I'll start off by acknowledging that this woman is innocent until proven guilty, but let me just say, her case isn't looking too good.
The 35-year-old Florida woman, Nichole A. Maks, is being charged with tampering with evidence and resisting arrest with violence in addition to the charge of premeditated first-degree murder after the death of her 79-year-old roommate Michael Cerasoli.
The murdered man was found dead as a result of blunt force trauma and multiple stab wounds after firefighters responded to an apparent arson in the home that he and the suspect shared.
The landlord identified Maks as the other tenant, and the case against Maks just continued to pile up from there.
The New York Post reported that,
Two cellphones were recovered near the 79-year-old's corpse: one belonged to the victim, while the other, which had a bloodied knife balanced on top of it, belonged to Maks.
Less than two hours later, police said they spotted a barefoot Maks with blood on her leg and ripped shirt outside a Krystal restaurant in the nearby community of Holly Hill.
When they approached, police said, she "dropped a knife and a hammer" at their feet.
So at this point, police have a bloodied suspect and two murder weapons. But then the police started talking to the woman, and it just kept getting weirder.
The New York Post continues,
Maks evaded questions about her recent whereabouts and where she lived, first pointing in a direction and saying she lived "right over there" by a nearby pawn shop and then claiming she had been living on the streets for the last four years, police said.
She denied knowing Cerasoli when detectives showed her his photograph.
When pressed, police said she conceded that she knew the man but denied seeing him on the day he was murdered. Then she shifted again, telling police she currently lived with Cerasoli and was at their home earlier that day.
Now her story changed many times in the course of this conversation, which didn't look great, but then the police took her into custody for questioning and her responses got even more bizarre.
After she was read her Miranda rights, Maks told detectives that she never entered Cerasoli's bedroom and only set foot on the second floor of their shared apartment to "feed her spiders." When asked about the weapons she had dropped, police said, Maks became "agitated" and demanded a lawyer. Police returned later with a warrant to test the woman's bloodied body for DNA evidence.
Maks then asked for a can of Diet Mountain Dew and police obliged her.
She really should have seen the question about the murder weapon coming, but despite her erratic brain function, she somehow had the presence of mind to attempt to clean the blood off her body with a diet soda.
Unfortunately, she didn't think of this in the almost two hours since the murder when she had apparently been loitering around Krystal while covered in blood.
And while it's not clear if bathing in Diet Mountain Dew would actually do the trick in getting rid of DNA evidence, doing so while in the presence of police officers who are attempting to arrest you doesn't exactly make you look innocent.
Despite her soda shower, police were able to collect DNA samples from her clothing that matched the blood on the knife, and her DNA was found on the weapon's handle.
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