A Mullica man accused of murdering his wife threatened to do it just a month before she died, a casino dealer testified Wednesday.
Sergio DeRosa is charged with murder. He insists he accidentally shot 57-year-old Lynn DeRosa in the head as he cleaned the barrel of her gun May 26, 2014. DeRosa says he didn’t realize the shell he picked up was a live round.
But Borgata employee Elaine Murphy claims DeRosa told her he was going to kill Lynn a month before the shooting.
“I’m going to kill my wife,” Elaine Murphy testified DeRosa said as he played poker at her table that April 26.
“C’mon, Serge,” Murphy replied.
But he didn’t laugh or take it back, Murphy told Chief Assistant Prosecutor Seth Levy.
Instead, he continued: “Literally, I’m gonna kill my wife.”
Murphy said she didn’t think anything of it until two to four months later when she was in the casino’s break room and someone told her DeRosa had killed the woman.
“You didn’t take it seriously because people say things like that all the time,” defense attorney Jill Cohen said to Murphy during cross-examination.
Murphy said she never had a customer say that to her before.
“I didn’t take it seriously until it happened,” she said.
Murphy said she tried to keep out of the case, not saying anything to investigators. But then in March 2015 — more than nine months after the killing — she reached out to the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office.
“It was eating at me,” she said, talking of how DeRosa still came into the Borgata to play poker.
Then, one day, Murphy’s supervisor told her, “This guy is walking around because you didn’t tell anybody.”
The next day, she made the call.
Murphy said she was 100 percent certain about what DeRosa said, because even if she had been 99 percent sure, she wouldn’t have gotten involved.
“Even with 1 percent not sure, I wouldn’t ruin someone’s life,” she said.
The 14 jurors on Wednesday also saw video of DeRosa talking with investigators hours after his wife was killed.
In the video, DeRosa adamantly denies intentionally shooting his wife, and expresses confusion and shock at how the round he put in was live.
He said he believed it was a snap cap, which looks similar to a live cartridge but is empty.
Although the investigators told him no snap caps were found, on cross-examination Detective William Anton confirmed that two snap caps were found loose in the bag where he got the cartridge he used.
“I lost my life,” DeRosa yells to the detectives at one point. “There’s nothing left. Just bury me beside her.”
He talked of snuggling in bed with his wife and how she would always call him “Meatball.”
“It’s my fault,” DeRosa told them. “But you won’t get me to say I killed my wife, because it’s not true. It will never be true.”
The trial before Superior Court Judge John Rauh is expected to continue into next week.
