Two years ago, a 5‑year-old Ansonia girl bounced out of her bed like she did every Easter Sunday, eager to hunt for eggs hidden overnight by the Easter Bunny.
Instead, she saw her 73-year-old next-door neighbor force his way into her family’s home and nearly shoot her father to death.
She hasn’t been able to get a good night’s sleep since.
On Thursday, a judge sentenced the man responsible for the crime to nine years behind bars.
Before handing down the sentence to Steven Sentementes, Milford Superior Court Judge Frank Iannotti said he was almost at a loss for words trying to understand the shooting that played out on Woodbridge Avenue April 20, 2014.
“We’re talking about a neighborhood dispute,” the judge said in disbelief.
The shooting was motivated by a dispute over water running off from the neighbor’s property onto Sentementes’ property, authorities said.
Background
In November Sentementes pleaded guilty under the Alford doctrine to first-degree assault and risk of injury to a minor in connection with the shooting.
According to police, Sentementes’ 39-year-old next-door neighbor was sitting in front of his house Easter morning when Sentementes came by unannounced — and then shot him.
The victim ran into his house, and Sentementes gave chase — and kept shooting, hitting his neighbor in the buttocks, left leg, and right calf.
At some point during the ordeal, police said the victim tackled Sentementes and the two tumbled down the home’s basement stairs. They ended up on the floor, where the wounded homeowner pinned down down Sentementes until cops arrived.
The shooting was rooted in a years-long water runoff issue Sentementes had with his neighbors, police said afterward. The victim’s house is on higher ground than Sentementes’, which caused water to run off onto Sentementes’ property.
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“Horrific,” “Unspeakable”
State’s Attorney Kevin Lawlor began the sentencing hearing March 17 by asking the judge to give Sentementes a sentence of between 10 and 15 years behind bars.
Lawlor said Sentementes had committed a “horrific” crime “unspeakable on so many levels.”
“This defendant, on Easter Sunday, planned out and carried out an assault on his neighbor,” Lawlor said.
The prosecutor said the shooting was so well-planned, Sentementes even left a tape-recorded message to his brother telling him what do do afterward. Hiring a lawyer was one of the first items on the list.
Sentementes’ neighbors now live in fear, Lawlor said.
And the lasting pain inflicted by Sentementes on the family isn’t just emotional, the prosecutor said.
“One of the bullets that struck (the victim) cannot be removed due to proximity to his spine,” Lawlor said, noting that the man lives in pain that his doctors can only try to manage for now. “Basically they’re just hoping that it moves at some point in the future so they can remove it.”
He asked the judge to punish Sentementes “severely” — by putting him behind bars “for the rest of his life.”
’Steve, Leave My Daddy Alone’
The prosecutor then read a letter to the judge written by the victim’s wife, saying the family wasn’t in court Thursday because they didn’t want to be in the same room as Sentementes.
The woman said that two years ago her family woke up to a nightmare that hasn’t ended, with permanent physical, emotional, and financial damage.
The victim has racked up $36,000 in medical bills, she said.
But worse than the debt is the emotional toll the shooting has taken.
Her daughter was 5 years old at the time, she wrote.
“Easter was a day we enjoyed quality time with loved ones and Easter hunts with our daughter, who every Easter Sunday would jump out of bed and rush to begin her hunt. On this particular Easter, she was jumping out of bed to witness our neighbor hurting her dad,” the woman wrote.
“My daughter said ‘Steve, leave my daddy alone. Go home. Please, please, please.’ At this point, Steve pointed the gun at (the victim) and said he was going to kill him,” the woman wrote. “How do you erase this from a 5‑year-old mind? How do you help your child forget and move on?”
Every day is a struggle, the woman wrote to the judge. Her daughter still lives in fear of Sentementes. She said the family is just lucky her husband wasn’t killed.
“Fortunately, my husband acted quickly to stop this monster,” the woman wrote.
The Xanax Defense
Sentementes’ lawyer, John Gulash, said what Sentementes did was clearly wrong.
“How can anyone rationalize what is clearly irrational behavior?” he said.
But he asked the judge to look at Sentementes “extremely productive life” up to that point — coming to the country at the age of 14, working blue collar jobs and investing for retirement.
Sentementes lost his investments, though, except for his Woodbridge Avenue home. As a result, he became more and more concerned about that property.
He became obsessed with the water run-off issue, Gulash said. He had made complaints to the state’s attorney general, the police, and had even unsuccessfully pursued a case in small claims court.
The lawyer said Sentementes would stand in front of a window at the home when it began to rain and plead with God to make it stop. He filled sandbags, placing them around his house in an effort to divert the water.
As Sentementes became more and more obsessed, Gulash said, a doctor prescribed him Xanax to help him sleep and treat his anxiety.
But “it actually began to have the opposite effect,” Gulash said.
He read a list of side effects off a Wikipedia page he said Sentementes exhibited.
Emotional clouding. Nausea. Headaches. Dizziness. Irritability. Sleep deprivation. Personality changes. Aggression.
Taken together, Gulash said, the circumstances provide “some mitigation, explanation, for why a man who lived as long as he did doing all the right things went so far off track.”
He asked the judge to sentence Sentementes to serve five years behind bars, and hand down a longer suspended sentence with strict probation conditions.
’I Snapped’
Sentementes then addressed the judge.
“Your honor, I am so, so sorry about this,” he said.
He described how he became more and more fixated on the water running off his neighbors’ property.
“I had problems for six years but I never attempted anything like this,” Sentementes said. “I snapped.”
He said he lost 28 pounds his first week in jail.
He began to cry as his apology continued.
“There isn’t a day that I forget why I am there,” Sentementes said. “I am so sorry.”
Judge: Victim Lucky To Be Alive
Judge Iannotti said both lawyers made good points. But he told Gulash that while he couldn’t say he was wrong about the adverse effects of his client’s Xanax use, it was the first time he’s heard such an explanation.
“I’ve never heard that Xanax caused anger or violence,” he said.
What was undeniable, the judge said, was “this was a terribly violent act based on anger and frustration.”
“Quite frankly, from what I’ve read, the victim is very, very, very fortunate to be alive,” Judge Iannotti said.
He also noted the man Sentementes shot will likely be in pain for the rest of his life.
He said he didn’t buy the excuse that Sentementes “snapped.” The judge said he might have handed down a shorter sentence if not for the recording Sentementes made for his brother police found after the shooting.
“This was a very calculated, well-planned event,” Judge Iannotti said. “This was not done on a whim. This was not ‘I snapped, I got a gun, I ran across the street and I shot him.’ This was probably thought about if not for days, maybe weeks, even longer.”
“He took a gun, he went across the street, and in front of this person’s entire family, including his minor child, he shot and kept shooting,” the judge went on. “That’s a calculated plan. And he executed that calculated plan.”
Sentence, Reaction
He then sentenced Sentementes to an 18-year prison term to be suspended after nine years behind bars, to be followed by five years of probation.
The judge also ordered Sentementes not to have any contact with his former neighbors, and if he is released to live at least 1 mile away from them.
Ansonia Police Detective Sgt. Patrick Lynch attended Thursday’s sentencing and said he thought the judge’s sentence was appropriate.
Lynch has been a cop 26 years. He said there are only a handful of cases he can remember with circumstances as bizarre or disturbing.
“He left a tape-recorded message to his brother that we recovered that basically laid out what he wanted to do,” Lynch said.
He praised Sentementes’ neighbor for putting his life on the line to save his wife and daughter by subduing Sentementes.
The only silver lining in the case, he said, was that it wasn’t a murder.
“The victim is extremely lucky he wasn’t killed,” Lynch said.