This February, Anthony Scalici discarded a fork in Florida. Detectives from New York and Florida had been watching him for weeks, waiting for a chance to get a sample of his DNA.
Fifteen years before, Mr. Scalici’s uncle had been found stabbed to death in a pool of blood in the hallway of his Queens home. But the blood of an unidentified male had also been found at the scene.
The police recovered the fork, tested it, and found that Mr. Scalici’s DNA matched the blood from the murder scene, as well as DNA that had been found under his uncle’s fingernail, according to Queens prosecutors.
Mr. Scalici, 41, was arraigned Thursday morning in Queens Supreme Court on a second-degree murder charge in the killing of his uncle Rosario Prestigiacomo, 64, according to a news release by Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney.
His lawyer, David Cohen, said his client had pleaded not guilty. Mr. Scalici faces up to 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
“Defendants should not be able to evade justice no matter how much time has passed,” Ms. Katz said in a statement.
The district attorney’s office investigated with the New York Police Department’s Cold Case Squad. It was the first time public genealogy databases had been used to identify and arrest a suspect in a homicide in New York City, according to Ms. Katz.
The case began on the afternoon of Feb. 10, 2009, when the police were called to a two-story rowhouse on Greene Avenue in Ridgewood, Queens, after a neighbor reported a disturbance. An officer found Mr. Prestigiacomo lying facedown in a pool of blood, the police said at the time.
The murder had been especially brutal. Mr. Prestigiacomo was stabbed 16 times, with puncture wounds from his neck to his lower abdomen. He also had been beaten with a shovel, the district attorney’s office said.
Mr. Prestigiacomo seemed to have struggled with his attacker. Swabs from the crime scene found blood that did not belong to him, and unidentified DNA also was found under his fingernail, the district attorney’s office said. The DNA was entered into local, state and national databases, which reported no matches.
The police asked neighbors to be on the lookout for a slim, white man in his 20s or 30s, wearing jeans and a blue hooded sweatshirt, but no suspect was found.
The investigation lay dormant until March 2022, when the district attorney’s office and the Police Department sent the mystery DNA to Othram, a private laboratory.
The company built a genealogical profile for the suspect, which was uploaded to public genealogy databases. The Police Department’s forensic investigations division used information from the databases to create a genealogical profile of possible suspects, and a family tree of the suspects’ relatives, prosecutors said.
That process led the police to Boynton Beach, Fla., and Mr. Scalici, the district attorney said. Detectives from New York and the Boynton Beach Police Department tracked Mr. Scalici in January and February 2024, looking for opportunities to gather a DNA sample from him.
They got their chance on Feb. 17 when Mr. Scalici discarded a fork, prosecutors said.
The recovered utensil was tested by the office of New York City’s chief medical examiner, which found a match in Mr. Scalici, the son of Mr. Prestigiacomo’s ex-wife’s brother, the district attorney said.
Mr. Scalici was apprehended in Florida on May 14 and extradited to New York two weeks later. He did not apply for bail, his lawyer said, and will be held in jail on Rikers Island.
Justice Kenneth Holder, who presided over Mr. Scalici’s arraignment, set his next court appearance for July 8.
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