Patrick Anthony Brown, a former Mattapan man, was sentenced to life in prison on Feb. 8 following his admission of guilt to the 1995 murder of Jamaica Plain resident Zandera Sullivan, Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in a press release.
Judge Judith Fabrican imposed the mandatory sentence for murder in the second degree: life with the possibility of parole after 15 years, along with a two-year probationary term.
Brown, also known as Derrick Malloy, had been on the run for 15 years and crossed at least five international borders in that time. The Boston Police Department’s Fugitive Unit, its Cold Case Squad, the US Marshals Service and a series of Suffolk homicide prosecutors worked to track Brown’s flight to Jamaica and several Central American countries. Brown was arrested in Belize in February last year, the press release said.
The case was featured on the television show America’s Most Wanted in 2009.
Brown pleaded guilty to the crimes of second-degree murder and armed home invasion minutes before his trial was scheduled to begin in Suffolk Superior Court on Feb. 7. He admitted to the May 29, 1995, incident, in which Brown killed Sullivan at Sullivan’s girlfriend’s Seaver Street home. That woman had ended her romantic relationship with Brown a few months earlier.
According to the press release, had Brown’s case proceeded to trial, Assistant District Attorney Gretchen Lundgren of the DA’s Homicide Unit would have introduced evidence and testimony showing that Brown went to his former girlfriend’s Seaver Street apartment building, walked up to her fourth floor apartment, and knocked on the door, asking to be let in.
When she did not let him in, evidence would have shown, Brown went to the back door of the apartment, forced his way in, and made his way to her bedroom, where he encountered her and Sullivan.
“At that point, the defendant pulled out a knife from the waistband of his pants,” Lundgren said in a press release. “Upon seeing the knife, the male victim got up and ran out of the apartment through the back door…The defendant [then] chased Mr. Sullivan with the knife in his hand.”
Moments later, Sullivan was found in the apartment building vestibule suffering from a severed carotid artery and jugular vein. He died as a result of those injuries.
Suffolk County District Attorney Press Secretary Jake Wark confirmed to the Gazette that by admitting his guilt, Brown corroborates the D.A.’s version of events.
Brown, a Jamaican national, will be deported from the United States if he is ever released from prison.