him to ditch the gangs while he still could, would he still be playing for the New England Patriots right now? If someone tried to get him on the right path, would he not have committed murder(s)? If a single person tried to help him turn his life around, would he still be alive today?

Do you think a single person can make that much of a difference in someone's life? Do you think people who do bad things are just bad people, or do you think that they could have been saved at some point? Leave a comment, let me know what you think.