Murder defendant Garcia: ‘I really lost it’
Less than an hour after he allegedly shot three people outside Lakeside Memorial Hospital in Brockport, registered nurse Frank Garcia called his professor at Nazareth College and contritely said he had “lost it.”
In a voice-mail message played Friday in Garcia’s murder trial in Monroe County Court, Garcia told nursing professor Linda M. Janelli that Lakeside fired him because a woman accused him of sexual improprieties.
Voice-mail audio
At the time of the call — 5:46 a.m. on Valentine’s Day — his accuser, certified nursing assistant Mary Silliman, lay dead in a parking lot with two bullet wounds to the back of her head, and a Canandaigua woman who had also accused Garcia of sexually harassing her at a Rochester health care facility had less than eight hours to live.
The message was played twice to jurors, who followed along with a transcript.
“Ms. Janelli, this is Frank. I’m sorry to let you down, but at Lakeside I really lost it,” a soft-spoken Garcia said. “Another girl said that I raped her there and everything so I had to take care of business and I am really sorry. You have been a great professor and somebody good to listen to. Thank you very much. Bye.”
Janelli testified that she recognized Garcia’s voice on the recording because she spoke to him at least once a week since he began taking graduate courses in gerontology at Nazareth in January 2008.
The professor said she heard the message Feb. 15 when she accessed her voice-mail messages while on a trip to New Jersey. Nazareth security officials contacted the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office and an investigator copied the message on a hand-held recorder.
Nazareth’s voice-mail system showed the call was made from a number that Garcia’s wife, Margeann Garcia, testified belonged to her husband’s cell phone.
Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr. allowed the District Attorney’s Office to release a copy of the message to the news media because the recording was entered into evidence.
Garcia, 35, of Hamlin is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Silliman, 23, and Randal Norman, 41, and attempted first-degree murder in the wounding of Audra Dillon, 42, who were shot shortly after 5 a.m. on Feb. 14.
Garcia was fired from his job as a nursing supervisor at Lakeside Beikirch Care Center on the Lakeside health-care campus a day earlier after an internal investigation supported Silliman’s allegation that Garcia had harassed her.
The prosecution said Garcia confronted Silliman outside the hospital while she was on a cigarette break.
Dillon testified this week that she was driving Norman to work when they saw a woman struggling with a man outside the hospital and stopped to help her.
Dillon said the man shot Norman and the woman before wounding her as she fled in her car. She said she could identify Garcia as the shooter because of his “very piercing eyes.”
Prosecutors contend that after leaving the message for his professor, Garcia drove to Canandaigua, where he shot Christopher Glatz, 44, and his wife, Kimberly Glatz, 38, execution-style in their home.
Kimberly Glatz had worked for Garcia at Wesley Gardens care center in Rochester and had accused Garcia of sexual abuse, resulting in his firing from that job in 2008.
Garcia has been convicted of the Canandaigua slayings and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
He faces the same sentence if convicted in the Brockport shootings.
MZEIGLER@DemocratandChronicle.com
What’s next
Frank Garcia’s trial continues Monday morning with testimony by sheriff’s Investigator Patrick J. Crough, who interviewed him after his arrest Feb. 14. Jurors are expected to see a video recording of the interrogation.
