Boston Jury Convicts Woman of Setting Fire that Killed Girlfriend’s Two Children
Boston Jury Convicts Woman of Setting Fire that Killed Girlfriend’s Two Children
by Peter Cassels
Wednesday Feb 17, 2010
A Boston jury convicted Nicole Chuminski of two counts of second-degree murder in connection with Acia and Sophia Johnson’s deaths inside their mother’s South Boston apartment on April 6, 2008.
The Suffolk County jury convicted Nicole Chuminski on two counts of second-degree murder in connection with Acia and Sophia Johnson’s deaths. The panel also convicted her of arson for setting the blaze and two counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (smoke and flames) for injuries the girls’ mother and brother sustained.
A judge will sentence Chuminski on Feb. 18. She faces a mandatory life sentence with the possibility of parole after 15 years on each murder conviction.
The fire in the South Boston triple-decker killed 14-year-old Acia Johnson and 2-year-old Sophia Johnson in April 2008. The children died holding each other in a bedroom closet. The fire burned them so badly the medical examiner needed dental records to make a positive identification.
The blaze also seriously injured Anna Reisopoulos, who is their mother and was Chuminski’s girlfriend at the time. Acia’s twin brother, Raymond Johnson, suffered less extensive injuries.
According to investigators, Chuminski and Reisopoulos had argued hours before the fire. Police arrested Chuminski after they discovered an accelerant on her clothing consistent with the fuel investigators found on a door frame in the dwelling.
“Throughout this investigation and prosecution, our goal was to speak for two murdered children,” Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel Conley said after the jury announced its verdict. “Suffolk prosecutors, Boston police detectives, Boston firefighters, state police chemists, our victim-witness advocates and countless others worked toward the result we reached today. But as satisfied as we are with these verdicts, we know they will never replace the beautiful lives that were snuffed out on April 6, 2008.”
Conley said the girls were part of what he called a dysfunctional family, but they loved each other deeply.
“These two young girls should not have died,” Conley told news media as prosecutors David Fredette and Julie Higgins stood by. “I hope this gives their family some sense of justice and relief.”
Fredette is in the district attorney office’s homicide unit and Higgins is in its domestic violence unit. Catherine Yuan was the victim-witness advocate who worked on the case.
“Nicole and I are disappointed with the verdict,” defense attorney William White, Jr., told EDGE. “We believed that there was reasonable doubt and that the evidence was weak and circumstantial. Fire investigators were unable to tell what accelerant was used to start the fire or how the accelerant was ignited. They had no evidence connecting Nicole to the crime. Nicole loved the relationship with the children and she cherished them. Although Nicole was abused in the relationship with Anna, she never had ill will or a notion to harm her or anyone else.”
During the trial, Fredette told jurors Chuminski was in “a fit of rage” after fighting with Reisopolous at a relative’s wedding reception in Weymouth the night before the fire. The two women had been together for only a few months.
Fredette told the court the family asked Reisopoulos to leave after the argument. As a result, Chuminski “was embarrassed, she was humiliated, and she was later kicked out herself,” the prosecutor said.
A few hours later, Chuminski started banging on Reisopoulos’s door at of her South Boston home, he added. When no one responded, Chuminski then tried to call Reisopoulos on her cell phone, but she didn’t answer.
Chuminski later went to a friend’s house, “and all she kept talking about was the wedding and [the incident],” Fredette said. “She has drugs in her system and she’s angry.”
Fredette said Chuminski returned to the street outside the building sometime between 2:30 and 3 a.m. on April 6, 2008.
“She’s banging on the door, no one’s answering, and the kids aren’t supposed to be there,” the prosecutor said. “She wants to send a little bit of a message. She takes something with acetone in it and pours it on the steps and lights it. This was an intentionally set fire.”
Fredette also told the jury when investigators interviewed Chuminski about the fire she “tried to distance herself” from the crime and changed her story several times.
Reisopolous, who is being held at a county jail on unrelated charges, and her son testified at the trial. They said they called for Acia Johnson to bring Sophia out, but she could not make it through the thick smoke. Firefighters later found the girls huddled together in the closet burned beyond recognition.
The Network/La Red, a Boston-based organization working to end same-sex partner abuse, said domestic violence occurs in 25 to 33 percent of relationships, a rate very similar to that heterosexual women experience.
“Partner abuse is often treated as if it is invisible in LGBT communities, but in reality, many in our communities live in fear of their partners, in fear for their safety and in fear for their loved ones,” Beth Leventhal, the organization’s director, told EDGE in a statement. “It’s unfortunate that it’s only after horrendous acts like the South Boston fire that we talk at a community level about this issue.”
Kaitlin Nichols, director of organizing and education for The Network/La Red, further discussed how this case highlighted domestic violence in same-sex relationships.
“One thing we heard from the prosecutors in this trial is that the violence was escalating before the fire,” she said. “Because we know that physical and emotional abuse tends to escalate and worsen over time, domestic-violence-related homicides are considered predictable and therefore preventable. One thing we can do as a community is learn the signs of abuse, which will make it easier to support someone who is being abused, sooner rather than later.”
Source: http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=&sc2=news&sc3=&id=102430
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Stumble It!
Think about this for a moment. If she had killed her girlfriend too, it could well have been listed as an “intimate partner homocide” so anyone seeing that would have seen “woman killed by intimate partner” and would have thought another man killed his girlfriend or wife. I strongly contend that that is the reason they are now using the term intimate partner instead of spousal abuse. They want people to think it is a man who is the abuser and to mask the number of women who abuse men or other women.
Shattered- you mean like the way they emphasize women and ignore men when they say stuff like:
“same-sex partner abuse, said domestic violence occurs in 25 to 33 percent of relationships, a rate very similar to that heterosexual women experience”
They really can’t bring themselves to acknowledge 1) that some women are violent, or 2) that some men are victims of violent women. It just doesn’t seem to be within their polluted little brains.
Healdsburger
You got it. Also what they do not point out is that “25 to 33 percent” occurs in lesbian relationships far more than it does with men but by just saying “same sex relationships” most think it is always the homosexual side, not the lesbian side of things. Lesbian relationships have a higher violence rate than any other.
Erin Pizzey states:
knew several years ago that the figures for lesbian DV were going to be reported. I was at a conference and met a research worker from America who told me about their research and said he doubted if their findings would ever be published.
My point is and always has been that I had many lesbians coming into the refuge who were savagely beaten by their partners.
I was aware for the last thirty years of the violence between women. How, I kept asking, could the feminist movement claim that men were ‘perpetrators’ when the figures for women attacking each other were as high or higher than the figures for men abusing women? At the moment, there are studies (Lie and Gentlewarrior) but we need to find much more evidence.
I pointed out on a programme called Woman’s Hour this Week that women were violent to each other, in an argument with a very senior feminist from the English Federation Of Women’s Aid (the federation controls most of the refuges in this country and the funding. They are heavily radical feminists [more accurately called redfems â€â€WHS] She argued that this was not so and the women were beaten by their husbands or partners when they tried to leave them for another women.
Are there figures for gay men’s violence towards each other? I would imagine so, but could be quite wrong, that the figures are less than for gay women.
http://fathersforlife.org/pizzey/eplesbdv.htm
This is from a liberal source:
How common is lesbian partner violence?
About 17-45% of lesbians report having been the victim of a least one act of physical violence perpetrated by a lesbian partner
http://www.musc.edu/vawprevention/lesbianrx/factsheet.shtml
Even Lesbian Life gets it:
http://lesbianlife.about.com/od/lesbianhealth/a/DVFactsMyths_2.htm
Myths of Domestic Violence for Lesbians
1: Lesbian relationships can’t have domestic violence, because they are both women. 2: Only the “butch†partner can be abusive. 3: It must be “mutual abusive†or “fighting†if both partners are of the same sex. 4: A physically smaller partner cannot abuse a larger partner.