Peter Lisi (
)
The craven murderer of a 95-year-old, WWII vet was sentenced to life without parole today, all the while protesting — despite what the judge called “overwhelming evidence” against him — that he was somehow the wrong man.
“I hope they find who did it,” remorseless killer thief Wilfred Matthews announced, bizarrely, given that he’d been caught after the fatal, Upper West Side robbery with victim Peter Lisi’s MetroCard in his pocket and the victim’s blood on his jacket.
“You can run but you can’t hide, because God finds everything,” the killer told the imaginary real killer, bringing the judge, and Lisi’s family members, to shake their heads in disbelief in a Manhattan Supreme Court courtroom.
Matthews, 44, was a crack-addicted janitor at the assisted living home at West End Avenue and 104th where the elderly, but still-hale and personable Lisi lived a vigorous life of visits to family and daily neighborhood walks.
“You denied him the grace of a happy death, which is what he deserved,” Lisi’s niece, Julia Shea, told Matthews of her beloved “Uncle Peter.”
Lisi’s death was slow and cruel, assistant district attorney Matthew Bogdanos told the judge in asking successfully for the highest sentence permitted by statute.
“I could say that no World War II veteran should die in a beaten and bloody heap on the floor of his own home,” Bogdanos told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro.
“But no one should die that way.”
The cash-desperate Matthews, in an apparent attempt to get Lisi to reveal where he hid his money, slowly tortured the old man, the autopsy evidence showed.
“We know from the medical examiner that the beating — the beating that broke more than 12 ribs, many of those ribs displaced — happened first,” Bogdanos told the judge.
“After the beating we know there was a chokehold placed on Peter Lisi,” during which, “We know that Peter Lisi squirmed and moved enough that it did not kill him,” the prosecutor said.
Failing at that point, Matthews stopped choking the old man and found a ligature, consistent with a cell phone cable, and began strangling his still breathing victim, the prosecutor said the ME evidence showed.
“Consider, your honor, what Mr. Lisi had to be thinking at that moment, on the ground, gasping for breath and looking at Mr. Matthews” as the killer rummaged around for a cord.
“We know he was alive, we know he was conscious,” at that moment, because Lisi would then make one final effort at survival, scratching at his own neck against the cord, the prosecutor said.
For 95 years, the vet had avoided death both natural and unnatural — dodging the ravages of illness and war, the judge noted in throwing the book at Matthews.
“It is the opinion of this court that you will be for the rest of your life a danger to society,” he told the remorseless killer.