A Hampton Bays man who spent 23 years in prison for a 1989 killing has been charged with murder in connection with a Christmas morning burglary and the shooting death of a North Sea man.
Dominick Parisi, 57, was arrested Sunday, January 16, at a home in Hampton Bays after a three-week investigation by Southampton Town Police and Suffolk County Police Department homicide detectives.
A second man believed to have been an accomplice in the burglary and killing of Steven Byrnes, 53, of Southampton apparently remained at large as of Wednesday morning. Police have not identified the second suspect in the case.
Parisi was arraigned in Southampton Town Justice Court on Monday morning on a single charge of second degree murder and ordered held without bail by Justice Barbara Wilson. He faces 25 years to life in prison if convicted of murder. He also could face additional charges after the case is presented to a Suffolk County grand jury.
In 1989, when he was 25, Parisi was charged with murder but pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter, according to state prison system records. He served 23 years at the Auburn Correctional Facility near Seneca Falls. He was released on parole in March 2012.
According to the account of the Christmas Day incident recounted for Justice Wilson by Assistant District Attorney Ferron Lien, Parisi and the other man — dressed in black and wearing masks — drove to the Roses Grove Road home owned by Byrnes just before 9 a.m. on Christmas morning in Parisi’s car, a Mercedes-Benz sedan.
Armed with a shotgun, they entered the house in what police initially described on the morning of the incident as a “home invasion.” Byrnes was shot once with a shotgun. He was dead when police officers responding to a report of a burglary arrived at the scene.
Police have not said whether anyone else was in the house at the time of the killing or how they know that there were two men involved.
The violent incident on Christmas morning rattled residents of the quiet surrounding hillside neighborhoods and gave rise to concerns when no arrests were made in the ensuing days about a continued threat.
Detectives spent all of Christmas Day and well into the evening at the scene, combing the neighborhood and knocking on doors to interview neighbors.
One neighbor told a reporter that he’d been told that the killing was drug related but expressed frustration at the lack of an arrest or information about suspects at the time.
Seeking to calm fears of a random crime, Southampton Town Police Chief Steven Skrynecki said that investigators had determined that Byrnes had been targeted by the killer, or killers, specifically, and that there was no lingering threat to others in the community.
Several days into the investigation, police announced that a $2,000 reward was being offered for information about the killing.
On Sunday, investigators were seen at the Hampton Bays house where Parisi had lived, on Janice Lane. A shotgun believed to be the murder weapon was recovered from Parisi’s car, which was parked in the driveway of the house, the prosecutor Lien said in court on Monday.
Defense attorney Jason Bassett, who was appointed by the court to represent Parisi, entered a general denial of the charges on his client’s behalf on Monday.
Parisi didn’t speak in court Monday except to say that he accepted the court’s appointing of Bassett to defend him and to reassure Wilson that he was physically healthy after having been taken from the Southampton Town Police Department headquarters to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital on Monday morning. Why he was taken to the hospital has not been disclosed by police.
Michael Wright on Jan 19, 2022