GUILTY NY - Maggie Rosales, 18, slashed to death, Huntington Station, 12 Oct 2014

A Suffolk County prosecutor said a Huntington Station man went up behind high school senior Maggie Rosales while she was wearing earphones, attacked her, and eventually slashed her throat.

Charged in what assistant district attorney Raphael Pearl called a "vicious murder" is Adam Saalfield, 21, whose family lives just houses away from the victim's home.

Saalfield pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Thursday to second-degree murder in the Oct. 12 stabbing of Rosales and was ordered held without bail. John LoTurco, Saalfield's attorney, said outside court there was "no relationship at all" between his client and Rosales.

Click to expand...

According to police, 21-year-old Adam Saalfield murdered 18-year-old Maggie Rosales, and left her body on Lynch Street in Huntington Station on Oct. 12. Prosecutors say Saalfield walked up behind Rosales and slit her throat twice.

Police say they have the attack on surveillance video and have DNA evidence tying him to the crime...

Court records show Saalfield was arrested just six days after the murder for possession of a hypodermic needle and allegedly told police that a friend who used heroin had left it in his car. Prosecutors say police took his DNA during that arrest and it matched the DNA left at the Rosales crime scene.

Click to expand...

Moments before jury selection was to begin Wednesday, a Suffolk judge was forced to postpone a murder trial because prosecutors had just found out that the county crime lab has not yet tested key forensic evidence.

Click to expand...

The video of the death of Maggie Rosales, 18, was shown during the first day of the trial of Adam Saalfield, 22, her neighbor on Leyden Street. He is charged with second-degree murder.

The surveillance video came from a camera on the side of Sinai Furniture, a store at the corner of Lynch Street and Depot Road. It shows Rosales walking west on the left side of Lynch Street shortly before 11 p.m. on Oct. 12, 2014. About two steps behind her is a man in a light hoodie and dark jacket.

Rosales, a senior at Walt Whitman High School in South Huntington, is oblivious, listening to music from ear buds plugged into her phone as she walked a few blocks to see her cousin and some friends, Assistant District Attorney Raphael Pearl told jurors in his opening statement before state Supreme Court Justice John Collins.

Click to expand...

The attacker was Saalfield, Pearl said. Saalfield slashed the much smaller Rosales twice,cutting through both carotid arteries, a jugular vein and her trachea, Pearl said. He even left a cut in one of the bones of her neck, he said.

Defense attorney Craig McElwee of Hauppauge told jurors the proof against his client is not as strong as Pearl suggested.

“You cannot tell the identification of the individual” who attacked Rosales in the video, he said. Like Pearl, he said his client never had any kind of relationship with Rosales, even though there were neighbors. He had no reason to stalk her and slit her throat, McElwee said.

Click to expand...

“She was a young woman lying in a pool of her own blood,” Nicole Calderone said during questioning by Assistant District Attorney Sheetal Shetty. “It was a significant amount of blood — probably the most I have ever seen.”

In a crime scene photo, the pool of blood extended from Rosales’ head to below her knees.

Calderone said she and her partner rolled Rosales, who was lying face down in the blood, onto her back. It was obvious she was dead, Calderone said, so she checked on Donald Ulloagueso, the young man who had found the body lying on Lynch Street, just east of Depot Road. “He’s beside himself,” Calderone said.

Click to expand...

Forensic scientist Thomas Zaveski of the Suffolk Crime Laboratory testified that he started documenting the blood trail, leaving evidence placards with letters and numbers along the way. There were so many stains he ran out of placards and had to use numbered orange cones to mark some stains, he said.

At first, in the dark early hours of Oct. 13, Zaveski said he thought the blood trail ended one block north of Lynch Street, at the corner of Varney Avenue and East 13th Street. But as he and officers looked more and after the sun came up, he said it was clear the trail continued to Leyden Street.

The last of the drops was in front of the Saalfield home. Rosales lived just a few doors away, although the two apparently didn’t know each other.

Click to expand...

The first time a Suffolk detective met a young Huntington Station man while investigating the October 2014 death of a neighbor, the man seemed helpful, the detective testified Wednesday in Riverhead.

“He was calm and he was cooperative,” Det. Michael Mahan said of Adam Saalfield, now 22. Mahan said he spoke to him briefly while going door to door to ask people if they saw or heard anything at about 11 p.m. two nights earlier, on Oct. 12, when a man stabbed Maggie Rosales, 18, twice in the neck and left her dead on Lynch Street.

Click to expand...

But on that first day, Mahan said during questioning by Assistant District Attorney Raphael Pearl, he had no reason to suspect Saalfield, who told him he drove to a nearby gas station at 10:45 p.m. the night of the killing to get cigarettes and otherwise didn’t go out.

Sure enough, Saalfield is clearly visible on surveillance video at that time at the gas station. He drove there in his 2000 Nissan Altima, left the car door open while he went inside for a minute, returned and left.

It was days later that detectives noticed similarities between Saalfield in the gas station video and the man in the video of Rosales being killed about 15 minutes later across the street. Using still photos from both videos, Mahan showed jurors that both Saalfield and the killer were about the same height and both wore dark pants, and a dark jacket over a light hooded sweatshirt.

Click to expand...

Of the dozens of bloodstains that came from the killing of a Huntington Station teenager, 11 of them seemed to present a problem for the man on trial in Riverhead, accused of her murder.

Most of them, particularly the stains near where Rosales was found in a pool of blood that was nearly the length of her body, contained DNA only from Rosales, Galdi said during questioning by Assistant District Attorney Rafael Pearl.

But stain 17, stain 19, stain 21, stain 22, stain 24 and stain 28 all told a different story. Galdi said these stains contained a mixture of DNA from both Rosales and Saalfield. The last stain, number 28, was found in the intersection of Varney Avenue and Leyden Street, where the Saalfield home is located.

The probability that anyone unrelated to Saalfield contributed DNA to that bloodstain is 1 in 2.45 quintillion, Galdi said. The chance that the other DNA came from someone not related to Rosales is 1 in 19.4 billion, he said. There are about 7.1 billion people on the planet.

Click to expand...

Even after her throat was slashed with enough force that a neck vertebra was nicked, a Huntington Station teenager likely did not die right away, the Suffolk chief medical examiner testified Tuesday.

“In my opinion, the death would not have been instantaneous, but it would have been a matter of minutes,” Dr. Michael Caplan testified during the trial of Adam Saalfield, 22, in Riverhead. Saalfield is accused of killing his neighbor, Maggie Rosales, 18, as she was walking to meet some friends the night of Oct. 12, 2014.

Using autopsy photographs and a video of the killing from a furniture store surveillance camera, Caplan explained to jurors and state Supreme Court Justice John Collins how he believed Rosales died.

Click to expand...

A Huntington Station woman told a jury Wednesday that nothing seemed amiss about her son about a half-hour after a female neighbor was killed blocks away from their home in October 2014.

“He was normal Adam,” Renee Saalfield said of her 22-year-old son, who is on trial, charged with second-degree murder. He is accused of slashing the throat of Maggie Rosales, 18, as she walked along Lynch Street a few blocks from home.

During questioning by defense attorney Michael Ross of Huntington, Renee Saalfield said there was nothing unusual about her son when he arrived home at the same time she and her boyfriend returned from a trip upstate the night of Oct. 12, 2014.

Click to expand...

A Huntington Station man was convicted Friday of second-degree murder for slashing a neighbor’s throat and leaving her to die in the street in October 2014.

Adam Saalfield, 22, did not react when he heard the verdict. The family of the victim, Maggie Rosales, 18, applauded briefly.

The State Supreme Court jury took an hour and 18 minutes to reach its verdict.

“All of my family is satisfied,” the victim’s father, Cesar Rosales, said afterward.

State Supreme Court Justice John Collins will sentence Saalfield on Sept. 23. He faces a maximum of 25 years to life in prison.

Click to expand...

A Suffolk judge sentenced a Huntington Station man Friday to the maximum of 25 years to life for slitting the throat of a teenage girl almost two years ago.

State Supreme Court Justice John Collins said the lack of emotion from Adam Saalfield, 22, at any time throughout the trial told him something about the man convicted last month of killing his neighbor, Maggie Rosales, 18.

“In my estimation, it’s because he has all the characteristics of a sociopath,” Collins said. “And there is no hope of rehabilitation for sociopaths.”

Click to expand...

“It is not easy for me, how this person took away my daughter’s life,” said Rosales’ mother, Ignacia Gonzalez, through an interpreter. “He took away happiness from my house. … She was a girl that loved life.”

The victim’s father, Cesar Rosales, said his daughter was a good person with no enemies.

“She was a good friend for everybody, all people,” he said. “She never hurt anybody. She didn’t deserve to die that way.”

Click to expand...