ATTLEBORO, Mass — An agitated and armed Aaron Hernandez complained that he could not trust anyone. Calling from his suburban home, Hernandez, a tight end for the New England Patriots, summoned two accomplices from out of state and together they embarked on a middle-of-the-night, 45-minute drive to Boston to pick up his friend Odin Lloyd, who, prosecutors said, had angered Hernandez for talking to the wrong people during a long visit to a nightclub two nights earlier.

Within hours, Lloyd was dead, shot five times and left in an industrial park less than a mile from Hernandez’s home.

These accounts were laid out Wednesday by prosecutors in Attleboro District Court, where Hernandez was charged with murder and five gun-related offenses. He is believed to be the third NFL player charged with murder while active, and he was, until Wednesday morning, a member of the league’s most celebrated team over the past decade. But about an hour after Hernandez, 23, was arrested Wednesday morning — and before he was arraigned on murder charges — the Patriots released him, calling it “the right thing to do.” Less than a year ago, the Patriots had signed Hernandez to a $40 million contract extension.

In court Wednesday, Hernandez, who pleaded not guilty and was held without bail, showed no emotion as the charges against him were read. He rarely looked at the packed rows of seating in the courtroom and did not seem to notice when there was a commotion as members of Lloyd’s family were escorted from the court crying.

One of Hernandez’s lawyers, Michael K. Fee, called the district attorney’s case against his client, “at bottom, a circumstantial case; it is not a strong case.”

The June 17 killing of Lloyd, according to the prosecutor William McCauley, was a protracted drama and it included Lloyd apparently growing nervous about Hernandez’s intentions as he sat in his friend’s car. In his final moments alive, Lloyd texted his sister to alert her. When she asked who he was with, he answered, “NFL,” and added, “Just so you know.”

The murder, prosecutors said, was gruesome, as Lloyd, a semipro football player, was shot multiple times, with the two final shots fired by someone standing directly above him. Hernandez, prosecutors said, felt betrayed that Lloyd, who had been dating his fiancee’s sister, had talked to some people Hernandez “had troubles with” when the two men were out together on June 14.

The suspected motive for the killing may have been age-old, but police used a variety of modern investigative methods and relied on the technology of a connected and interactive devices to build their case against Hernandez. Piecing together cellphone tower tracking, text messages and surveillance tapes — including video obtained by 14 cameras trained on the outside and inside of Hernandez’s home — police constructed a timeline and concluded, in the words of McCauley, that Hernandez “orchestrated the execution” of Lloyd, 27.