MARLBOROUGH – Court documents reveal additional details about what led to a fatal stabbing in Marlborough earlier this month.
Darlene Carreras, 37, of Marlborough, has been charged with manslaughter following the death of Eric Murray, 45.
Police received a 911 call at 10:24 p.m. Aug. 2. According to the statement of facts filed in Marlborough District Court, the caller told police that a woman was screaming “help,” “stop” and “let me go.”
When officers arrived, the door to the apartment was cracked open, and police said they heard a woman screaming. Inside, Murray was lying on his back next to a counter in the kitchen. According to the statement of facts, Murray was pressing a stack of paper towels against his chest, and Carreras was also applying pressure.
Police said a folding knife was open and on the ground next to Murray’s right side.
According to the statement of facts, Carreras told police that she had been arguing with Murray.
“She said that she grabbed the knife from him and did not know what happened afterwards,” the statement of facts reads.
According to the court documents, Carreras told police that Murray would go to her apartment as a “refuge while he is drinking.”
She told police that they are friends.
Carreras was transported to the hospital for treatment of a cut to her right middle and index finger.
After she was released from the hospital, police interviewed Carreras.
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During this interview, she told police that they began to argue after Murray asked her to wash the child’s clothes and became upset when she refused. She also told police that he was angry with her because she wanted to get food for the child.
In the statement of facts, police said that she “provided two different accounts of what occurred as to the physical altercation.”
She told police that Murray pinned her against the kitchen island and punched her. In one account, she told police she grabbed a knife that she knew was behind the coffee maker. During a struggle, they fell to the ground, as did the knife.
When she got up, Carreras told police that Murray had pointed the knife to her chest, she turned it around and stabbed him.
In a second account, Carreras told police that Murray grabbed the knife. After they fell, Murray still had the knife when they got up. According to the documents, Carreras said she kicked and threw Murray to the ground. She told police he fell and began to snore. When she rolled him over, the knife was in his chest, she told police.
Police later executed a search warrant at the apartment. Officers wrote that the investigators found an apparent blood trail on the wall near the kitchen island.
The blood trail is consistent with it coming from her right hand after her fingers were cut, police said.
“Given the location of this blood trail to the kitchen island, it would not have been possible for Carreras to have made this blood trail while pinned against the island as she described,” police wrote.
Carreras told police that she didn’t call 911 because she was trying to keep pressure on the wound, but she threw a bottle at a neighbor’s door. According to the statement of facts, a man who had been in the apartment earlier received a call from Carreras to come back.
According to the statement of facts, Murray suffered a single stab wound to the chest and superficial incised wound to the jaw. He was transferred to the hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
An autopsy was performed. The statement of facts said that his pulmonary artery was severed, and a doctor in the chief medical examiner’s office determined that his cause of death was the stab wound.
