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Georgia man convicted of killing 17-year-old Malden girl in 1991
Rodney Daniels has been found guilty of shooting and killing Patricia Moreno on the fire escape outside the apartment she lived in with her foster family.
A jury has found a 50-year-old Georgia man guilty of first-degree murder for killing a 17-year-old Malden girl in 1991, concluding a 32-year-old cold case that the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office brought back into the spotlight two years ago.
Rodney Daniels was convicted of shooting Patricia “Tricia” Moreno in the head while she stood on the fire escape outside her apartment on July 20, 1991, the district attorney’s office said in a press release Wednesday.
“When a family loses a loved one in a homicide, even the passage of time never fully heals that wound. That is especially true when they do not have answers about what happened and no one has been held accountable,” District Attorney Marian Ryan said in the release. “Those who knew and loved Tricia have been waiting over three decades for answers.”
The initial investigation
On the night of Moreno’s death, police responded to the third-floor apartment at 21 Henry St. in Malden that she shared with her foster mother, the foster mother’s two teenage daughters, and Daniels, who was the older daughter’s boyfriend, the release said.
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Police found Moreno with gunshot wounds to her head. First responders rushed her to a hospital, where she died of her injuries, the release said.
The other people in the apartment at the time told police they heard a pair of gunshots but had no idea who had shot Moreno, the release said. There was no evidence of forced entry into the home.
When the police first interviewed Daniels, he said he’d been sleeping in an armchair in the living room when the gunshots woke him up, the release said. He then went out onto the fire escape and saw what had happened to Moreno, he told police, though it was her foster mother who called 911 that night.
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Police soon learned that Daniels’s owned a handgun that matched the bullet that killed Moreno and that he’d “engaged in threatening behavior” toward her in the weeks before her death, the release said. Still, they were unable to obtain enough evidence to make an arrest.
A new investigation
Authorities began reinvestigating the case in 2020 after Ryan reopened the district attorney’s office Cold Case Unit the year prior.
Investigators reconstructed the scene and determined that, based on the position of the entry wound and the trajectory of the bullet, the shooter was standing in the doorway of the apartment, the release said.
They also began interviewing witnesses again and got in contact with a new witness who lived in the apartment below Moreno when she was murdered, the release said. He told them that on the night of the murder a loud noise woke him up.
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He immediately looked up through the third-floor fire escape and saw a young woman, who was later identified as Moreno, struggling to breathe, and a man, whose description matched that of Daniels, standing over her, the release said. The witness watched as the man then retreated back into the apartment.
Investigators also discovered that an alibi witness, who had protected Daniels in 1991, later admitted to her friends and family that Daniels had killed Moreno, the release said. She also said he hid the murder weapon inside an armchair and later disposed of the gun.
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That witness, who is now dead, admitted that she lied to police and a grand jury in 1991 to protect Daniels, the release said. She said that, even many years later, she was afraid to disclose what she knew for fear of being prosecuted.
With the new evidence, prosecutors obtained a warrant for Daniels’s arrest from Malden District Court. He was arrested in his South Fulton home in Georgia in September 2021, arraigned as a fugitive from justice, and then transported to Massachusetts.
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