Posted on 12/30/2013 8:16:54 AM PST by nickcarraway
A homeless man told the police on Friday that his conscience drove him to reveal something he’d kept secret — that he’d beaten a man to death in South Providence 24 years ago.
By nightfall, Daniel Serrano, 65, was charged with the murder of 32-year-old Michael Holliday — a man he said he didn’t intend to kill, Maj. David Lapatin said. “He claims he was feeling very guilty about it,” the police major added. A workman discovered Holliday’s body in a vacant third-floor apartment at 27 Somerset St. on Feb. 24, 1990. The man had been beaten to death. He had been known to the police at the time for a record of forgery and counterfeiting charges during the 1980s.
Holliday’s death was one of 31 homicides in Providence that year, one that was never solved.
Serrano is known as one of the city’s street people, with a history of arrests for drugs, breaking and entering and carrying a gun. What motivated him to walk into the station on Friday was a sense of guilt and the police said Serrano talked about church.
He first walked up to the information desk and told the clerks he wanted to confess to the murder. Then he told Detectives Kenneth Court, Jason Simoneau and Lt. Michael Figueiredo details about the crime — making “damaging statements that we believe would only be [known] to the person at the scene,” Lapatin said.
The detectives brought Serrano to the scene at the apartment house, which had been a homeless shelter, Lapatin said. Though the scene had changed in nearly a quarter-century, Serrano knew it, Lapatin said, and “he pointed out more things.”
Serrano told detectives that he’d wanted to go after another man who had been harassing him, Lapatin said. “He said the person he killed was not the person he intended to kill.”
Serrano is expected to be arraigned before a bail commissioner on Saturday.
All these years, Holliday’s family has wondered about his murder. To hear that a man had confessed was “the best gift ever,” said Holliday’s sister, Theresa Holliday-Delves.
“We’re very pleased with the police, with the work they did to solidify this,” she added.
Michael Holliday was the youngest of the four siblings. He graduated from Central High School and then joined the Army; he was deployed to Korea for several years, she said. “He joined the Army to get a different perspective on life,” Holliday-Delves said.
Her brother loved the experience of being stationed in Korea and learned the language, she said. But after he returned to Rhode Island, things changed for him, she said.
Holliday never married or had children, she said. She didn’t know how he ended up where he did, living in a tough neighborhood. She was living out of state when Holliday was murdered and didn’t know what happened to the case.
Holliday-Delves eventually moved back to Providence, where she worked for the School Department for years. Now 63, she has children and grandchildren who are about to learn more about her brother. There will be “sensitive conversations,” she said, about a man they didn’t know.
It was hard to hear that her brother had been murdered for nothing, a mistake. Serrano’s “torture is living with the knowledge that he took a life he didn’t need to take,” she said.
She was comforted to hear from Major Lapatin that her brother probably hadn’t suffered. She hoped he was at peace.
The news was still stunning her late Friday night. “You only see this stuff on television,” Holliday-Delves said. “You can’t believe it’s going to happen to you.”
Conscious or cold weather? A 65 year old homeless man in Providence in the winter just figured out his retirement plan. Three hots and a cot, no heavy lifting, healthcare without the bother of a crappy website. If he can collect even token Social Security benefits, he’ll be in smokes for the rest of his life.
winner winner chicken dinner.
Everyone should kill at least one stranger in a flophouse when they’re young, so they’ll have something to fall back on when they get old.
Victim was gay in 4,...3,....2,..
You own this thread.
Too funny.
Can you blame him? It appears to be a sensible choice for a man his age with no home.
What’s not funny is that it’s true. The American penal system is worse than useless in deterring those most in need of being deterred.
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