Baltimore homicide detectives don't believe a Johns Hopkins University student had "the intent to kill" when he used a samurai sword to confront an intruder outside his home, a police spokesman said Thursday.
Police say John Pontolillo, 20, a chemistry major from New Jersey, killed the man with a single blow early Tuesday. Pontolillo has not been charged in the death of Donald D. Rice, 49, a career criminal who was released from jail just three days before the altercation. Prosecutors will determine whether charges are warranted after consulting with police, a process that could take weeks.
"We do not believe he went down there with the intent to kill somebody," police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said of Pontolillo. "We're looking to see if he was the aggressor, and so far the evidence doesn't suggest that."
The student was the third Baltimore resident in the past month to draw headlines for a confrontation with an intruder. In August, a man used a baseball bat to bash a man who police say was attempting to rob a Fells Point store for the third time. And this week, an off-duty police officer shot and critically wounded a man who police say had forced him to the ground at gunpoint in his Northeast Baltimore home.
Guglielmi's comments came as officials clarified the sequence of events that led up to the killing outside the East University Parkway house that Pontolillo rents with three other students.
Just after the incident, police said that it was a noise coming from the garage behind his house that led Pontolillo to get his sword and go outside early Tuesday, hours after the burglary of a video game console. Police said that Rice lunged at Pontolillo.
On Thursday, Guglielmi said that Hopkins police had visited Pontolillo and his housemates before the incident to warn that a neighbor had spotted a suspicious person lurking in their backyard, and that the students had joined the officers in canvassing the neighborhood.
Guglielmi said that an unspecified number of Hopkins police officers, one of them an off-duty city officer moonlighting with the Hopkins force, were called to the 300 block of E. University Parkway on Monday night to investigate the report of a suspicious person. Guglielmi declined to say what time the officers received the call or arrived on the scene.
