TRIAL HALTED; JUDGE GETS COVID
The trial of Louis Coleman III, accused of kidnapping leading to the death of 23-year-old Jassy Correia, is continued to May 23 after Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV contracted COVID.
Saylor, the chief judge at the federal court in Boston, announced positive test results for the virus during a short video status conference on Monday. The trial was originally set to resume today.
Coleman and Correia met in the early morning of Feb. 24, 2019, on the sidewalk outside Venu nightclub in downtown Boston, two among the throng of people socializing on the sidewalks after the Theater District clubs had shut down for the night. Correia had just been pushed out of an Uber that wasn’t for her and Coleman was standing nearby. The two walked down Tremont toward Coleman’s car.
Jurors over the course of last week watched hours of surveillance footage both inside the club and outside of it. They watched the pair meet and they watched them go to Coleman’s car.
Then, on the third day, jurors watched Coleman pull into the parking lot of his Providence apartment building two hours after meeting Correia. Her dead body was in the passenger seat.
Four days later, Coleman was arrested in Delaware just off Interstate 95 south with Correia’s body in the trunk of his car. Dashcam footage shows six Delaware troopers, guns drawn, approach the car and pop the trunk. It was at this cliffhanger moment that jurors filed out of the courtroom Friday, ready to return to see the trunk’s contents today.
This isn’t the first time the case has been postponed due to COVID.
While the criminal complaint was filed soon after the arrest on March 3, 2019, and the indictment filed about a month later on April 4, 2019, the essential decision of whether prosecutors would seek the death penalty for Coleman came as the pandemic took its initial grip on the nation.
Toward the end of January 2020, prosecutors said they would decide in “60 to 90 days” whether to seek the death penalty — a penalty allowed in federal court — but ended up taking nearly two years before announcing they would not seek death on Nov. 4, 2021.
Jurors have seen voluminous surveillance video footage documenting nearly every moment from the night of clubbing in the city to the moment of Coleman’s arrest.
That includes video of each person’s experience at the club, Correia’s interaction at the Uber, the two going to Coleman’s car, the graphic footage of Coleman dragging Correia’s half-naked body through his apartment building to his sixthfloor apartment.
Footage has also shown Coleman at Rhode Island stores to buy first things to deal with the smell of Correia’s decaying body and then implements for body removal, including the black suitcase with blue piping in which Correia’s body would eventually be found.