And with that, a gruesome murder case that had languished in a kind of judicial liminal space for more than three decades finally arrived at an official conclusion. Despite there being no doubt that Colafella had killed two members of a neighboring family and wounded two others, longstanding questions about his mental competency repeatedly kept the case from coming to trial, with Colafella spending most of those years confined at a mental health facility.
Advertisem*nt
Though unusual for the decades between the charge and verdict, the Colafella case is a window into a byzantine process in the judicial system that can leave victims and their families without a sense of closure, while prosecutors, defense lawyers, judges, and psychologists wrestle over what to do with a defendant whose mental illness left him unable to fully participate in the case against him. It is a kind of legal purgatory that can trap both him and his victims.
“As society has progressed forward, we really haven’t modified the justice system to keep up with these realities” that some people can balance on that knife’s edge of competency, said Dr. Kellie Wallace, a professor at Lasell University in Newton who wrote her dissertation about people caught in the nether world of the competency process. “The justice system sort of looks at everybody as a rational person, and we know that is not the case, and it doesn’t know what to do with you otherwise.”
And now, in a bizarre turn of events, Colafella is already eligible for parole as he has been in custody longer than his sentence for the crime. A hearing on whether to grant him parole is scheduled for Sept. 5.
Colafella’s years stuck in “forensic limbo,” as Wallace calls such cases, were largely spent in Bridgewater State Hospital. He was sent there shortly after the June 1990 morning when he attacked his upstairs neighbors, the Earley family, with a gun and an ax, killing the father and son and wounding the mother and another son.
Advertisem*nt
About once a decade over this period, doctors deemed him competent to stand trial, only for him to be found incompetent by other evaluators again. Then last year, he was again found competent and this April he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years.
“For Mr. Colafella to remain in custody that long without a trial is pretty much unconscionable,” Colafella’s attorney, Sean O’Neill, said in an interview, adding that he will now advocate for Colafella’s release from prison on parole.
O’Neill said Colafella has “done his time and deserves a fair chance to live outside of a carceral setting in his remaining years.”
But some of the Earleys’ surviving family members don’t want to see him granted parole. The many ups and downs over the years have taken their toll, they said.
“We’ve been on a roller coaster,” said Maureen Earley, the wife of another son who was not at the family apartment at the time of the killings.
As of mid-August, Massachusetts was holding 99 people at Bridgewater whom the courts had deemed incompetent, according to the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security. Most are there for shorter periods: an average of 196 days before the hospital’s forensic psychologists considered them “restored” enough for the criminal matter to proceed, according to the state.
But for a few like Colafella, including another patient who has been deemed incompetent since 1995, months can stretch into years.
Advertisem*nt
Because of how the justice system handles such cases, defendants often end up being held for longer than they would have if they had just been found guilty from the onset and served their sentence, said Connor Barusch of the Committee for Public Counsel Services.
“There are a bunch of situations that come up that a person with a mental health diagnosis is treated more severely than someone without one,” Barusch said. “And that clearly is wrong.”
Colafella’s violent encounter with his upstairs neighbors, his tenants, occurred on June 14, 1990, after a longstanding dispute over rent and noise, according to court filings and news reports. That morning, Colafella grabbed a handgun and an ax and strode up to the second floor, where Walter and Katherine Earley and their adult sons Robert and Thomas lived. Colafella opened fire, killing Walter and Robert and wounding Katherine and Thomas.
The two surviving victims have since died. But children of other siblings who weren’t there that day continue to follow the case closely, and attended the April hearing. Janet Earley-Lynch, a grandchild of Walter and Katherine, said the violent attack continues to haunt the family.
“Thirty-four years our family never lived their lives fully due to the effects this had on them,” Earley-Lynch said in court as she stared at Colafella. “Thirty-four years the defendant got to live. Now 34 years later, the defendant will be released to continue on with his life.”
The scene of the killings has been laid out in chilling detail in police reports, court filings, and witness testimony. Police responding to a call for a stabbing at 137 St. Alphonsus St. found Walter Earley, a retired Boston police officer, outside on the sidewalk bleeding heavily, and Thomas bleeding from the groin and holding Colafella’s gun and axe.
Advertisem*nt
Thomas Earley pointed police inside, where they found Colafella covered in so much blood that officers asked him if he was one of the victims.
Colafella answered: “It’s from the people I shot upstairs.”
Earley-Lynch and other family members remembered Walter’s enthusiasm for handball and Katherine’s devout faith. Speaking to the Globe weeks after the April hearing, they said a kind of pallor has hung over the family since the deaths of Walter and Robert, and the two survivors, Katherine and Thomas, became lost souls who lived together for the rest of their lives, afraid to walk out the door. They died a few years apart in the 2000s.
Within hours of the attack, Colafella confessed to detectives, telling them his intent had been to scare the family into moving out, but that the situation escalated.
“I told them, ‘I’m going to cut your head off. . . . Stay down,’ ” he said.
“I never thought it would end up like that,” Colafella told detectives.
A family member of Colafella’s said “Nick,” as the family called him, had a complicated history. An immigrant from Italy, he’d worked as a mason and did well, saving enough to acquire multiple rental properties. He was friendly but guarded, a loner who loved his extended family but preferred to travel alone.
He’s deeply regretful and his thoughts are with the Earley family, his relative said. “The man prays the rosary every day, and I don’t think he’s praying it for forgiveness,” the relative said.
Advertisem*nt
After his arrest, concerns over Colafella’s competency were immediately raised: the courts postponed his case due to his “refusal to be arraigned,” according to filings. Twice — nearly two decades apart — he was deemed competent to stand trial, but each time he was recommitted to Bridgewater, including on the eve of trial in 2021.
With medical records impounded, specifics of Colafella’s diagnoses are scant, though one footnote on a court filing says his incompetency “stems from his paranoia concerning his defense counsel,” and others refer to delusions.
The question of competency differs from what is known as an “insanity defense,” in which defendants claim they are not culpable because they were mentally ill at the time of the crime, and unable to control their actions. Instead, in determining a defendant’s competency, evaluators weigh whether the defendant understands the legal proceedings and what is at stake, and whether they can participate in their own defense.
On at least one occasion, in 2009, a lawyer for Colafella sought to have the charges dismissed, saying Colafella could receive better mental health treatment if he was released from prison. The lawyer argued that it was “pointless if not cruel, and serves no purpose” for the case to continue. But the request was rejected.
Former Suffolk district attorney Daniel Conley, who was a staff prosecutor at the time of the killings and responded to the scene, said in an interview that he does not recall the decision in the late 2000s, when he ran the office, to keep pushing to try the case. But Conley, who recalled the pools of blood on the sidewalk, said such a determination would have been made in consideration of the victims and their families.
Once again, the case languished.
In 2022, attorney Sean O’Neill was referred to Colafella through another client. Colafella connected to O’Neill in a way he hadn’t with his previous lawyers, and began participating in his own defense. The courts deemed him competent in March 2023.
In April, Colafella hobbled into the musty Suffolk Superior courtroom using a walker. In front of the Earley relatives, a court-appointed evaluator testified that she’d spoken to Colafella that morning and that he showed no signs of delusions, and that he understood the charges and the weight of the sentence he faced.
Judge Joshua Wall asked him if his mind was clear that morning. “Very clear,” Colafella said.
Asked about the shooting, he said, “My mind was defective at the time.”
And then he pleaded guilty. District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office said in a statement, “We believe this disposition provides justice for the Earley family and appropriate accountability for Mr. Colafella’s behavior.”
The Earleys’ surviving relatives see it differently.
“This was not the closure, if there is such a thing, to be expected after all these years,” Earley-Lynch said.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter.
