Nearly two years after Joan Porco was critically injured in her Delmar home, the mother of defendant Christopher Porco took the stand in the most anticipated moment yet in his murder trial.
Joan Porco testified in a succinct, soft-spoken manner that she has no recall of the Nov. 15, 2004 night someone quietly entered her 36 Brockley Drive, Delmar, home in the middle of the night attacking her and her husband with a 3-foot long wood-cutting ax as they lay in bed. Peter Porco died as a result of the attack and Joan Porco was severely injured. Their son, Christopher Porco, is on trial for murder and attempted murder in the crimes.
I am sorry for your loss, and I am sorry to have to call you as a witness, I promise I will be brief, Chief Prosecutor Michael McDermott said to Joan Porco.
Jurors witnessed firsthand and for the first time the severity of Joan Porco’s wounds by the assailant. McDermott asked the victim if she has any recollection of the night she was attacked and her husband was murdered.
`No, because of the damage that I have, I feel I have amnesia,` said Joan Porco. Her only recall about the weekend of the crime was about 12 hours earlier in the day that Sunday afternoon.
`Peter started working on the lawn, and I went to the ‘Y’ to secure a membership for my family,` said Mrs. Porco.
Joan Porco said she was `livid` when she first found out Bethlehem Police Det. Chris Bowdish said she nodded ‘yes’ that her son Chris had committed the crime.
`It sounded like the most absurd thing I ever heard,` Joan Porco said.
Porco was called by the prosecution as a witness to allow into evidence e-mail correspondence between her and her son Christopher from January to November 2004.
`You have looked over these e-mails with your attorney,` asked McDermott.
`Yes, but I can’t see them because of my eye,` said Joan Porco, who is now blind in one eye from the attack and is only able to read with the other eye through a magnifying glass.
Thirty e-mails were submitted to the court, including several correspondences from Joan to Christopher Porco questioning her son’s action or lack thereof regarding his financial affairs in the summer and fall of 2004. She also questioned her son’s unwillingness to confront his parents with the truth.
`Honesty and integrity are the most important things in life,` said Joan in an e-mail to her son in September 2004. Another e-mail from October asked why Christopher Porco is not accepting phone calls from either his parents or his brother Johnathan.
`Don’t you want to talk to us?` asked Joan in an e-mail. `Are you hiding something?`
In another message, Joan Porco stated that her other son Johnathan tried to contact Christopher 40 times in regard to selling a computer on eBay. Christopher eventually told his mother he was trying to finance his own education in the fall of 2004 at the University of Rochester by selling merchandise over the Internet.
`He said he had a company where he was selling computers online and he had sold several in addition to working at the veterinary hospital,` said Joan. Christopher Porco has worked at the Bethlehem Veterinary Hospital since he was in high school.
McDermott characterized Porco’s online sales in a different way to the media, saying one of the computers sold was Joan’s that was stolen from the family home and auctioned by Christopher Porco on eBay.
`It was another scam where the mother was victimized,` said McDermott.
In an e-mail two weeks before the attacks, Joan Porco questioned her son’s ability to reason by not addressing several outstanding loans heading to delinquency.
`We do not want companies calling here anymore,` said Porco. She asks a number of questions in the e-mails. `This is very upsetting to us.`
`What are you thinking of?` `A due date is a due date, what don’t you understand?` `Are you crazy?`
When asked by Defense Attorney Laurie Shanks if she felt her son Christopher was crazy, Joan Porco stated unequivocally `no.`
`I didn’t think he was mentally ill,` said Porco. `I was just trying to get his attention. I was angry.`
She also told the jury that neither Christopher nor Johnathan Porco ever showed any violence toward anyone.
Joan Porco was scheduled to take the stand for a second day on Tuesday, Aug. 2, mainly due to Shanks’ several hours of questioning to elicit several comments about Joan Porco’s life, about Peter Porco and about her two sons. She recalled in great detail growing up in Gloversville in a close family where her father operated a glove business.
`Family was always important to me,` said Joan Porco as Shanks explained to jurors how Joan Porco’s own parents died when she was young. She recalled the first time she met her husband Peter on the University of Albany campus in 1972 and when they married on June 8, 1974. Joan Porco said that both she and her husband spent as much time as possible with their two sons as they were growing up.
`We were a very close family, and Peter always wanted to be there for the boys,` said Porco.
Joan Porco told jurors she was the disciplinarian and the boys would go to Peter whenever they needed him. She recalled Christopher Porco as being very perceptive and very much like his father.
`I think Chris has many of the same traits his Dad had,` said Joan Porco. `I see Peter in Christopher a lot.`
Shanks tried to find out when Joan Porco first realized her husband Peter had been murdered.
`It did take me quite a lot of time to accept what had happened,` said Joan Porco. She also did not recall when she first understood that her son Christopher was the authorities’ main suspect.
`I had no idea at Sunnyview (rehabilitation hospital in Schenectady) he was the only one they were focusing on,` Porco said. `Since that time I came to realize the truth really isn’t what they (the police) were after. They were after convicting my son Christopher.`
Shanks asked Joan Porco about a mysterious stranger she claims to have seen outside her home two times prior to the attacks.
`I happened to be on the porch when I saw a man with a very slight build walk up the driveway quickly like he had something to do. As soon as the light came on he walked back down the driveway,` Porco said in a raspy voice as she cleared her throat several times at the end of a long day of testimony. She stated she was very scared and concerned about the stranger who also appeared in the daytime. Joan Porco did not inform the two incidents of the mysterious stranger to local authorities until after the attacks on Brockley Drive several weeks later.
Joan Porco’s attorney and family friend John Polster stayed in the courtroom next to the defense team of Shanks and Terence Kindlon during testimony. McDermott questioned if Mrs. Porco ever asked Christopher where he was on the night of Nov. 14, 2004.
`My attorney, John Polster, had asked me not to discuss the case with Christopher or anyone, and I have not,` she stated.
Christopher Porco told several witnesses that he was sleeping in the student lounge at Munro Hall dorm at the University of Rochester when the attacks occurred. Many of those same witnesses, including several university students, testified that they had not seen Christopher Porco in the student lounge at Munro Hall during the overnight hours of Nov. 14 and 15.
Porco was first seen that next day Monday morning around 8:45 a.m. jogging under a bridge in the direction of the dorm.
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