The man police pulled in from a 12th-story window of a Roxbury apartment building — where he dangled from a handle caught on his underwear — has been arraigned for the murder of his boyfriend, who was found stabbed to death inside that apartment.
Michael Perry, 37, of Dorchester, appeared in Suffolk Superior Court Wednesday and was charged with the murder of Jose Aponte, 43, his boyfriend. Perry was first charged Dec. 14 in Boston Municipal Court but the case was kicked up to the Superior Court following an indictment returned on March 8.
Perry was brought in from jail and appeared wearing a light blue button-up shirt, an upgrade from the Tyvek-type suit he wore during his initial appearance in BMC.
Perry pleaded not guilty to the charge. Clerk Magistrate Ed Curley ordered Perry held without bail.
“You know what happened,” Perry allegedly screamed at police officers who asked him what had occurred when they found Aponte’s “dead and bloody” body just inside the door of his Roxbury apartment at around 12:30 a.m. on Dec. 12, 2022.
When they asked if he was alone, he allegedly responded, according to the Commonwealth’s Statement of the Case, “Come and find out.”
When officers were able to push past Aponte’s body, they found “that the normally well-kept living space beyond was completely trashed” and furniture had been piled high to form a barricade, according to charging documents. Beyond that, police said, Perry was pacing around with a knife and a pair of scissors.
The SWAT team entered and told Perry to drop the weapons, a command prosecutors say Perry did not obey. An officer fired pellets from a “less lethal” weapon, one of which struck Perry in the head. He then ducked under cover and disappeared until officers heard his voice crying for help “as if from a distance.”
“They clambered through the debris and found that Perry had jumped or climbed out a window and was hanging upside down, prevented from falling to his death only by his underwear and sweatpants that were caught on one of his sneakers and a window handle,” according to the Statement of the Case.
It was not Perry’s first interaction with the police.
In 2019, prosecutor Ian Polumbaum said, Perry beat up and stabbed a former boyfriend who didn’t want to continue their sexual relationship. When police surrounded him at gunpoint, he refused to drop his knife and begged for them to shoot him. He would go on to plead guilty in this case. He was sentenced to three to four years in prison and got out in early 2022, shortly before he met Aponte online.
Polumbaum said it’s a similar matter here, with evidence of friction in their relationship, as Perry decried their lack of sexual intimacy and accused Aponte of cheating on him.
“I’ve been in this journey of celibacy with u and I get no love. Just side eyes and suspicion,” Perry wrote to Aponte on Dec. 7, just days before the alleged stabbing. “U never acted like this before so something else is up.”
Even through the friction, the men continued dating, and Perry came over to Aponte’s studio apartment that Friday, Dec. 9. Polumbaum said that Perry checked in a little after 8 the next morning at the apartment security desk, meaning he had left and returned alone.
Aponte’s manager at Brooks Brothers received a text from Aponte’s phone at around 11 a.m.: “Wake up sick been trying to feel better with not improvement, I really can’t make it today.”
The poor grammar and wording struck both the manager and Aponte’s family as not like him. So a friend went over to the apartment that Sunday evening to check in, but got no answer other than an unusual cold draft coming from under the door, a court document states, and “what sounded like kitchen utensils rattling inside.”
The police would make the next check, leading to the discovery of the body and Perry’s rescue from the window. Police reported that they found multiple knives in the apartment out of place, the document adds, including two near Aponte’s body with the large blades broken off from the handles.
The medical examiner would declare that Aponte suffered at least 29 stab and slash wounds across his body — with deep stabs to the face, neck and chest and an arm gouged so badly it looked like someone had tried to cut it off.
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