NEWTON — On the night Alyssa Ruggieri was killed, Giuseppe "Joseph" Tedesco says he went to her home in Hopatcong simply to see how she was doing.
In a series of text messages just before he drove to her home on March 27, 2010, Ruggieri had told Tedesco, her accused killer, she wouldn’t be joining him for his 25th birthday celebration, but they would get together again soon.
Ruggieri’s messages that night were uncharacteristically brief, he said. And that brevity prompted him to visit her at her family’s home, a little more than a mile from his own home, according to Tedesco, who testified on his own behalf today at his murder trial in Newton.
Tedesco said he shot Ruggieri in self-defense, while the prosecution has said Tedesco killed Ruggieri, 22, in a jealous rage after she sent him a message earlier stating she didn’t want to see him anymore and wouldn’t join him at a party.
Recounting the incident, Tedesco said after Ruggieri put away her family’s dog, "Bosco," she let in Tedesco, got him a glass of water and told him everything was fine. He then drank the water and put the glass in the kitchen sink.
When he turned around, he said, he was shocked to see Ruggieri holding in the palm of her hand his gun, a .25-caliber handgun, which had fallen out of its hiding spot behind his back and onto a sofa.
"What is this? Basically, what I am doing with it?" Tedesco testified she asked him.
Tedesco claimed he told her he was going to join some friends at a party in Hoboken that night, and that he sometimes concealed his small handgun when he went out alone to urban areas.
In the next minute or so Ruggieri would be dead, her body riddled with six gunshot wounds, including three shots that fired at close range to her face during a series of bizarre circumstances, as described by Tedesco.
The first shot went off, he said, when he went to grab his gun out of her hand.
"The gun went off when I tried to pull it out of her hand," testified Tedesco, who later demonstrated for the jury his confrontation with Sussex County Assistant Prosecutor Seanna Pappas playing the part of Ruggieri.
Despite being shot in the hand, Ruggieri kept a firm grip on the weapon, and both she and Tedesco tripped over a small rug and tumbled down a flight of stairs that led from the second-floor kitchen to the front doorway.
As they were falling down the stairs, the gun accidentally fired at least two more times, according to Tedesco.
"I heard two bangs," Tedesco testified under questioning by his attorney, Anthony Iacullo of Nutley. "Basically, the gun was in both of our hands."
When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Tedesco realized he had been shot in the hand during the struggle on the stairs. The gun discharged twice more as he and Ruggieri continued to try to get control of the gun in the foyer of the front door, said Tedesco.
The last shot occurred, according to the defendant, when they were lying on the floor and Ruggieri had the gun pointed at his head.
"I thought I was dead, I was going to die," said Tedesco, who claimed he accidentally delivered the final blow, a shot to Ruggieri’s right temple, as he fell backwards.
"The gun was pointed at my face, what was I supposed to do?" he told Pappas during cross-examination.
Tedesco’s testimony contradicted a host of claims made by prosecution witnesses during the trial, including three of his friends who said the defendant had threatened — while drunk at a New York City club — to kill anyone who tried to date Ruggieri.
"Was this a tragic accident or a matter of self-defense?" Pappas asked Tedesco, who had earlier described the killing as an "unfortunate set of circumstances."
"A little bit of both," he replied.
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