Murder suspect free due to glitch

Fingerprint check delayed for hours

Prall's police photo.

Boston police mistakenly allowed the release last week of a fugitive from New Jersey wanted on murder charges, setting off a manhunt in the city amid warnings that the suspect poses a serious threat to the public.

Yesterday, police officials blamed a computer glitch for release of the suspect, who is wanted in Trenton on charges of killing his brother last year and trying to run down a police officer in 2006. But they acknowledged that individual officers could have prevented the release.

Tormu Prall, 35, of Trenton, was in the custody of Boston police for two days after officers in the South End charged him with public drinking on May 17. They took his fingerprints and scanned them into a computer database, but the results, which revealed he was wanted on murder charges, took an unusually long time to be processed, more than four hours, and did not arrive until about a half-hour after a Boston municipal judge ordered his release.

Now Trenton police and the US marshal's office are trying to help Boston police find the man they once had in their grasp. The capture of Prall, who had previously served 12 years in a New Jersey prison on a drug conviction and is a suspect in a recent arson in Cambridge, is "a high priority," said Trenton police.

"He has the potential of doing harm to others and shows no remorse for anything that he's been involved in the past," said Trenton police Captain Joseph Juniak. "It's imperative we capture this guy before somebody else gets injured or killed."

Boston police, who issued an alert for Prall last week that did not mention he had been in their custody, said they are reviewing what went wrong.

Commissioner Edward F. Davis said it is the first time that the computer fingerprinting system, which the city has used since 1994, has failed to produce results promptly. But he said officers should have asked prosecutors and the judge to wait until the results came in.

"It's always disappointing when something like this happens," Davis said. "You hope when there is a technical foul-up that the human systems will kick in and people will take the extra step. It's unfortunate that didn't happen in this case."

Davis said he will not order an internal affairs investigation because the mistake was not a result of wrongdoing.

The department contracts with Canada-based ComnetiX to run suspects' fingerprints and mugshots through national and federal crime databases. Calls to the company were not returned yesterday.

But according to Davis's spokeswoman, Elaine Driscoll, ComnetiX told the department that the request took hours that day, far longer than the average 15 minutes, because the company's computer server was down.

About 4 a.m. on May 17, police arrived at the corner of Stuart and Clarendon streets, where there was a report that a woman was being held against her will. Instead, they found three people on the corner, a woman, another man, and Prall, who told police his name was Denzel Willington. According to a police report, he was holding a small red cup with liquid that smelled of alcohol.

Officers charged him with public drinking and took him to the police station in the South End. When officers tried to book him, Prall screamed, began fighting the duty supervisor, and refused to let them take his fingerprints, according to the report.

Officers placed him in a cell, where he stayed until late Monday morning, when he was brought before Judge Tracy-Lee Lyons. She ordered that he be taken back to the station and have his fingerprints taken. If someone refuses to let police take fingerprints, a judge can issue an order that allows officers to do so.

At 3 p.m. that day, Prall, who was still going by his alias, returned to court.

"He was processed, [Lyons] was told that he had no prior record, and she dismissed him," said Joan Kenney, spokeswoman for the court system.

Prosecutors did not ask for bail, said Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley.

"The information provided to us at arraignment indicated that this was an indigent defendant who spent almost three full days in jail on a petty misdemeanor charge," Wark said. "The Boston Municipal Court sees thousands of similar cases each year, and it would be very rare to seek monetary bail on such a case."

The maximum penalty for drinking in public is a $100 fine, he said.

By the time police learned of Prall's past, he was gone. The department informed Trenton police, who immediately sent investigators to Boston. The US marshal's office also joined the search. Boston police issued an alert three days later, after the department's fugitive task force had exhausted all leads.

Davis said that police have no firm leads on Prall's whereabouts, but that investigators are working under the assumption that Prall is still in the area.

He is about 5-foot-8-inches tall, weighs about 135 pounds, and has used many aliases.

Prall's 62-year-old mother, who lives in the Trenton area, said she does not know where her son is.

"I'm just in a lot of pain and agony," Anna Mitchell-Prall said in a telephone interview.

Trenton police said that last September, Prall and his older brother, 40-year-old John Prall Jr., who lived together, got into an argument over bills.

Police believe that the younger Prall later doused the house with an accelerant and set it on fire, said Juniak, the Trenton police captain.

John Prall suffered burns over 90 percent of his body. A 40-year-old woman staying in the house was also severely burned. The woman survived, but John Prall, a father of four, died four days later at a Philadelphia hospital.

Tormu Prall, who fled the scene and has eluded police since, was later named a suspect and charged with homicide by arson and attempted homicide.

In January, a Mercer County, N.J., jury convicted him in absentia of several crimes, including eluding police and aggravated assault.

Those charges stemmed from a separate episode in October 2006, when Prall, who was fleeing police in a van, nearly ran down a patrolman crossing a street in Trenton.

Juniak said he does not blame Boston police for losing Prall.

"We're frustrated we haven't captured him yet," he said. "Although we take steps and measures to prevent a person from slipping through, sometimes it happens for one reason or another. . . . There is no blame to be cast."

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.