New Year's weekend brings violence

Four stabbings and a shooting occurred Thursday through Saturday.
01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, January 4, 2006

BY GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- One man was shot and four others were stabbed in separate incidents as part of a violent outburst in the city over the long holiday weekend.

The incidents were less serious than three others that have been widely reported, including what the police said were two homicides early Thursday morning and Friday night and a stabbing late Friday night that left a man in critical condition.

The outburst began Thursday with the shooting death of Tonea "Nutt" Sims, who died at about 1:30 a.m. after he was shot repeatedly while sitting in the kitchen of a house in South Providence.

At about 11 p.m. Thursday, the police went to Miriam Hospital, where Santana Vicente, 24, of 61 Wendell St., in the West End, was being treated for what a doctor described as serious but non-life-threatening head wounds.

Vicente told the police that he was attacked from behind as he walked on a side street in Mount Hope, near Camp Street. The attacker hit him on the head with a metallic object and a second assailant stabbed him in the head with a metallic object, he said.

The victim managed to get away after wrestling with his attackers and called his brother, who drove him to the hospital. Vicente suffered five or six deep scalp cuts, according to the police.

The victim said his attackers said nothing and took nothing from him.
The next morning, shortly before 5 a.m. Friday, Robert Ruotolo, 51, whose home address was not disclosed, met the police at Branch Avenue and Charles Street. He said someone had stabbed him with a screwdriver as he was lying on a couch.

Ruotolo, whose head was bloody and who had puncture marks on his arms, was treated at Rhode Island Hospital, according to the police.

At about 5:30 a.m. Friday, the police went to 58 Dora St., Silver Lake, for a report of a shooting. Wendell Gwinn, 39, of that address, said that as he was walking on Whitehall Street near his house, a car drove by, he heard some popping noises and he suffered a leg wound. He was treated at Rhode Island Hospital.

Later Friday, at about 10:15 p.m., Johnny Jiminez, 32, of 17 Burnett St., Elmwood, was found shot to death on Cornwall Street in the North End. Detectives consider it the city's 22nd homicide of 2005.

About 45 minutes later, Pedro Natareno, 20, of 78 Lawn St., Mt. Pleasant, fell to the street at Sears and Rangeley avenues, Mount Pleasant, stabbed in the chest.

The police said yesterday that Natareno remains in critical condition after surgery, and that he very nearly became Providence's 23rd homicide of the year.

At the scene, the police quickly arrested David Contreras, 20, of 46 Sears Ave., who was standing nearby wearing a blood-stained white hooded sweatshirt, and charged him with assault with a dangerous weapon.

Contreras was arraigned yesterday in District Court and he entered no plea on the felony charge. Chief Judge Albert E. DeRobbio set cash bail at $50,000. Contreras also was arraigned on a charge of violating a suspended sentence in a previous District Court drug case, and DeRobbio ordered him held without bail on that count pending a hearing Jan. 17.

Shortly after 1 a.m. Saturday, Donald W. Turmel, 47, of 162 Broad St., at Crossroads Rhode Island, told the police that two men had accosted him and demanded money as he stood in front of the Crossroads building. One of the men stabbed him in his left side with a pair of scissors, he said.

When officers arrived, the scissors were still embedded in Turmel. He was treated at Rhode Island Hospital.

In another stabbing that morning, the police said Antonio Gomes, 44, of 396 Pawtucket Ave., Pawtucket, complained that his girlfriend stuck him in the chest with a steak knife at her apartment in Washington Park after he refused to have sex with her.

Dionne Smith, 38, of 145 Babcock St., was charged with felony domestic assault and was arraigned in District Court yesterday. An assistant public defender representing Smith said she claims self-defense.

Officers were dispatched to her apartment at about 7:30 a.m., where they learned that an argument began in the bedroom and moved into the kitchen, where Smith allegedly knifed Gomes.

In another violent incident, which was neither a shooting nor a stabbing, Christopher Dyment, a 26-year-old professional hockey player for the Providence Bruins, suffered a serious eye injury in a fight on the East Side early New Year's Day.
gsmith@projo.com / 401-277-7334

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