'Trial 4': Who is Jose de la Rosa? Immigrant was targeted by corrupt Boston detectives and falsely charged
Netflix's new limited docuseries, 'Trial 4' focuses on the story of a man who says he was wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer when he was just 19 years old. The eight-part docuseries will feature Sean Ellis as he faces his fourth trial — 25 years after he was first tried in 1995 — as he may end up going back to prison. Ellis had been previously sentenced to life and was released when new evidence came to light.
Ellis had spent 22 years in prison after being convicted of the 1993 murder of Boston police detective, John Mulligan. He was put on trial three times within the space of a year, and now faces his fourth trial – which could see him back in prison for life. After his first three trials for armed robbery and first-degree murder, Ellis, aged 19 at the time, was found guilty in 1995 and sentenced to life.
It was later uncovered that three of the officers who forced their way into the investigation of Mulligan's murder were his colleagues, Walter Robinson, John Brazil, and Kenneth Acerra.
In an investigation by The Boston Globe's Spotlight team a few years after Mulligan's murder, it was revealed that the three officers were corrupt, often falsifying informants and warrants to conduct drug busts — the money they recovered would then be taken by the officers instead of being turned in to the police. Robinson and Acerra were sentenced, however, Brazil attained immunity by agreeing to testify against his colleagues.
The three officers would target suspected drug dealers and undocumented immigrants. One of those immigrants targeted was Jose de la Rosa, who came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in 1988 and settled in Boston in 1989. In 1991, as he drove up to his apartment, de la Rosa had a gun pointed at him by Robinson and Brazil, who then forced him to take them to his apartment.
There, they searched everything, and even when they found nothing, they arrested de la Rosa. At the police station, the officers threatened de la Rosa to turn in someone "bigger," but since he was innocent, he could not. In response, the officers charged de la Rosa with a bogus cocaine trafficking charge that was eventually dismissed. However, when de la Rosa returned home, he noticed that the money he had saved up to buy a car, amounting to $2,300, had been stolen by the officers.
While de la Rosa tried to put the events behind him, after the Spotlight report, when the District Attorney's office began to investigate the officers, he agreed to be a part of the investigation. Today, de la Rosa has put behind his experience with the Boston police detectives behind him.
He earned a degree in health care management from Northeastern University and a Master of Science in Business Analytics from Babson College and co-founded Guardian Healthcare, a home healthcare organization that services the elderly and young adults with disabilities in their own homes, providing bilingual and cultural competent nurses, therapists and home health aides to patients across the state of Massachusetts.
'Trial 4' is now streaming on Netflix.
