Commonwealth v. Broom (Lawyers Weekly No. 10-079-16)
NOTICE: All slip opinions and orders are subject to formal revision and are superseded by the advance sheets and bound volumes of the Official Reports. If you find a typographical error or other formal error, please notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Judicial Court, John Adams Courthouse, 1 Pemberton Square, Suite 2500, Boston, MA, 02108-1750; (617) 557-1030; SJCReporter@sjc.state.ma.us SJC-11729 COMMONWEALTH vs. ELDRICK BROOM. Suffolk. February 12, 2016. – June 13, 2016. Present: Gants, C.J., Spina, Botsford, Duffly, & Lenk, JJ. Homicide. Cellular Telephone. Probable Cause. Constitutional Law, Search and seizure, Probable cause, Retroactivity of judicial holding, Harmless error. Search and Seizure, Warrant, Probable cause. Error, Harmless. Jury and Jurors. Practice, Criminal, Capital case, Retroactivity of judicial holding, Warrant, Harmless error, Jury and jurors, Question by jury. Indictments found and returned in the Superior Court Department on January 31, 2012. A pretrial motion to suppress evidence was heard by Janet L. Sanders, J., and the cases were tried before Jeffrey A. Locke, J. Elizabeth Caddick for the defendant. Cailin M. Campbell, Assistant District Attorney, for the Commonwealth. BOTSFORD, J. Eldrick Broom, the defendant, stands convicted of the murder in the first degree of Rosanna Camilo DeNunez, on the theories of extreme atrocity or cruelty and felony-murder with aggravated rape as the predicate felony.[1] We consider here the defendant’s appeal from his convictions, and affirm. Background. We summarize the facts that the jury could have found. In 2010, the victim, who was from the Dominican Republic and the mother of three children, moved to New Jersey with her newborn baby, Thiago. Shortly thereafter, she relocated to Boston to seek medical treatment for Thiago. Although in July of 2011, the victim’s sixteen year old daughter, Navila, joined her mother to help her take care of Thiago, the victim’s husband of seventeen years and her other son remained in the Dominican Republic. By the time Navila came to Boston, the victim was living in an apartment on Fairlawn Avenue in the Mattapan section of Boston. In the spring, summer, and early fall of 2011, the defendant lived in an apartment across the hall from the victim. The defendant was living with his fiancée and their children. The victim spoke very little English, and interacted in a substantive way only with her family members and the medical professionals who were providing services to Thiago. The victim sometimes left her keys in her apartment door at the Fairlawn Avenue apartment, and on three different occasions before the day she was killed, the defendant knocked on the door and returned the keys to her. Navila had never seen her mother and […]