DC - Savvas Savopoulos, family & Veralicia Figueroa murdered; Daron Wint Arrested #17

[Skigirl]

They ^ must have already had a buyer. Also, those kinds of things are more valuable with the tags still attached. Do you think DW et al would know authentic LV from fake? Would they even care? I don't even know that AS carried those types of bags, but maybe if there were women with the "gang" as others have postulated, they would go shopping in AS' closet. Not many would fit in a white bucket, so DW would have to be like Santa Claus, dropping of hand bags on his way from the S house to the church parking lot!

I am SO curious to find out the original plan in this crime. I have a hard time imagining the plan was to steal AND to torture murder. Of course, I could be totally wrong. It just seems one would make the other more difficult, but would be added when the perps were at the house longer than originally planned.

It seems like if people were coming and going from the house, that would be more likely to be noticed by neighbors. I lean toward thinking DW was not alone, at least not the entire time. I don't believe he took a bus to the house. How did he get there? Who dropped him off and were they aware of the plans, or thought there was some legitimate reason?

Don't laugh, but I watched a huge number of homicide and theft videos put out by DC Police last night...so many people roll up on bikes! I had no idea so many people rode bikes to crimes! A bike would be easy to stash behind the house or down the street, and if it looked decent, it probably wouldn't really make anybody blink. Of course, you would have to then assume that somebody rode off on it or otherwise disposed of it (unless parked on the street someplace and left behind) but I can't stop seeing a picture in my mind of Wint casually peddling into the neighborhood.

 

[Peliman]

To rent a car you have to have a valid driver's license and a credit card. Maybe that explains the presence of one of the women in the car with Wint?

Yes that's true, something I suspect, no link.

Please refresh my sanity. Real early on did I hear about a search on a pick-up truck owned by wint? Is it my imagination or a figment of my imagination?

 

[Skigirl]

The plot thickens, and becomes more confusing, with every bit of info. They had a state-of-the-art "safe" room, Mr. S had a gun in the house, swords (in which he had professional training), a home security system, a garage that was nearly impossible to access, and protective dogs. This may sound off the wall, but I'm beginning to wonder if DW drugged them, at some point, to subdue them. Of course, he would've had to let the drugs wear off of SS, before he allowed the phones calls. After the calls, he would drug again. Who knows, but it is a possibility...and, one that might explain a few things. I guess we won't know, until the full autopsy and toxology reports are released.

ITA agree that each detail makes this crime curiouser and curiouser. You also have these weird car things popping up (rare mosler, assistant who happens to be a racecar enthusiast, the reg in his possession, the Amerit truck) that might just be a red herring. Plus a tortured, not just murdered, 10-year old! It is utterly baffling.

 

[CrimeNeverPays]

I'm getting a better picture of the happenings. Breaking out my crystal ball it's looking like a group in the hood and a couple in-laws or out-laws. I'm also seeing something like an accessory out there somewhere.

My hunch is the Chevy cruze was a rental. Wish I knew more about NY happenings. His GF can't be happy about long absences.

You are right... need more info on the GF --look like the interview w someone who lived there..said there was a group living there. ??communal living?? or did I dream this up?? Also need to go back to DW's last *known* theft that he was arrested for... & then walk backwards from there.....to the SS invasion. keep watching for the breadcrumb trail.

 

[Skigirl]

Yes that's true, something I suspect, no link.

Please refresh my sanity. Real early on did I hear about a search on a pick-up truck owned by wint? Is it my imagination or a figment of my imagination?

A pick-up truck owned by Wint? Errrrrrrr... I have no recollection of that, but keep in mind that my brain is like a...the thing you use to strain spaghetti.

Anyone else?

 

[rkf]

Panic room upper left part of the PLAY ARROW on the screenshot? Looks like a normal door opening into hallway, then thick like a wall shaped door inside.

View attachment 78171

If you look at the blueprint of the first floor, the butler's pantry is right below that room. It looks like those walls are supporting/load bearing walls, so it could just be a closet or they could have made it a safe room. Seems pretty small for a family of 5. I don't see anything else that could be it, but I can't read most of the text. I wonder how the news channel got these blue prints.

Looking at these blueprints some more makes me think about where the victims were during the crime. PS was in his room, to the right of the arrow. He has his own bathroom to the left of his room. The master suite is huge. Is this where the adults were kept? Or the bedroom to the right of PS? I thought news reports said there was a bathroom connecting PS' room to the room where the adults died, but it doesn't look like the bathroom on either side of PS' room has doors that open to two bedrooms. A bathroom and PS' room are where the fire was primarily contained IIRC.

 

[rkf]

They didn't even take all the credit cards, according to the SW return for the house. If Wint's motive was financial, he did a really poor job of extracting the value he could have from the situation.

Which means either he's not very smart or money wasn't his motive. I said to someone else, DW may not be intelligent, but he is really good at detecting weakness in individuals and systems.

 

[TexMex]

Panic room upper left part of the PLAY ARROW on the screenshot? Looks like a normal door opening into hallway, then thick like a wall shaped door inside.

View attachment 78171

So the panic room is upstairs?

 

[Skigirl]

If you look at the blueprint of the first floor, the butler's pantry is right below that room. It looks like those walls are supporting/load bearing walls, so it could just be a closet or they could have made it a safe room. Seems pretty small for a family of 5. I don't see anything else that could be it, but I can't read most of the text. I wonder how the news channel got these blue prints.

Looking at these blueprints some more makes me think about where the victims were during the crime. PS was in his room, to the right of the arrow. He has his own bathroom to the left of is room. The master suite is huge. Is where the adults were kept? Or the bedroom to the right of PS? I thought news reports said there was a bathroom connecting PS' room to the room where the adults died, but it doesn't look like the bathroom on either side of PS' room has doors that open to two bedrooms. A bathroom and PS' room are where the fire was primarily contained IIRC.

This reminded me that the Savopoulos house SW allowed LE to look for/seize diagrams or photos. Who would have had access to diagrams? Are diagrams blueprints? What other type of diagrams would be relevant here? Maybe there is something I'm not thinking of.

 

[rkf]

Here is the question . What do you suppose the TRUCK they were found with was intended for?? stashed stuff. right? LE coulda/woulda/shoulda followed it to its destination.....may have found a warehouse full of designer Birkin Bags, - but more like martial arts stuff, Japanese swords (worth $$), Bling Bling, some Man Cave stuff, but that truck looks more like it was ready to chop shop something somewhere. (we need to find that warehouse - ) that would be key..

Any ideas on the purpose of that large Truck?? haven't kept up w the blog, but SS own any motorcycles or smaller vehicles that PS drove when Kart racing?? You know he would have been the kind of dad who would have purchased something for PS to drive that was his very own... how about boats... an obit it read SS was skilled powerboat enthusiast...

The Bentley is the lone ranger here.... was found somewhere else..we have NO info on it. A particularly valuable one I read here on WS, could have been the one planned for chop. But my curiosity is there would have had to be more vehicles for such a prolific auto enthusiast.. smaller ones off the radar...

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a stash house somewhere. (Hope LE has found it by now.) But how would DW et al have transported larger items to it? The Porsche doesn't hold very much. Assuming this is not their first burglary (HAHAHA...) the warehouse/storage locker/stash house could have been full of stuff from other crimes. Wondering how much of it would have been from S family.

 

[rkf]

DW& company needs Poster 1 address... can you forward to the jail??

DW & Co have plenty of friends on the outside.

 

[Skigirl]

If you look at the blueprint of the first floor, the butler's pantry is right below that room. It looks like those walls are supporting/load bearing walls, so it could just be a closet or they could have made it a safe room. Seems pretty small for a family of 5. I don't see anything else that could be it, but I can't read most of the text. I wonder how the news channel got these blue prints.

Looking at these blueprints some more makes me think about where the victims were during the crime. PS was in his room, to the right of the arrow. He has his own bathroom to the left of is room. The master suite is huge. Is where the adults were kept? Or the bedroom to the right of PS? I thought news reports said there was a bathroom connecting PS' room to the room where the adults died, but it doesn't look like the bathroom on either side of PS' room has doors that open to two bedrooms. A bathroom and PS' room are where the fire was primarily contained IIRC.

The affidavits describe the adults as being in an adjacent bedroom, I always assumed the other one at the front of the house, especially since smoke was billowing out of the front windows and fire fighters described the fire as "fairly contained".

 

[Skigirl]

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a stash house somewhere. (Hope LE has found it by now.) But how would DW et al have transported larger items to it? The Porsche doesn't hold very much. Assuming this is not their first burglary (HAHAHA...) the warehouse/storage locker/stash house could have been full of stuff from other crimes. Wondering how much of it would have been from S family.

If true they had a ring going with an infrastructure that included a storage unit, good golly, this all seems like more work than holding down a legit job. I mean, moving crud around from houses to storage units, finding buyers of the crud, driving around, changing money into money orders $1000/time, rounding up all your friends and planning/coordinating. I can't even imagine that, even when it didn't result in arrest, it amounted to too much wealth for any of those people. How senseless.

 

[rkf]

One possibility is that whomever came up with the idea was too stupid to realize that there weren't cartoon-style money bags with little dollar signs on them piled up around the house, and then, when those didn't immediately materialize, was too stupid to realize that it wouldn't be possible to withdraw ONE BILLION DOLLARS from a local bank branch the next morning.

That's exactly like the Carr brothers in Wichita. They thought if someone drove a nice car, they must be rolling in money.

I think if the richest peers you know are drug dealers and fences, and when you visit their house, they have piles of money stacked up on the kitchen table, you might think that rich people who earn their money in more legitimate ways also have stacks of money on their kitchen tables, or more discretely in safes. Most rich people with financial advisors are not going to let large sums of money sit in a steel box when it could be making interest for them via an investment account. But since people who believe in living fast and dying young don't usually do a lot of investing for the future, they wouldn't know that. JMO

P.S. Love the cartoon-style money bags. GREAT image!

 

[rkf]

I also would take the registration state with a grain of salt for a company that has a fleet of vehicles that are deployed all over the place.

I haven't been able to find any evidence that Amerit serviced karts for Autobahn. No announcements about contracts (Amerit announces lots of its contracts), no "partnership" announcement, no ads online for Amerit that suggested they might have hired go-kart techs because of a contract. I found indeed.com listings for 'go kart mechanics' for Autobahn, which leads me to believe that go-karts are specialized and they have to have people in-house to work on them. But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Gut tells me that the connection is that someone in the 'ring' worked or Amerit, had worked for Amerit, or knew someone who worked there, which seems possible, given Amerit's location.

Also, the autobahn go-karts are electric - a far cry from company truck fleets or even (most) employees' personal automobiles. If there is a racing link, I think a connection would be more likely between Amerit and some of the race tracks up and down the east coast. Also, Amerit is based in NC, so all their trucks may be registered there. I agree with your gut ^. A fascinating thing about DW's and JW's social media accounts is the variety of folks with whom they were each friends. Convicted felons to preachers to friends' parents to students, etc... Neither lived in a world completely isolated from the other - that is not to say they were necessarily connected - just that they both knew people who could travel in one world or the other quite comfortably. JMO

 

[katydid23]

That's exactly like the Carr brothers in Wichita. They thought if someone drove a nice car, they must be rolling in money.

I think if the richest peers you know are drug dealers and fences, and when you visit their house, they have piles of money stacked up on the kitchen table, you might think that rich people who earn their money in more legitimate ways might also have stacks of money on their kitchen table, or more discretely in a safe. Most rich people with financial advisors are not going to let large sums of money sit in a steel box when it could be making interest for them via an investment account. But since people who believe in living fast and dying young don't usually do a lot of investing for the future, they wouldn't know that. JMO

P.S. Love the cartoon-style money bags. GREAT image!

I think that is why SMART thieves rob drug dealers. It's the dealers that have large bags of cash lying around. But wealthy people who work for a living have very little cash lying around. They put it in their bank accounts and investment portfolios, not in their floor safes.

 

[rkf]

I'm getting a better picture of the happenings. Breaking out my crystal ball it's looking like a group in the hood and a couple in-laws or out-laws. I'm also seeing something like an accessory out there somewhere.

My hunch is the Chevy cruze was a rental. Wish I knew more about NY happenings. His GF can't be happy about long absences.

I thought the same thing, but I believe I saw a Chevy Cruze listed previously in some traffic arrests. I will go back and double check when I have time.

Wanted to add, per a previous post, I think there were 3 women in the car with DW and 2 men in the Amerit truck, for a total of 6 in the convoy. 4 were released soon after DW's arrest.

ETA: Checked MD records and one of DW's relatives had a Chevy, but the wrong year, so I have no idea who it belongs to. I tried to run a Carfax on the Chevy right after the arrest, but nothing came up. FWIW.

 

[mk4osu]

I think it's very probable that there was some coming and going, from the house...most likely in the middle of the night. With that scenario, he could flee the scene, after starting the fire, virtually empty-handed. Would be interesting to know if the Porsche was parked in the same place, when pizza was delivered, as it was when VF husband arrived. Without a doubt, IMO, he/they left with more than the 40K. They are thieves...that's what they do. It's how they afford to eat, buy drugs, and I-phones...among other things. A thief will rob a person blind, in a little amount of time. Can you imagine having all night? I would bet the bank he made off with jewelry and other items of value. Look at the photos that have been posted. He obviously has big love for jewelry...gold/silver chains, diamond stud earrings. He was probably like a starved man, eating free, at the all night buffet.

They ^ must have already had a buyer. Also, those kinds of things are more valuable with the tags still attached. Do you think DW et al would know authentic LV from fake? Would they even care? I don't even know that AS carried those types of bags, but maybe if there were women with the "gang" as others have postulated, they would go shopping in AS' closet. Not many would fit in a white bucket, so DW would have to be like Santa Claus, dropping of hand bags on his way from the S house to the church parking lot!

I am SO curious to find out the original plan in this crime. I have a hard time imagining the plan was to steal AND to torture murder. Of course, I could be totally wrong. It just seems one would make the other more difficult, but would be added when the perps were at the house longer than originally planned.

It seems like if people were coming and going from the house, that would be more likely to be noticed by neighbors. I lean toward thinking DW was not alone, at least not the entire time. I don't believe he took a bus to the house. How did he get there? Who dropped him off and were they aware of the plans, or thought there was some legitimate reason?

 

[BondGirl]

This reminded me that the Savopoulos house SW allowed LE to look for/seize diagrams or photos. Who would have had access to diagrams? Are diagrams blueprints? What other type of diagrams would be relevant here? Maybe there is something I'm not thinking of.

Contractor

 

[rkf]

The plot thickens, and becomes more confusing, with every bit of info. They had a state-of-the-art "safe" room, Mr. S had a gun in the house, swords (in which he had professional training), a home security system, a garage that was nearly impossible to access, and protective dogs. This may sound off the wall, but I'm beginning to wonder if DW drugged them, at some point, to subdue them. Of course, he would've had to let the drugs wear off of SS, before he allowed the phones calls. After the calls, he would drug again. Who knows, but it is a possibility...and, one that might explain a few things. I guess we won't know, until the full autopsy and toxology reports are released.

JMO - I think if someone has your 10 year-old at knife point, all the guns, swords, safe rooms and security systems in the world aren't going to help you. I believe SS' martial arts training helped him stay calm in an unbearable situation. Everything else they had for personal security was out of reach at a pivotal moment and therefore worthless to the victims. They did everything they could have possibly done to safeguard their personal safety, while still living a "normal" life. I think it would be nearly impossible to live, anticipating every knock at the door could be a criminal intent on torturing and murdering your whole family. I know some people live like that, but it's at great personal cost to their freedom and spontaneity. And the vast majority of people never encounter a situation like this, no matter how many times they open the door to strangers, employees or acquaintances.