Victim's kin see justice in sentence
Killer of teenager gets life term
Taciana Ribeiro Saab said yesterday she was there to wipe the tears from the face of her firstborn son, Cristian Giambrone. She was there to console him when a mother's touch was the only balm that could ease his troubles. And she expected her 19-year-old-year old son to be there for her.
"But now Cristian is not there for me, not by his choice, not by his fault," she said sadly in Suffolk Superior Court after Daniel Rogers was convicted of murdering Giambrone on Feb. 16, 2004, in Boston. "I miss the future that is never coming."
On that day more than three years ago, Rogers was a drug addict who stumbled into the
During a confrontation outside the store, Rogers stabbed Young. When Giambrone stepped toward Young, Rogers stabbed him in the neck, severing his carotid artery, according to Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley's office.
In court, Ribeiro Saab was calm but had tears in her eyes. She did not look at Rogers. She also read victim impact statements from her second son, 13-year-old Nikoy Coley-Ribeiro; his stepfather, Cornell W. Coley; and Giambrone's girlfriend, Andrea Hoock, who received a letter from her boyfriend on the day he was buried.
"Nothing can make this man who killed Cristian feel the pain I feel every single day," Hoock wrote. "He took Cristian's life and hurt so many others . . . I wish I could tell Cristian I loved him just one more time."
Giambrone's younger brother said in the statement that he desperately misses his older sibling and the moral direction he provided.
"I could always turn to Cristian when I needed to know what to do," he wrote. "He made it his mission to make sure that I knew right from wrong. Daniel Rogers killed my hero, he killed my role model, and he killed part of me and everyone who knew Cristian."
Giambrone was a popular senior at Boston Latin Academy and was working as a clerk at CVS to finance a trip to his mother's homeland of Brazil and to spend a year touring the world, his mother said.
"I am living, and my firstborn son is dead," she told the court. "It is unnatural as it can be."
Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggan said Rogers was a career criminal who had amassed 33 convictions since he was first arrested as a juvenile in 1973. He said that surveillance video from Boston Children's Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center showed Rogers fleeing the scene.
Rogers did not speak during sentencing. His defense lawyer, Peter Krupp, said that the jury was misled by faulty legal instructions from Superior Court Judge Regina Quinlan that improperly led them to convict Rogers of first-degree murder.
While acknowledging the loss the Giambrone family has suffered, Krupp also said that Rogers was a drug addict in 2004 who was attacked by overzealous CVS employees. He said Rogers was stabbed in the hand by someone who was with Giambrone.
Rogers, he said, "was flung against the wall and was punched and kicked" by CVS employees who used more force than "reasonably necessary to detain someone who was shoplifting."
Without responding, Quinlan gave Rogers the mandatory sentence of life without parole.
In a symbolic gesture sought by Haggan on behalf of Young, Quinlan also sentenced Rogers to serve 9 to 10 years imprisonment after his life sentence is completed.
Rogers' conviction will be automatically reviewed by the Supreme Judicial Court.
Afterward, Riberio Saab said: "I think that justice has been done, thank God."
