Dominic Marino (2 of Clubs, Connecticut)

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Our card this week is Dominic Marino, the two of clubs from Connecticut. There had been many times that Mark Marino hugged his oldest son goodbye and feared that he might never see him again.
After all, Dominic was an Air Force vet who'd been deployed overseas more than a few times. But as they hugged goodbye one night in the fall of 2018, this wasn't one of those moments.
30-year-old Dominic was just heading home after a short visit with his dad, both sure that they would see each other again soon. But that's the thing about tragedy.
It often jumps out at you when you least expect it. You never know which hug will be the last.
Mark sure didn't. And now that hug is a scene that he'll play on loop in his mind for the rest of his life, or at least until he finally has some answers about what happened to his son on a frigid November night just a week later.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, so it was already getting dark as he walked up to the front door, which he was startled to find was open.
And not just left open, which wouldn't have made much sense on this cold day anyway, but it had been forced in, like busted open. As soon as Vinny crossed the threshold into the house, there were no two ways about it.
Something bad had happened here. The house was freezing, and by the looks of things, the entire place had been ransacked.
Every kitchen drawer, every kitchen cabinet had been rifled through and left open. Vinny was in a full-on panic by the time he opened the door to Dominic's room.
And there, he found his big brother, unconscious, lying face up on his bedroom couch, his hands and feet bound in front of him with some sort of heavy duct tape. And Vinny ran to help his brother, but Dominic was beyond helping.
He was ice cold when his brother reached him. It's a moment that Mark says his son has never been able to get out of his head.
Tried to rip the tape off him, compressions. My poor little boy.
He's not the same. He didn't know what to do.
He didn't know what to do. He called me, and I'll never forget that.
I was sitting there eating Chipotle. Not eating yet, just got back with it.
And my phone rang, it was Vinny. And he's screaming on the phone.
I'm like, you know, slow down. What's going on? You know, he's yelling, Dominic's dead.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. So I start, you know, screaming, call 911.
Mark lived a little over 30 minutes away in Hamden, Connecticut, so he couldn't just race to the house to figure out what was going on for himself. So he called the East Hartford police to see what they found, what they were doing, and what he should do.
But all that they would say was that units were responding to that address. Sorry, sir, can't say more than that.
And none of this made sense to Mark, so he did the only thing he knew to do. He got in his car and raced to be with his boys.
And we parked in the neighbor's driveway and basically stood out there for hours. And they wouldn't let me go in the house to see him or anything.
Like, you know, I was one of those dopey parents, like on TV, like, is that really my kid inside the house there?

You know, type of question.

And I couldn't believe I was saying it

as it was coming out of my mouth.

Inside the house, evidence texts processed the scene

while detectives from the homicide division

streamed in and took inventory.

And a few things were apparent from the start.

Dominic was killed by what looked like

a single gunshot wound to the chest. And even though there was a clear exit wound, there was no spent bullet to be found, not even when a metal detector was brought in or when the couch that Dominic had been found on was cut apart.
But that's not to say that there wasn't evidence at the scene. Like an unspent bullet in the hallway outside Dominic's room, which was later determined to belong to a 9mm.
But when it couldn't be connected to any known firearms, it was really just a dead end. Still, detectives were able to get a sense of the scene pretty quickly.
And one thing that seemed obvious was that it wasn't some random home invasion.

The house was about what you'd expect

from a couple of bachelors,

but even amidst the chaos,

it was clear that whoever had done this

was looking for something very specific.

The voice you were about to hear

belongs to Lieutenant Frank Napolitano

with the East Hartford Police Department. He was one of the original detectives on Dominic's case back in 2018, still works it today.
And he and Detective Paul Solzigi sat down with Audio Chucks reporter Taylor to talk about the investigation. I wouldn't say random, just based on the evidence that appeared the house was completely ransacked.
I mean, every kitchen drawer was open. Every cabinet door was open.
Every drawer, every lower cabinet, every top cabinet, which indicated someone was looking for something. Dominic's phone was still there.
There was still a computer there. There was still the TV there.
The video game system was there. So it implied that it wasn't just your basic burglary.
There was things that easily could have been taken out of the home that were still there. Dominic's wallet was also sitting on the ground in plain view.
And something else that stood out was the dog, still there at the house despite the open door. And we're not talking a yappy little ankle biter either.
She was a German shepherd named Zoe, and she was fiercely loyal to Dominic. As far as the detectives could tell, there was no evidence that Zoe had been involved in any sort of confrontation.
And it seemed like she never even left after Dominic was killed. Not a single neighbor reported seeing her wandering around the whole weekend.
No noise complaints about a barking dog either, even though the houses were really, really close together. As far as Lieutenant Napolitano is concerned, there are two possible explanations.
Either Zoe was incapacitated somehow, though by the way, she looked perfectly fine now, or she knew the intruders, likely at least two, possibly more. It signified whoever was in the house, most likely at least two, were in there for a while to restrain Dominic, who was a good-sized guy, most likely to, you know, hold them back while they did their search.
And Dominic's dad reiterates this. He was a monster, you know.
I saw the kid bench 500 pounds. So who would Zoe know and be comfortable with? Detectives sat down with both Vinny and Mark within hours of Dominic being found in order to find that out.
Mark was clear and consistent and ready to spill his guts, obviously just wrecked to his core.

But what about Vinny?

No, he was visibly upset.

He was, yeah, crying.

He was, his reactions were appropriate to what happened, sure.

And at the time, we didn't have any of this information that he was lying to us.

Did you catch that?

They didn't have any of this information

that Vinny was lying at the time.

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As the first few days of the investigation unfolded, detectives started to notice some inconsistencies in Vinny's story.

It can be a little weird. After the fact, we did a search warrant for Vinny's phone.
We found out before he even called 911, he called this guy. This guy was a friend Dominic had gotten into some trouble with years earlier.
A drug thing. Details aren't really important.
Although he did end up having to serve some time for it. And when he got out, the two didn't hang out much anymore.
Dominic really kind of hunkered down after that, spending more and more of his time at home, mostly gaming and reading. So police wanted to speak with this guy that Vinny had called that night.
We brought him in to be interviewed. He denied ever receiving the call.

And we actually had his phone records like, well, you did.

This is how long it was.

We know you did.

He denied it, denied it, denied it, left the police department,

just said, I'm not talking anymore, left.

A couple hours later, he called me back.

He's like, oh, you know what?

My wife reminded me I did take that call.

I was just distraught.

What else do you want to know? And that was very odd. Vinny had failed to mention this call, by the way.
But according to the records, he called the friend, and then Mark, and then 911. And look, the kid had just found his brother's body and was no doubt in shock, panicking.
And the calls took place in rapid succession over the course of a minute and a half total. And instinctively calling your dad in an emergency doesn't seem that off base, but my guy, what is up with the random friend and why was he the first call? Vinny didn't have a good explanation for that.
Mark told our reporter that whenever he tried to get Vinny to explain why he did that, Vinny would just get mad and walk away. But Vinny's phone records weren't all bad news for him.
The GPS data that detectives were able to pull put the phone in pretty much the exact locations and at the same times as Vinny's alibi of being with his girlfriend all weekend. But still, detectives were just growing more and more confident that Vinny wasn't being entirely truthful.
And they were pretty sure they knew what he was trying to hide. Things start to unfold where, even during the progress of speaking with neighbors, like, yeah, the two brothers lived there, but one of them always came out to this car they kept driving.
That's just your typical M.O. for drug sales.
So it was clear that Vinny was involved in something he wasn't supposed to be involved in. Now, to be clear, though detectives suspect that Vinny was dealing drugs out of the house.
We're not talking about hardcore narcotics.

Basically, they think he was a low-level pot dealer.

And maybe that was related to whatever the killer or killers were looking for.

If so, it's possible they never found it.

Because not long after Dominic's murder,

Mark had to go back to the house to get his son's military uniform for his burial. And what he found was disturbing.
He told our reporter that the mattresses in his son's bedrooms were flipped over and cut up like someone had been in there looking for something. Again, he called police, but nothing really came of this.
And he had his son's service to focus on. But when he went back to the house to retrieve more of Dominic's things on December 2nd, there was furniture blocking the front door.
And the back door looked like it had been kicked in. And once he went inside, he saw that two TVs were missing.
His safe appeared to have been tampered with, and some of Dominic's things were missing as well. Valuable baseball cards and stuff like that.
So Mark called police again. To this day, he is convinced that these incidents have to be connected to his son's murder.
But detectives, they don't see it that way. In fact, they let patrol cops handle these reports separately.
And according to police records obtained by our team, the responding officers didn't see any indication of the front door being blocked or that the back door was kicked in or anything being gone other than the TVs. It wasn't even clear to them when the mattresses were cut up.
But Mark thinks they got it all wrong. He thinks that his son's killers came back, sliced those mattresses trying to find something, although the TV theft he attributes to a neighbor.
He wishes that detectives had looked harder for a connection. But at the end of the day, detectives were focused on the homicide investigation and they didn't think looking into the potential theft of TVs would lead them to a suspect, which is why Detective Napolitano says that there wasn't sufficient reason to divert investigative resources.
Detectives do believe, though, that someone illicitly removed potential evidence from the house after Dominic was murdered. And that someone would be none other than Dominic's brother, Vinny.
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That's BlueNile.com. Detectives learned that before any first responders arrived that night,

before they were even called,

according to Detective Napolitano,

Vinnie removed a pretty decent-sized stash of weed and a gun,

and then he hid them in the overgrown backyard.

Now, police never found them,

because apparently while the house was still being processed,

that very first night, Vinnie, or maybe somebody associated with Vinny, snuck into the backyard of this house that night that was just crawling with cops, grabbed the drugs and gun, and then somehow got both off the property completely unnoticed. He denied it at first, but after a while, he finally admitted, yeah, there was drugs in the house, there was a gun in the house.

I went in, took everything out.

So he was involved in something,

but he never would fully commit to cooperating or providing information.

When Mark found out about the gun from detectives, he went straight to Vinny.

He got the gun and turned it into police.

But when it was compared to the unspent bullet that they'd found in Dominic's room, it actually wasn't a match. And at the end of the day, Lieutenant Napolitano and Detective Sulzicki don't think that Vinny was involved in his brother's murder.
They don't think he plotted it, and they don't think he wanted his brother to die. In fact, almost the opposite.
They think it's possible that he, his cash, or his drugs is what the intruders were after, not Dominic at all. To this day, I still believe Vinny has the information we need to solve this case.
I believe he was the intended target. Pretty much everyone we've interviewed also gives us that, like oh I'm surprised it was Dom.
Vinny's more of the target-type person. They also think that Vinny has misled them so many times, in so many ways, over so much time, mostly to protect Mark's already broken heart.
And here's how Mark sees it. Although it was determined that Vincent wasn't exactly forthcoming in all of the things that he was doing in his personal life, he in no way, shape, or form had any knowledge of then or since of who was in the house and who murdered his brother back then.
So, you know, Vincent walks around in a daze, most daze now, still hasn't gone over the fact that his brother was murdered in the house and we found him. And anything that he would have known or found out since then, he would have shared it at least with me.
And I can tell you honestly, he has not told me anything. Mark does have suspicions of his own, though.
They center around a kid Vinny ran into at a convenience store the Friday afternoon before Dominic was killed, a guy that we're going to call Steve. According to Mark, Vinny says that he told Steve that he was leaving town for the weekend, possibly leaving him with the impression that the house would be empty.
Mark even heard that Steve knew details of the murder that only one of the perps would know. But he's been told that Steve was cleared after what he feels was an inadequate investigation.
And he believes that it's worth giving Steve another look. But detectives say that they spoke with Steve and there's never been any reason to suspect him of wrongdoing.
Now, there is some evidence that police have to work with in this case. If you remember, Dominic's wrists and ankles were bound with tape.
And after speaking with Mark, detectives were sure that that tape hadn't come from the house. And so they put boots on the ground trying to find any store in town that sold that specific kind.
They didn't have any luck. But that doesn't mean the tape still isn't the missing puzzle piece that could solve this case.
There is a mixture DNA sample that was pulled off the tape, but it's so complex that it can't be entered into any database. You would need a direct comparison.
So we would have to have a suspect have their DNA compared directly to the tape. They do know one thing about the mixed DNA sample.
It doesn't belong to Vinny. Mark still has a hard time reconciling how any of this could have happened, how his brave, strong son could be overpowered and taken from him.
I mean, ever since he was a little boy, it's like Dominic was training to be a superhero. Or maybe it's more accurate to say, like a professional wrestler.
So he was a Hulk Hogan nut, starting at about two years of age. Like, you'd be laying there watching TV, and all of a sudden he comes out of nowhere with like a flying elbow.
Dominic had even started working out like Hulk Hogan to ward off bullies in school. And eventually he became a defender of others being bullied.
And then he went on to defend the country. He was so proud of his military service.
His dad said there was never a question in his mind about what he wanted to do, even from a young age. He definitely was born to serve the country.
He's always believed in his country, and that's why he went to serve. It was more important to him than anything.
But in his fifth year of service, Dominic was pushed out with an honorable discharge after being injured in an IED attack. Mark said it crushed his son.
Everyone still saw Dominic as the hero. But without his uniform, he had this lost sense of self, and he fell into a pretty deep depression.
He basically became a shut-in. He hardly left his room, let alone the house, except to maybe see family and hang out with some buddies that he'd had since elementary school.
In the six years since his son was killed, Mark's own life has become a lot like Dominic's. He doesn't really leave the house much anymore either.
I've done nothing. I go to work, I go home.
Same routine at home every night, you know, cook, little gaming, and then the dogs, and that's it. I'll go and see the grandbabies as much as possible, but there's times I don't want to leave my house, you know, because I'm just not the same person I was before I answered that phone call, you know, like, I don't care.
I just want to know what killed my kid. There's many ways to lose a child.
I can't downplay other ways people's kids die, but murder is just, it's horrible. Your kid is here and the next day he's not, and he's not doing anything wrong.
It happened literally in his bedroom. Literally.
The phone call, the planning for the funeral,

I mean, that stuff is horrifying.

Mark shared an anecdote with us that has really stuck with me.

One I don't think I'll ever forget.

And I hope you don't either.

Took me six hours to start his obituary.

I sat at my computer and cried like a baby for hours before I could start typing my thoughts about my son, who I would never hug again or see again. It's just, you know, six years later, it's no easier.
It's not. I see his picture every day, and I think about him and talk to him every day.
It just never gets easier. Your own child is, you know, it's a scar that never, it's a wound that never heals.
It's just, it's horrible. Now, detectives said that because Vinny had been gone all weekend, and because Dominic's body had been frozen, his time of death has never been determined.
But a neighbor says that they did see him alive at 2 p.m. on Saturday, November 17, 2018.
So police assume that his death was sometime after that. But Mark thinks his son died the night of Friday, the 16th, or sometime into the very early hours on Saturday morning.
You see, he had planned to go to his grandparents' house on Saturday morning, but he stood them up, didn't even answer their calls either. And in Mark's mind, there's no other explanation for why his son would have done that or missed that appointment.
Dominic adored his grandparents and they adored him. He thinks the assumption that Dominic died later on Saturday could be a flaw in the investigation.
You see, detectives at one point applied for a geofence warrant, which allowed them to pinpoint the presence of phones within the specific parameters of the property at specific times. The results didn't turn up anyone's phones in the house or on the property, except for a different neighbor whose home was close enough to the Marino's.
But that search only applied to devices in the area after 2 p.m. on Saturday.
So Mark is hopeful that detectives will seek another geofence warrant, this time starting Friday night. And Detective Napolitano says they're open to it.
He's even discussed it with prosecutors. But he also says that courts tend to require a lot in order to approve them, and that new evidence would need to come to light first.
When you hear this episode, it will have been more than six years since Air Force veteran

Dominic Marino senselessly lost his life in his own home.

And although detectives and Mark haven't always seen eye to eye, Mark makes no secret of how

much he appreciates their efforts.

You know, Frank Napolitano, he's a lieutenant at the East Harper Police Department. He's been working Dominic's case since day one.
And, you know, I'm sitting here speaking to the deck podcast because Lieutenant Napolitano at the time worked as hard as he possibly could to get Dominic's information on the deck of cards. I'm going to leave you with just a few more words from Mark, because no one speaks about Dominic's death more poignantly than he does.
You know, I have to tell you, there's nothing that prepares you to pull up to a cemetery and see your kid's name on a headstone. Now, I've been there quite a bit.
Every single time is the same reaction. I just, you can't even get out of the car without bursting into tears.
I have the same prayer every time I go there. Every time I go there, I pray that we find out who killed him.
I beg God, literally, kneeling on his grave, holding, hugging his headstone, begging God to let us know who did this to him, you know? I mean, I would do anything to have him back, but I know that's not possible, so the next best thing is maybe finding out who did this to him. If you know anything about the murder of Dominic Marino that cold November weekend in 2018,

please reach out to Lieutenant Frank Napolitano with the East Hartford Police Department at 860-528-4401.

You might be eligible for a $50,000 reward.

And more importantly, you might be able to give a devastated dad just a bit of peace.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work,

visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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