An EMT and former military police officer videotaped himself swallowing a bullet with a beer chaser before prosecutors say he fatally shot a rookie Stoneham firefighter at point-blank range during a drunken game of dare between friends.
When first responders found David Atherton, 24, dead on his back and drenched in blood late Tuesday night on the kitchen floor of his Congress Street apartment in Stoneham, authorities said his childhood pal Patrick Riccardi-O’Connor told them through tears Atherton had killed himself after asking him, “Do you trust me?”
“They were drinking in the deceased’s home. At 10:10 or thereabouts last night, Stoneham police received a 911 call. Initially the defendant reported that the deceased had shot himself,” Adrienne Lynch, chief of homicide prosecutions for Middlesex District Attorney Marian T. Ryan, said yesterday at Riccardi-O’Connor’s arraignment in Woburn District Court. “It was learned through another individual that was present that the deceased and the defendant had been videotaping themselves during the course of the evening fooling around with the gun, pointing it at each other,” Lynch said.
She said Riccardi-O’Connor had been tossing back funnel shots of beer, “and in one of the videos it shows the defendant actually ingesting one of the bullets.”