*WARNING: Some readers may find details of the case included below disturbing.
Linda Fortuna had heart trouble and Theresa Fagerlin once figured someday she would find her best friend dead of a heart attack.
“But not this,” Fagerlin said Friday outside the Lackawanna County Courthouse. “This has been a hard time for us. This was a senseless, evil act, and that's all I'm going to say. I'm here for justice for Linda. She was a kindhearted person.”
An hour earlier, Fagerlin sat in a third-floor courtroom during a preliminary hearing for Michael Willie Marquis Woods.
Two women died, another seriously injured
Scranton police say Woods stabbed Fortuna and two other women Dec. 9 inside the Jermyn Apartments. Fortuna and Terry Muller died. Marilyn Waller survived serious wounds but faces more surgery, her daughter said Friday. Woods also stabbed to death Muller’s golden retriever service dog, Nayla.
After listening to and watching often gruesome evidence, Magisterial District Judge Christopher J. Szewczyk sent all charges to county court for further action. Woods is charged with first-, second-, and third-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated cruelty to animals, burglary and attempted burglary and homicide.
Surveillance video viewed in court
Hallway surveillance video played during the hearing shows Woods walking calmly along sixth-floor hallways carrying a machete. An evidence photo depicts a 25-inch-long machete with a partially serrated 18-inch blade.
As Fortuna steps off an elevator, Woods walks up and plunges the machete into her chest, the video shows and city Detective Michael Schultz testified.
Woods then turns and stabs Muller in the chest. She had been talking to a friend standing in the hallway, Schultz testified. Woods then walked into Muller’s apartment and stabbed the dog.
The friend escaped unharmed to her apartment, but Woods then forced his way into Marilyn Waller’s apartment, stabbed her in the stomach and slashed her right wrist, virtually severing her hand, Schultz testified.
Muller, 59 and a military veteran, got up and bled heavily when she did, Schultz testified. Video shows her rising and staggering into her apartment.
Schultz testified Woods did not harm Muller’s husband, who was bed-ridden in the apartment.
Fortuna and Muller died from the chest wounds, county Coroner Tim Rowland testified.
Waller survived, has undergone three surgeries to repair torso damage, surgery to reattach her hand and likely faces several more hand surgeries, relatives said after the hearing. She may never regain full use of her hand, though she can wiggle fingers. Waller has returned to her apartment. She’s already adjusted and types texts quickly with her left hand.
“I was always the one who was stronger and did things,” Waller’s sister, Doreen McGuire, said. “And when this happened, I thought she's gonna survive this. She is so strong. I could not believe it that this is my sister.”
During the hearing, Chief Deputy District Attorney Sara Varela played a recording of Waller’s frantic 911 call after she was stabbed.
'Please help me, please hurry'
“Please help me, please hurry, please hurry, please hurry,” Waller tells a dispatcher. “He’s stabbing people.”
Moments later, Waller says, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
“I don’t know what to do, I can’t move my hand. God help me,” she cries. “I called my sister, please help me. I gotta call my sister.”
As a dispatcher questions her, she describes her attacker as “a black man in a blue hoodie.”
“There’s blood all over me,” she said. “Please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die, please don’t let me die.”
A door knock in the background follows.
“That’s the police,” the dispatcher tells her.
Separately, Muller called for help, too.
“He stabbed us,” she shouts. “I’m heavily bleeding ... 326 Biden St. ... I can’t breathe.”
“Tell me where you’re at again,” the dispatcher says.
There was no response.
In the hallway, video shows, Woods calmly entered the elevator Fortuna just left after the attacks. A photo presented during the hearing shows him inside the elevator. He’s holding the machete in his right hand and smoking a cigarette. He walked out the Jermyn’s entrance onto Biden Street where police encountered him at the Wyoming Avenue intersection and took him to the ground.
Numerous times afterward, Woods said, “I’m sorry,” Schultz testified.
Woods told police he had smoked the hallucinogenic drug PCP. District Attorney Brian Gallagher said after the hearing Friday that a test of Woods’ blood showed PCP. But, Gallagher said, Woods was also lucid enough to warn a nurse about to draw his blood that he’s allergic to iodine, often used to sterilize the site where blood is drawn.
Woods did not testify and only occasionally whispered to his lawyer, assistant public defender David Cherundolo, at times. His family members attended the hearing but declined to comment afterward.
Fagerlin and other friends and family of the victims were in the courtroom as a county victim advocate sat nearby.
Before an aide played the stabbing video, Varela turned and told the family and friends they could step out if they didn’t want to see it.
Marissa Dankulich, Waller’s daughter, and McGuire stayed to watch.
“I wanted to see instead of all these secondhand accounts, I wanted to know what he did,” Dankulich said.
Woods’ behavior in the courtroom surprised them.
“We all saw the videos of it, and he (was) just emotionless, like I didn't see him tear (up), nothing,” Dankulich said. “How does he not have an emotion for what he did?”
Fagerlin, 61, a Scranton resident, took up the offer to step out.
“I am not ready yet to see those videos. I'm a person that I like to remember the living as they are,” Fagerlin said. “I don't want my inner peace disturbed, if you can understand that. I'm a strong person, but I'm just not ready.”
Fagerlin declined to describe her thoughts when she saw three deputy sheriffs lead a handcuffed and shackled Woods into the courtroom. Woods, 38, lived on the Jermyn’s sixth floor.
'We went everywhere together'
Fagerlin said she and Fortuna were close.
“We went everywhere together. We had lunches, dinners, laughs, (she’d) come up to my house for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter,” Fagerlin said. “I took her to her doctor's appointments. She was kind of like my sister.”
They met in 1980 as students at Scranton Technical High School. They lost touch, but then Fagerlin’s mother died in 2017.
“She went to my mother's funeral, and we kind of got closer, and then, you know, Linda's had a lot of tragedy,” Fagerlin said.
In recent years, Fortuna’s fiancé, who “spoiled her rotten,” died of natural causes, a brother died, her son died, Fagerlin said.
“It's just a shame. She went through a lot with her son,” she said.
She and other friends helped Fortuna deal with the grief. Fortuna loved traveling to casinos to gamble, shopping at Boscov’s and eating at Longhorn Steakhouse, Brick Oven and Ragnacci’s Restaurant.”
“Linda loved to go out and eat,” Fagerlin said.
That was only one of the ways they spent time together.
"I turned 60, she went with me and my family on a cruise,” Fagerlin said. “And that's why I was very mad, very upset that, you know, I had the time with her, but I wanted more.”
Last year, Fortuna sold her West Scranton home and moved into the Jermyn in October.
“I did not want her to move to the Jermyn,” she said.
Fagerlin said she worked for a nearby bank and sometimes saw people coming and going from the Jermyn.
“Sometimes I used to hold my breath, because the characters that used to come out of there ... and everything,” she said. “We had arguments. I asked her to carry mace. You know what I mean? I just really didn't want her there.”
Fortuna applied for other apartments, but they all had waiting lists, and she just wanted to get out of her home.
“The memories weren't the greatest there. She just wanted to get out and ... she wanted to start traveling, and she was actually happy there (at the Jermyn),” Fagerlin said.
Her friend did not know Woods, she said.
“I go to talk to her all the time,” Fagerlin said. “Sometimes I go and pick up the phone just to tell her if something good is happening. And then I just hold back, and you know, she's not here. He took her away from me ... Now I can't bring her back. Nobody can bring her back.”
