Discarded fork leads to Queens cold case arrest
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By Ryan Schwach
A discarded fork helped law enforcement get an indictment in a 15-year-old Queens murder last week, marking the first time a homicide suspect was identified and arrested in New York City using a public genealogy database.
Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said on Thursday that DNA found on a discarded fork in Florida used by Anthony Scalici connected the 41-year-old to the murder of his uncle in Ridgewood back in 2009.
Scalici was arrested on May 14, and now faces homicide charges, putting a potential end to the murder case under investigation for over a decade.
The investigation began in February 2009, when 64-year-old Rosario Prestigiacomo was found in his Ridgewood home in a pool of blood with 16 gruesome stab wounds to his body.
Police responded to the Greene Avenue home after a neighbor reported hearing a disturbance.
Prestigiacomo had been stabbed in the face, neck, torso and limbs, and suffered puncture wounds to his lung, esophagus, chest and lower abdomen. He also had blunt force injuries to his head, torso and extremities.
At the time of the murder, it was reported that it was unclear if Prestigiacomo knew his killer.
“It is a real big shock,” Prestigiacomo’s daughter Rosa Adele told the Daily News in 2009.
Neighbors at the time told the New York Post that they remembered the victim’s penchant for planting tomatoes in the yard of his Ridgewood home, which he owned.
Blood swabs were taken from the scene, and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that along with Prestigiacomo’s blood, an unknown male’s DNA was also found, which suggested that the attacker had been injured as well and was bleeding.
That profile was entered into local, state, and national databases with negative results, and the case went cold.
In 2022, just over 13 years after the bloody murder, Katz’s office and the NYPD Cold Case Squad sent DNA to a private laboratory and the United States Department of Homeland Security to search for new leads in the long cold case.
A few months later, the private laboratory, a Texas-based company called Othram, used DNA testing to produce a genealogical profile from the suspect’s blood, and the profile was then uploaded to public databases.
Using that information, Linda Doyle from the NYPD’s Forensic Investigations Division built a family tree to identify possible suspects, or relatives of a suspect.
That data was turned over to the Queens district attorney’s office in December 2023. That launched a new investigation carried out by the DA’s alongside NYPD’s Cold Case Squad.
Scalici, who was living in Boynton Beach, Florida, a town on the state’s eastern coast, was identified as the suspect using the new genealogical data.
On various dates in January and February, detectives from the NYPD Cold Case Squad and Boynton Beach Police Department were sent to the Sunshine State to surveil Scalici and attempted to obtain a discarded DNA sample from him.
On Feb. 17, 2024, Boynton Beach Detectives Marco Villari and Aramis Grigorian allegedly grabbed a fork that had been used by the defendant.
The discarded utensil was analyzed and allegedly confirmed that the profile matched the unknown male DNA profile found at the scene of the grisly murder of Prestigiacomo.
Scalici is the son of Prestigiacomo's ex-wife’s brother.
On May 14, Scalici was arrested by Florida United States Marshals, NYPD’s Regional Fugitive Task Force and the Boynton Beach Police Department.
Two weeks later he was extradited to New York, and was indicted the following day.
In all, from the murder to the arrest, it took 5,572 days, two states, and four different agencies to get Scalisi to a courtroom.
“I formed a Cold Case Unit to bring closure to grieving families and seek justice on behalf of victims,” said Katz. “This case is an example of the perseverance and determination of the investigators on this, and every cold case, and highlights the successful partnership formed between my office and the NYPD Cold Case Squad. Defendants should not be able to evade justice no matter how much time has passed.”
Scalici was charged with murder in the second degree. Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Holder ordered him to return to court July 8.
He faces up to 25 years to life in prison if convicted.
