A HAUNTING ENCOUNTER
Woonsocket woman came face to face with man suspected in grandson’s murder
Patricia Desjardin was already reeling from the loss of her daughter, two days earlier, when she went looking for her grandson, Derek Desjardin.
Instead, she found the man suspected of killing him.
Paul Raposo initially refused to answer for Desjardin when she knocked on the door the morning of June 24, after Derek failed to show up for the landscaping job that he loved. Desjardin knew Raposo – years earlier, he had dated a friend of her daughter. After taking Raposo in as a roommate, Derek had been having problems with him – money problems – and he was trying to get him to move out.
“I told him I was going to call the cops,” Desjardin said. “I told him I was going to count to three and he was going to open that door. I had a crowbar.”
Raposo, 26, would be in the custody of the Woonsocket Police Department within hours, charged with murder and other offenses in the shooting death of Derek Desjardin, a 30-yearold father of two. But what happened to his grandmother in the moments after she began rapping on the front door of the ramshackle, boxy tenement at 408 Cass Ave. where Derek lived with Raposo will haunt her forever. A longtime hospice nurse who lives in Woonsocket, Desjardin arrived at the apartment with her adoptive son, Michael Desjardin, who lives with autism. But they weren’t the first to show up. Her son’s employer, Tony Chausse of Greenfield Landscaping, arrived first to pound on doors and windows, but it seemed as if nobody was home.