- November 17, 2024
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Joseph Frank Bova, the man accused of the Feb. 21, 2013 execution-style shooting of Mobil gas station clerk Zuheily Rosado, will be reevaluated for mental illness before the murder case proceeds.
Attorney Raymond M. Warren represented Bova in a Friday, May 29 competency hearing, asking Circuit Judge David Walsh to allow a reevaluation by a psychologist before continuing the competency hearing at a future date. Bova, charged with first-degree murder, did not speak during the hearing.
Warren said jail officials have noted signs of severe mental illness, despite the fact that a treatment facility that had initially noted Bova as incompetent had at one point cleared him to stand trial.
“(Flagler County Inmate Facility Director) Becky Quintieri … told me that their own staff, medical staff, formed a hypothesis that he was experiencing auditory hallucinations and they changed his medication,” Warren said. “I have no faith that he would not have voices telling him what to do or what not to do even now.”
Warren also suggested having Bova evaluated by a neuropsychologist who could determine if he had traumatic brain injury as a result of a motorcycle wreck in which he’d been hospitalized after he was thrown from the bike and landed on his head.
The two conditions — traumatic brain injury and schizophrenia — were two “separate emerging events,” Warren said, which each required professional evaluation.
Assistant State Attorney Chris Miller agreed with Warren’s request to have Bova undergo further evaluation.
“I think that given the history of what’s going on in this case. … I believe it would be in the interest of all involved to get another evaluation,” he said at the hearing, “so we can all make a decision based on current information.”
Walsh had previously found Bova incompetent to stand trial in an October, 2014 competency hearing.
Bova, a former resident of 4600 E. Moody Blvd in Bunnell, was arrested Sept. 12 by detectives in Boca Raton after an anonymous tipster who recognized him from surveillance footage turned him in.
The detectives found Bova living out of his vehicle. When they searched it, they found a SCCY 9-mm semiautomatic handgun that ballistics tests revealed was the gun used in the murder.
Bova was lucid and able to answer questions when detectives spoke to him, and
had no known criminal history and no known history of mental illness at the time of his arrest.
He also had no known connection to Rosado, and there was no clear motive for the shooting.
