A New Jersey jury Friday convicted tech boss Paul Caneiro of slaughtering his business partner brother and the brother’s family in their posh Colts Neck mansion, which he then burned down.
The jurors found him guilty of murder, arson, weapons possession charges and related crimes after a month-long trial featuring nearly 50 witnesses in Monmouth County.
The panelists reached the verdict after roughly five hours of deliberations that began Friday morning.
He faces a maximum of life in prison.
Caneiro, 59, is accused of shooting Keith Caneiro — with whom he shared two businesses — on Nov. 20, 2018, after the sibling confronted Paul hours earlier about allegedly stealing nearly $80,000 from him.
Paul allegedly cut the power to the tony house on a hill, shut off the generator and waited in the dark for Keith, 50, to come outside, before shooting him five times.
He went inside the home shooting and stabbing Keith’s wife, Jennifer, 45, and then stabbing his niece Sophia, 8, and his nephew Jesse, 11, prosecutors claimed.
Then Paul set a slow burning fire at the home before returning to his Ocean Township hosuse where he turned off the security cameras before setting a blaze there too to make it appear he was also a target, prosecutors claimed. Paul, his wife and two daughters all made it out unscathed.
Paul’s motive was to silence his brother before it was confirmed he pilfered the money from his brother’s trust, meant to fund Keith’s life insurance policy, prosecutors alleged.
The alleged wayward brother was overextended paying for four luxury cars — including an Audi for his gal pal Yisel Restrepo. He was also bankrolling trips for himself and Restrepo at a time when he and his brother’s businesses — a tech company and an extermination company — were struggling and Paul was on disability payments, prosecutors claimed.
Meanwhile, Caneiro’s lawyer, Monika Mastellone, suggested a third brother, Corey Caneiro, may have actually carried out the crimes, which he allegedly framed Paul for. The plot would have made Corey the sole inheritor of Keith’s family $3 million trust as Paul would forfeit his share if convicted of murder, Mastellone pointed out.
Mastellone called Caneiro’s two daughters to the witness stand who testified about how close Paul was to Keith and his family. Mastellone argued Paul loved them all too much to ever commit such heinous acts.
Paul cried during opening statements and closing arguments when Mastellone described his close-knit relationships with the victims.
The defense attorney also claimed Paul wasn’t struggling but was raking in over $200,000 in disability payments and he and Keith’s extermination company was potentially set to be sold off for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Mastellone also claimed that investigators had “tunnel vision” and “confirmation bias” as they probed the murders and fires, which she claimed meant they overlooked other theories and suspects, all leading them to the wrong man.