A young Hispanic man, 23-year-old Jose "Bebo" Mendez, was killed on April 9, 2014, in West Hartford, Connecticut, following a dispute with his girlfriend. The incident unfolded in a car, culminating in a fatal gunshot wound.
On that Wednesday evening, at approximately 6:30 p.m., police responded to a report of a car crash near the intersection of Prospect Avenue and Kane Street. Officers arrived to find a vehicle that had gone through a fence.
Inside the car was Mendez, who was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead. The cause of the crash was determined to be a shooting. Mendez had been shot in the head.
The woman with Mendez, his 27-year-old girlfriend Angela Grasso of Plainville, was immediately identified as the suspect. Grasso, a bail bondswoman, was taken into custody and initially charged with first-degree manslaughter with a firearm. She claimed that she shot Mendez in self-defense, stating that he had repeatedly threatened to kill her and her family. According to Grasso, an argument had begun the day before, with Mendez accusing her of being unfaithful. She told investigators that on the day of the shooting, the threats escalated as they drove, and she believed her only option to save herself and her family was to shoot him.
Prosecutors, however, were skeptical of her self-defense claim. They argued that Grasso had opportunities to escape from Mendez earlier in the day if she had truly been in fear for her life. Surveillance video from a rehabilitation hospital they visited showed her walking ahead of him and at a distance from him at certain points. Subsequently, the charge against her was upgraded to murder.
In February 2016, a Hartford Superior Court jury acquitted Angela Grasso of murder but found her guilty of the lesser charge of first-degree manslaughter with a firearm. Despite her insistence that she acted out of fear, she was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Her subsequent appeal, which argued that the state had failed to disprove her claim of self-defense, was rejected by the Connecticut Appellate Court in April 2019, upholding her 25-year prison sentence.
