Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Bridgeport, CT: 22 years after Bridgeport shooting, man charged with murder

BRIDGEPORT -- Twenty-two years after Aida Ramos was shot in the head and seven years after she died, police arrested her former boyfriend and charged him with murder.

Joseph Santiago, 40, was arrested Friday. He is being held in lieu of $250,000 bond pending presentment in Superior Court on Tuesday. It wasn't clear Monday night what new information led police to arrest Santiago.

Ramos, formerly of Pembroke Street, was shot on May 7, 1989. She died in a Massachusetts hospital in December 2004 after being on life support.

According to Santiago's arrest warrant affidavit, police received a report that Ramos had been brought to Bridgeport Hospital suffering from a gunshot wound to the base of her skull.

Witnesses told police they were in a Pembroke Street apartment with Ramos and Santiago, when they heard the sound of a gunshot, the affidavit states. They said Santiago then came running into the room where the witnesses were and exclaimed he had just killed Ramos.

The affidavit continues that Santiago and a witness dropped Ramos off at the hospital. On the way back, Santiago stopped at a gas station to wash his hands in some gasoline and he warned the witness not to talk about what had happened to Ramos, the affidavit states.

But Ramos did not die at that time. In fact, the affidavit recounts that while she was at the hospital she was able to pen a letter to a Superior Court judge relating how Santiago had shot her.

"He said to me, `Do you want to know what a gun could do?'" Ramos wrote in the letter, according to the affidavit. "I never looked back when I felt something hot in my neck and I fell on my right side on the couch."

Ramos subsequently lapsed into a coma and died Dec. 23, 2004, at Bay State Medical Center in Springfield.

The affidavit states that a subsequent autopsy determined her cause of death was complications from the gunshot wound.

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