Court: Case against man convicted of strangling and dismembering somebody was not prejudiced by prosecutors' use of songs he wrote and sang about strangulation and dismemberment

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a Cambridge man's first-degree murder sentence for strangling and then dismembering somebody in his apartment in 2015.

In an appeal of his life-without-parole sentence, the attorney for Carlos Colina argued that the prosecution's use of recordings of songs written and sung by Colina, found in his apartment after parts of Jonathan Camilien, 26, of Somerville were found in two different locations, and including lyrics about strangulation, murder and dismemberment, unfairly prejudiced the jury against his client and that they were obtained with a faulty search warrant, to boot.

The state's highest court concluded: Nope.

The court said the lyrics - some of which it describes in great, nauseating detail - were properly introduced by prosecutors to show Colina's "state of mind, identity, intent, plan, or knowledge on the day of the murder and not for the purpose of showing anything about the defendant's character or propensity for misbehavior."

Similarly, there was nothing wrong with the warrant police obtained to search Colina's apartment, in which they found the CDs. And while the judge and prosecutors may have made some errors in their statements to the jury, they were minor and would not have affected the verdict, the court said.

We conclude neither the rap music evidence nor the record of online purchases [another piece of evidence] was erroneously admitted in evidence. We further conclude that the trial judge's nondeadly force instructions were correct, and that any error in the judge's omission of an instruction on sudden combat or reasonable provocation was not prejudicial. While we agree that the prosecutor's remarks during closing argument were erroneous, the defendant was not prejudiced.

The court summarized events on the morning of April 4, 2015, when security guards from Biogen found "a suspicious duffel bag" on a walkway next to their property on Binney Street.

Police officers arrived at the scene shortly after 8 A.M. and discovered that the bag contained a human torso, appearing to belong to a male. Later that day, security personnel from the business led officers to a conference room, where they reviewed a surveillance video of the business's property recorded in the early morning hours of April 4. The officers observed on the video, starting at the 4:15 A.M. time stamp, a person carrying a bag across a street towards the walkway, returning from the walkway to the same street without the bag, and entering an apartment building, all over the course of approximately five minutes.

Directing their investigative efforts to the apartment building depicted in the surveillance video, police obtained a time stamped record of key fobs used to enter the apartment building on that morning of April 4. From this record, police learned that a key fob assigned to the defendant was used to enter the lobby at 4:26 A.M. and that no other key fob was used to enter the apartment building for a "long period" around this time. The record also showed the number of the defendant's apartment, which was located on the third floor.

Later that same morning, police conducted a search of the halls, stairwells, and trash rooms of the apartment building. In a trash bin in the third-floor trash room, they discovered human remains -- including upper left and right limbs, lower left and right limbs, and a human head that appeared to be that of a male -- within white trash bags that had been stuffed into two blue draw-string bags branded with the name of a bodybuilding website. The trash bin also contained red-brown stains that later tested positive for the presence of blood. Officers also found clothes and other items in the trash bin, including fragments of a driver's license and credit cards that had been cut into pieces. From these fragments, officers obtained the name of the victim, Jonathan Camilien, as well as his date of birth and photograph.

While on the third floor in the trash room, and prior to the trash bags being removed from the trash bin and opened, police officers heard the sound of a power tool or vacuum cleaner coming from the defendant's nearby apartment. When they approached the apartment's door, they could hear water being turned on and off and could smell a strong odor of bleach and cleaning products. The defendant then exited his apartment to the sight of the officers standing outside his front door. The officers observed that the defendant's clothes were wet and that he smelled of a bleach-based cleaning solution. The defendant agreed to accompany the officers to the police station. In the apartment building's lobby, officers observed a box addressed to the defendant from the same bodybuilding website that was branded on the blue draw-string bags found in the third-floor trash bin.

After arresting Colina, who had numerous scratches and cuts, police got a search warrant for his apartment, where, in addition to his rap CDs, they found:

A piece of green rope, a handsaw with red-brown stains on the blade that was removed from its handle, and cleaning supplies. They also observed red-brown stains on the floor beneath a carpet, some of which tested positive for the presence of blood.

Colina was convicted in 2018.