Bensalem police say none of Cosmo DiNardo's 40 encounters gave any clues he would ever kill

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Police said the calls did not result in charges. DiNardo, who confessed to four killings, was arrested in February for having a gun, which state law forbids for those involuntarily committed for mental treatment.

The 40 encounters Bensalem police have had with Cosmo Dinardo since 2011 were mostly nonviolent and gave no indication he was capable of murder, Bensalem Public Safety Director Fred Harran said Thursday.

Harran defended his department, saying some of the contacts were as simple as home alarms going off. He said some did involve “physical disturbances” but he couldn’t elaborate because they were domestic in nature.

Bensalem police first encountered Cosmo DiNardo on August 15, 2011, Harran said It was nothing major, just someone calling to report DiNardo riding an ATV on the street.

“We have had reports with physical disturbances,” Harran said, but to his knowledge none involved weapons, aside from a Feb. 9 vehicle stop that led to that later-dismissed gun charge.

Solebury Township Police Chief Dominick Bellizzie said earlier this week that DiNardo had not had many run-ins with Solebury police – aside from a verbal altercation with his mother, Sandra DiNardo, in July 2016 inside a car near Aquetong Road.

Comso DiNardo lived with his parents in Bensalem but the family owns several properties, including the 90-acre farm in nearby Solebury.

Details about past interactions with police have painted a more vivid picture of the troubled 20-year-old from Bensalem, who last week confessed to the gruesome killings of four young men whom he had lured to his parents’ sprawling Solebury Township farm to sell them marijuana. But many questions remain.

Of their 40 contacts, Bensalem police said they fielded additional calls about DiNardo riding his ATV. They responded to reports of mental-health issues. Officers looked into whether DiNardo was a suspect in minor crimes, for which he never faced charges, Harran said. And just last year, DiNardo was banned from his alma mater, Holy Ghost Preparatory School, and Arcadia University.

In the Holy Ghost incident, DiNardo showed up — unannounced and uninvited — to an Oct. 23 open house for prospective students of the Catholic boys’ school.

A police report indicates DiNardo was loud and disorderly after he arrived on the Bensalem campus, Harran said. He was subsequently escorted from campus, said school spokesman Bill Doherty, and Holy Ghost then contacted DiNardo’s parents to tell them their son was no longer welcome there. Harran said Bensalem police also contacted the family to let them know Cosmo DiNardo could only return to the school accompanied by his parents.

Doherty said that he did not know exactly how DiNardo was being disruptive but that there was no weapon involved. Harran also said he did not see a mention of a weapon in the police report.

To Doherty’s knowledge, this was the first incident involving DiNardo at Holy Ghost.

But it was not the Bensalem Police Department’s first encounter with DiNardo, who prosecutors said had been previously diagnosed with schizophrenia and involuntarily committed to a mental health facility.

For Harran, his frustration lies with the lack of communication between mental health facilities and law enforcement due to patient privacy laws. He said he wishes there were a database where police could look up mental health records for individuals they encounter.

“There’s no reason we shouldn’t know that information,” Harran said. “There’s a lot of other DiNardos out there.”

In early November, a few weeks after the Holy Ghost incident, DiNardo also became persona non grata at Arcadia University in Cheltenham, according to a source close to the university.

DiNardo was only enrolled at Arcadia for the fall semester in 2015.

A source said DiNardo returned to campus seeking to re-enroll last fall but had some verbal encounters with students and staff. Campus police contacted Cheltenham police, who said this week they had no record of the incident. Arcadia sent a certified letter to the DiNardo family informing them that Cosmo was no longer welcome on campus.

After years of run-ins with police, DiNardo first faced criminal charges Feb. 9, when someone called Bensalem police to a report a man getting into a vehicle carrying a shotgun, Harran said. Out on patrol, Officer Katherine Bailey saw a car matching the description provided by the caller. When she pulled the driver over, Bailey found him to be DiNardo, Harran said.

DiNardo had a Savage Arms 20-gauge shotgun; under state law he was prohibited from possessing guns because he had previously been involuntarily committed to a mental-health institution.

DiNardo was arraigned that night but not held in jail. The preliminary hearing on the gun charge kept getting pushed back, Harran said.

Police needed a mental-health worker from Doylestown’s Lenape Valley Foundation to testify about DiNardo’s involuntary commitment, Harran said. But the worker refused to testify, citing concerns over patients’ health privacy, Harran said, and the judge dismissed the charge.

That firearms charge was refiled last week, as DiNardo became a “person of interest” in the disappearance of the four young men.

In May, DiNardo was sued by another Bensalem resident for damages from a March car crash. The other driver alleged DiNardo was traveling “negligently” and rear-ended his car on Hulmeville Road, according to the lawsuit filed in Bucks County Court seeking a judgment in excess of $50,000. Attorneys involved in that case did not immediately respond to messages Wednesday evening.

DiNardo confessed last Thursday to the murders of Jimi T. Patrick, 19, of Newtown; Dean A. Finocchiaro, 19, of Middletown Township; Thomas C. Meo, 21, of Plumstead Township; and Mark P. Sturgis, 22, of Pennsburg, Montgomery County. Patrick graduated from Holy Ghost Prep in 2016.

Philadelphia police said they would investigate DiNardo’s additional claims to Bucks prosecutors of killing two people in Philadelphia when he was 15. Police Commissioner Richard Ross said Tuesday his office had only minimal information and was awaiting details from Bucks County.

DiNardo’s cousin Sean Kratz is charged as a coconspirator in three of the Bucks County killings. He and DiNardo, who face preliminary hearings Sept. 7, remain imprisoned at the Bucks County Correctional Facility with no bond.

“He’s very reserved,” Kratz’s lawyer, Abby Leeds, said Wednesday. “I think he’s in shock at everything that’s going on right now.”

Kratz, 20, also has a history of run-ins with police and has faced charges for theft and other crimes in Philadelphia and Montgomery County.

The parents of at least one victim, Sturgis, have retained a lawyer. Robert Ross, a Philadelphia-based lawyer, said he was looking to determine whether anyone recklessly or negligently allowed  DiNardo and Kratz access to firearms or whether any guns were unlawfully sold to either confessed killer.

“There’s a bigger issue involved here,” Ross said. “If these two accused men aren’t given access to these weapons, these crimes don’t happen.”

In the years before the killings, DiNardo was an appointed member of the Bensalem Drug and Alcohol Advisory Board, but was mostly a no-show, according to two women who served with him.

Pamela Janvey, 71, who served on the panel with DiNardo for about two years, said she did not remember much about him or his participation. He was quiet and she said she did not recall him attending too many of the 12-member board’s monthly meetings. She said she vaguely remembered him wearing a suit and tie to the swearing-in ceremony.

Liz Bourne, a board member since 2002, said she realized DiNardo’s name was familiar when she heard news of his arrest last week. But she, too, did not remember much about his time with the board.

DiNardo was appointed to the panel for its standard one-year term first in 2015 and was then reappointed for the 2016 term, according to township documents.

Township Solicitor Joseph Pizzo said Wednesday that appointments to the board came after either an informal application by the individual or Bensalem’s longtime mayor, Joseph DiGirolamo, reaching out to someone whom he believed was interested in volunteering.  He said he did not know the details of DiNardo’s appointment.

Janvey said her understanding was, “The mayor wants you, that’s it,” Janvey said. Appointees were  “usually politically connected,” as she was, as a board member of Bensalem’s Livengrin Foundation for Addiction Recovery.

Acquaintances have told the Inquirer and Daily News that DiNardo was known to deal drugs.

“I doubt [DiGirolamo] has any idea of what he was like or anything about him —  otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten on,” Bourne said. “I just can’t understand how he got on to begin with.”

Many in Bensalem knew that the DiGirolamos and the DiNardos were friends, Janvey said.

DiNardo, who would have been 18 the first year he served, was the youngest member of the board at the time, but college-age people had served on the board in the past, according to Janvey.

The Drug and Alcohol Advisory Board is “purely an advisory board,” Pizzo said. Its duties include organizing an annual poster and button contest in which local students compete to make antidrug-theme items.

Through Pizzo, DiGirolamo said he was not interested in speaking to a reporter at the township building  Wednesday, citing a desire to keep the case’s focus on the families involved.

“I don’t know if [DiNardo] only attended one meeting or what,” Bourne said. “But I have no recollection of him participating in anything at all.”

Staff writers Colt Shaw, Chris Palmer, and Justine McDaniel contributed to this article.

 

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