It took 23 years, but a man has finally been convicted for the 1991 murder of Patricia Moreno.
The Herald reported that the 17-year-old “Tricia” was seen smoking a cigarette on the fire escape of her Malden foster parent’s apartment early in the morning of July 20, 1991. At around 2:50 a.m., a neighbor said two shots rang out and he looked through a small gap in the blinds of his window and “saw Moreno lying on the fire escape gasping for air.”
Police responding to 911 calls for the gunshots would find her face-down on the third-floor fire escape of 21 Henry St. in Malden, still alive but fading. The .38 slug to her head would take her life 12 hours later, at around 3 p.m.
On Thursday, a man named Rodney Daniels was convicted by a Middlesex Superior Court jury in Woburn for Moreno’s murder. Police arrested the former Massachusetts man at his home in Georgia on Sept. 27, 2021.
“When a family loses a loved one in a homicide, even the passage of time never fully heals that wound. That is especially true when they do not have answers about what happened and no one has been held accountable,” Middlesex DA Marian Ryan said in a statement following the verdict in the six-day trial.
“Those who knew and loved Tricia have been waiting over three decades for answers. When I created our Cold Case Unit it was my hope that we would be able to get to these resolutions. These older cases present substantial challenges and require relentless investigative work and dedicated resources,” she added.
That unit took up the case again in 2020 and returned to the building at 21 Henry St. in Malden to reconstruct “Tricia’s” moments before her shooting on that third-floor fire escape.
They found that the bullets must have come from the doorway leading to that fire escape, meaning the killer was someone inside the home — a detail further backed up by there being no evidence of forced entry. Daniels had been a frequent visitor to the home and had been staying there the night of the murder.
According to the DA’s statement of the case, they interviewed a man who appears to be the same one the Herald spoke to all those years ago, but he added another detail: as Patricia Moreno lay gasping for air, a man stood over her. The physical description he provided investigators matched that of a 1991-era Rodney Daniels.
Daniels is identified as the boyfriend of one of the daughters in the foster mother’s apartment — and the very one Patricia Moreno’s biological mother, Jewell Moreno, told the Herald had threatened her daughter by pointing a gun at her a month earlier. The state Department of Social Services would deny knowing of the threat when questioned by the Herald the next day.
While Daniels was known to have threatened Patricia Moreno, the DA’s office says “police had not previously been able to gather sufficient evidence to make an arrest.” That’s because an alibi witness had lied for him, afraid that if she came clean she would also be in trouble, according to the DA’s statement, but would years later confess what she knew of that night.
