Franklin man pleads guilty to shooting boyfriend in head, waiting for him to die in woods

By ALYSSA DANDREA

Monitor staff

Published: 04-26-2018 11:11 AM

Fresh off Laconia’s annual Motorcycle Week, Richard Tripaldi II and James Brock returned to the remote campsite bordering the Great Gains Memorial Forest in Franklin.

The two young men, in a fledgling relationship, had spent some nights there previously. The relationship wasn’t going well; after just a few weeks they had contemplated breaking up.

When they returned in late June, Tripaldi had grown angry. As Brock knelt down next to the fire pit, Tripaldi moved in and fired a single shot from a .22 revolver at Brock’s head. Then he waited for Brock’s final breath.

On Wednesday, Tripaldi, now 26, pleaded guilty in Merrimack County Superior Court to second-degree murder. He confessed to shooting Brock in the head and waiting roughly five minutes for him to die before burying his body about a quarter-mile into the woods between Flaghole and Montgomery roads. He will spend 42 years to life in state prison.

“At the time he shot Mr. Brock, he was in a ‘dark place.’ He was unable to identify any particular reason why he shot (Brock),” Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin said during Tripaldi’s plea and sentencing hearing.

Tripaldi had previously told family members that he intended to kill Brock, 24, so he could steal his 2007 Chevrolet Impala and any cash in his possession.

One of his sisters, Mercedes Tripaldi, later told Franklin police that she didn’t take Tripaldi’s comments seriously at the time. She said her younger teenage sister prompted her to go to police on Aug. 1 after Richard Tripaldi confessed to her that “he had shot his boyfriend and buried him alive in the woods,” according to a police affidavit.

Mercedes Tripaldi encouraged police to check the wooded area off Flaghole Road because her brother had lived there in a tent with Brock, the affidavit says. That information led authorities to Brock’s body the morning of Aug. 2, and hours later Tripaldi was taken into custody.

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A state medical examiner concluded that a bullet had entered Brock’s skull, and that he had been dead for about a month.

Brock had relocated to New Hampshire from Jackson, Miss., where he grew up. In victim impact statements read aloud Wednesday, family members told about a boy who had grown up in the Presbyterian church, who was a percussionist in his high school’s marching band and who was fascinated by the mechanics of elevators.

James Brock Jr., and his wife, Betty, adopted the boy when he was just a few days old. He was their only child.

“James had his whole life ahead of him, and I’m very sad that he doesn’t get to live it,” Brock Jr. wrote in a letter read Wednesday by Strelzin.

The family lives in Mississippi and could not make the trip to New Hampshire for Tripaldi’s sentencing. However, Brock Jr. said he wanted Tripaldi’s punishment to “match the awfulness of his crime.”

“I want justice to be done,” he wrote.

Tripaldi has a minor criminal history that includes convictions for drug possession. Prosecutors considered that limited criminal record, as well as Tripaldi’s confession following his arrest and input from Brock’s family, when negotiating the plea deal. That deal also includes a concurrent 7½- to 15-year state prison sentence on a charge of theft by unauthorized taking, which stems from Tripaldi’s decision to steal the Impala after the murder.

Strelzin told the court the agreement brings finality to a case that may have otherwise gone on for years. He noted that most homicide cases go to trial and any guilty convictions are typically appealed.

“Forty-two to life is a significant sentence. Obviously, in some ways, it pales in comparison with the fact that a young man is dead,” he said.

Friends and family members captured Brock’s personality and love for life in several letters, which Judge John Kissinger Jr. said he read prior to the start of the hearing. Kissinger said too often murder cases become about the defendant and his heinous actions, rather than about the victim and the mourning of a life.

“What strikes me in reading the letters is how much James meant to his family and his friends, and the extreme loss that is involved here,” Kissinger said.

He continued, “I completely believe that this extremely lengthy state prison sentence is appropriate for the savage ... acts that Mr. Tripaldi engaged in.”

(Alyssa Dandrea can be reached at 369-3319, adandrea@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @_ADandrea.)]]>