Man pleads guilty to murdering his girlfriend in 2004
A Dorchester man pleaded guilty to killing his former girlfriend 11 years ago, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. The admission comes nearly five years after he was initially charged in the case.
Shabazz Augustine, 36, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the 2004 death of Julaine Jules, authorities said. Augustine was initially charged with Jules’s murder in 2011, but filed a motion to suppress evidence of his cell phone records, tying the case up until now.
In 2004, Augustine asked his cousin to call Jules at work to tell her he was ill, asking her to come over and visit him, according to court documents. Jules left work in the middle of her shift and did not return. Later that night, her car was found engulfed in flames in Revere. Jules was not seen again until her body — encased in a plastic bag — floated to the surface of the Charles River three weeks later.
Prosecutors said that Jules was seeing a second man, and that Augustine became jealous after hearing the two spent the weekend together.
For nearly seven years, the case languished. Then, in 2011, prosecutors brought charges against Augustine and planned to use his cell phone location information as evidence to reveal his whereabouts the night of Jules’s disappearance, according to court records. The case became caught in a back-and-forth legal battle over the prosecution’s right to access and use records from location data collected from Augustine’s cell phone, holding the trial up by four years.
Augustine was held without bail during that time, according to the DA’s office.
A Suffolk Superior Court judge initially ruled that use of Augustine’s cell records would violate his right to privacy, but the state’s high court, but the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the ruling last August. In her decision, Justice Margot Botsford wrote that there was probable cause to believe Augustine was involved, and that knowing his location during the time she was missing was “likely to produce evidence of where and when the body was placed in the river.’’
Earlier last year, the Supreme Judicial Court denied Augustine’s request of $12,000 in attorney’s fees for legal representation provided by the American Civil Liberties Union after determining that the organization had never intended to charge him and did not do so, authorities said.
Rather than facing trial with the cell phone records available as evidence, Augustine accepted the sentence of life in prison Wednesday morning.
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