SMETHPORT — “All Mel Bizzarro wanted to do on that cold January morning was go to the restaurant where he knew his wife was working,” said L. Todd Goodwin, deputy attorney general, Tuesday morning in McKean County Court during his opening statement in the trial of Stephen Stidd.
Stidd, 65, is charged with the Jan. 16, 2015, shooting death of Bizzarro, his son-in-law, in the parking lot behind Togi’s Restaurant on East Main Street in Bradford.
Goodwin continued, saying Bizzarro went to the restaurant to talk to his wife, Michelle Bizzarro, from whom he was separated. He wanted to “talk with her about his attendance at his son’s basketball game. All the defendant wanted to do was exact revenge for a fight that occurred 10 years earlier.”
The prosecutor painted a picture of a man on a mission, choosing “to get out of the safety and comfort of his vehicle, cross an empty parking lot, confront a much larger man and shoot him dead.”
Goodwin said Stidd was a then-62-year-old man with a history of back pain, confronting Bizzarro, who was 6’3” and weighed 330 pounds. He said the two argued and Bizzarro headbutted Stidd, who pulled out a gun and shot Bizzarro, hitting part of his heart and causing his death.
“The defendant was walking around with a gun in his pocket with the name of the victim on the bullet,” Goodwin said, explaining the name “Mel” was found carved into a live round in the gun recovered by police from Stidd at the scene.
Defense attorneys Greg Henry and James P. Miller deferred their opening statement until later in the trial.
The first of six witnesses to take the stand Tuesday was David Bizzarro, father of the victim.
He explained the morning of the shooting, he was babysitting his twin 7-month-old grandsons at his house, where Mel Bizzarro was living as well.
“Mel came down a little after 8,” his father recounted. “He said, ‘I’m never going to drink again.’ I said, ‘Yeah, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that.’”
He said his son had a stomach ache and was “a little” hungover. He told his father he was going to McDonald’s to get something to eat, and his father asked him to bring him something back. “When he was leaving, he said, ‘Are you going to go with me to (his son’s) game?’”
His father said he couldn’t. Mel Bizzarro said, “I’m going to run to Togi’s to tell Michelle I’m going to the game alone. I told him to remember McDonald’s quit serving breakfast at 10:30. … I never saw him again.”
David Bizzarro said his daughter, Joy, called him later to ask if Mel was home, saying, “She said something bad just happened at Togi’s.”
She brought a babysitter for the children and took her father with her to Togi’s.
“They wouldn’t let us near,” he said.
Next on the stand was Olivia Renko, who lived in an apartment behind Togi’s at the time of the shooting. She explained she was in an upstairs bathroom with the window open when she heard a gunshot, and looked out.
“I could just hear some yelling back and forth, I heard (Stidd) say, ‘You f—-r,’ and the gun went off. I didn’t see who he was talking to,” Renko said.
She saw a body fall on the other side of a delivery truck in the parking lot, she said. She saw some Togi’s employees outside later that morning, and they told her, “Steve shot Mel,” she testified.
Next to the stand was Jodi Anthony, who lived on Welch Avenue in an upstairs apartment. Her bedroom window looked out over Togi’s rear lot, and her parents rented an apartment over Togi’s Blue Room, she explained.
“I heard a bang outside,” she said, explaining she thought it was the ramp for the Maplevale Farms delivery truck that was at Togi’s. She ran to the window to look.
“I saw Mel drop to his knees and fall,” Anthony said. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t anyone helping him?’”
She testified that she watched out the window for about 15 minutes. In that time, she said, she saw Stidd check Bizzarro’s pulse as he lay on the ground. No emergency responders came until about 25 minutes later, she said, adding that she had seen Barbara Stidd make a call about 20 minutes after she heard the shot.
“If Mrs. Stidd had been on the cell phone prior to your going to the window, you wouldn’t have seen that,” Henry said.
“No,” Anthony responded.
Henry asked her about a state police interview conducted with her after charges had been dismissed by District Judge Dominic Cercone and refiled by the state attorney general’s office.
“Did you not tell state police you were glad they were looking into the investigation again because you felt Mr. Stidd had gotten away with murder?” Henry asked.
“I did,” she replied.
Former Togi’s employee Dale Sweetapple testified he’d been at the restaurant early that morning to bake bread, left around 8:30 a.m., and returned a little while after that. When he came back, Stidd and his wife, Barbara, were sitting in their truck in a parking lot of a church behind Togi’s, waiting to meet someone to talk about purchasing some property, he said. He spoke to them briefly, then went in the restaurant to start putting away the stock that was being delivered at that time by a Maplevale Farms driver.
He went back outside a few minutes later. “I saw Steve standing, Mel was on the ground and Barb Stidd was tapping on his forehead with a phone, saying, ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up.’ Mel was on the ground. It was a cold January day. You could see your breath. I saw no breathing; I saw nothing.”
He recounted that he said, “What the hell happened?” before heading back inside. There, he said to Michelle Bizzarro, “Your dad just shot Mel,” he testified. He added that he did not see her go outside.
Sweetapple said Mel Bizzarro was his boss and his friend. However, under cross-examination, Miller asked if Sweetapple remembered telling police, “Mel threatens everybody. He would threaten people with his fists. Mel is an intimidator.”
Sweetapple said no, he didn’t recall saying that.
Miller asked him several questions about alleged discrepancies between his testimony and his earlier interviews. Sweetapple said he didn’t remember.
Lt. Steve Caskey of the Bradford City Police described getting the dispatch for a fight behind Togi’s, and a subsequent report that a shot had been fired. He responded to the scene within one minute of the dispatch. When he arrived on scene, the Stidds were walking toward him, he said. He asked what was going on.
“Mr. Stidd said, ‘I told him I had a gun.’”
Caskey asked for the gun; Stidd immediately gave it to him, a two-shot Derringer-style handgun. Caskey said Police Chief Chris Lucco was on the scene as well, and took Stidd into custody while Caskey locked up the gun in an evidence locker in his car, and locked the car.
While Caskey was on the stand, deputy attorney general Bobbi Jo Wagner presented him with a series of photos of the crime scene to identify, before showing them on a large-screen television in the courtroom.
Senior Judge John Cleland, presiding in the case, briefly addressed the jury before the pictures were displayed, explaining it was part of the evidence and might be difficult to see.
The photos included images of Bizzarro’s body. His family in the audience, including his mother and grandmother, openly wept.
Caskey was also questioned about Stidd’s gun. He explained the investigation was quickly turned over to state police, as a member of the city police department was related to the family involved. With Trooper Ted Horner, Caskey removed the weapon from the lock box in his car and turned it over to state police. The handgun was opened, and the two casings were removed; one was spent, one was live, Caskey explained.
“The live round had a name carved around the top of it,” Caskey said, “Mel.”
The troopers asked him the name of the victim; Caskey told them it was Mel Bizzarro. “They were surprised,” he said.
The courtroom went silent as Wagner opened evidence bags, showing the gun and closeup photos of the letters carved into the bullet.
Under cross-examination by Henry, Caskey said he was notified by another officer that Stidd had an injury to his forehead. He said he would send the photographer, Jay Bradish, from the crime scene to photograph the injury.
The last witness to take the stand Tuesday was David Burlingame, a retired state police firearms expert, who gave detailed explanations about the gun and the bullets that were in it. He also explained he had done tests on the gunshot residue on Bizzarro’s shirt, and determined the fatal shot was fired from 12 and 24 inches away from Bizzarro’s chest.
He said he was unable to match the bullet recovered from the scene to Stidd’s gun. However, he said, the gun, bullets and Bizzarro’s clothing items all arrived together for testing.
Testimony will resume today at 9 a.m., presumably with cross examination of Burlingame.
