By Laurel J. Sweet and O’Ryan Johnson
Friday, October 8, 2010
The brother of a Cambridge man who was stabbed to death seven years ago by a Harvard University student was charged yesterday with trying to decapitate a Harvard researcher and raping his 11-year-old son during a brutal August home invasion.
Marcos Colono, 32, was also named as a suspect in the rape of two women in a 2008 home invasion, prosecutors said.
The 53-year-old father who was attacked in the August home invasion was forced to witness his child’s abuse and then was hacked 11 times with a butcher knife – eight times in his neck – as he and his boy fought back, prosecutor Katharine Folger said.
Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone Jr. said the “horrific” bloodbath left “an entire community in fear.”
In a joint press conference with Boston police and prosecutors, Cambridge authorities said Colono was looking for money and they have no reason to believe he knew the father works at Harvard or that the crime was linked to his brother’s 2003 stabbing death by a Harvard student.
Colono, a construction worker with a 15-year-old son, was named a suspect yesterday in an unsolved 2008 home invasion in Brighton in which two female college students were raped, authorities said.
“We expect to charge him in the near future,” said Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley.
Prosecutors said they tied Colono to the Cambridge home invasion through a bloody partial handprint found at the scene and a fingerprint Boston police have had on file from a 1998 pot bust.
They said police matched DNA recovered from the Cambridge and Brighton crime scenes but do not have a DNA sample from Colono yet to compare it to because he has no felony convictions. In both cases, victims were “stacked” on top of each other before they were assaulted, prosecutors said.
As his anguished mother Ada Colono looked on, Marcos Colono pleaded not guilty to home invasion, armed assault with intent to kill and aggravated rape of a child. He was ordered held on $1 million cash bail by Judge Roanne Sragow.
Defense attorney Ben Selman called Colono’s bail “excessive.”
In a nationally polarizing tragedy that pitted haves against have-nots, Colono’s brother Michael, an 18-year-old cook, was stabbed through the heart April 12, 2003, in Cambridge during a chance encounter that led to a fight with Alexander Pring-Wilson, a well-to-do master’s student at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
Pring-Wilson, 32, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in January 2008, after his initial murder conviction was tossed out by the state Supreme Judicial Court, which ruled a defendant claiming to have killed in self-defense could dredge up a victim’s criminal history. At the time, Colono angrily slammed Pring-Wilson’s second chance as an “insult to justice.” Pring-Wilson was freed Dec. 31, 2008.
