Appellant Stephen Alvelo was convicted of the malice murder of Warren Cooper, the aggravated assaults and false imprisonments of Melissa Williams and Joey Freitag, possession of a knife during the commission of a crime, and concealing a death.1 He brings this appeal from the trial court’s denial of his amended motion for new trial, following this Court’s remand of the case to the trial court. See Alvelo v. State , 288 Ga. 437 704 SE2d 787 2011. Walter Cooper’s body was found wrapped in a comforter under a mattress on the front porch of a house he shared with appellant and fellow victims Melissa Williams and Joey Freitag. The forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Cooper testified that he died as a result of “multiple sharp force injuries,” some of which were consistent with having been inflicted with a knife found in the kitchen and some with having been inflicted with an object like the hatchet found at the scene. Ms. Williams testified that she and Freitag returned to the residence on August 11, 2006, to find appellant, with a “crazy” look in his eyes, cleaning up blood in the kitchen. Appellant grabbed a hatchet from a kitchen countertop and ordered Williams and Freitag to kneel on the floor. Armed with the hatchet, appellant approached Freitag and Williams and struck Williams on her head and her spine with the hatchet before she was able to wrest the weapon from him and flee the house. Freitag, whom Williams described as frozen with fear, testified that appellant grabbed him and yanked him down to the floor when Freitag did not obey the order to kneel. Freitag escaped from the house by jumping through a screened window during the struggle between Williams and appellant for control of the hatchet. Both Freitag and Williams testified that appellant was shirtless and neither of them noticed any wounds on his exposed torso. Police and paramedics who responded to calls for emergency help discovered Cooper’s body, and Ms. Williams identified the comforter in which Cooper’s body was found as one that was kept in the laundry room.
Appellant told police in a recorded interview played for the jury that Cooper attacked him with appellant’s ax and that appellant stabbed Cooper several times with a knife and, upon gaining control of the ax, used it to strike Cooper several times. A forensic specialist for the Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department testified and surmised, based on the blood-spatter patterns in the house, that the two men fought in the kitchen, where blood from both men was found; that, due to the large amount of blood found under the refrigerator, Cooper was incapacitated near the refrigerator; that, in light of a bloody transfer pattern on a cabinet in the laundry room adjacent to the kitchen, appellant had used a bloodied hand to open the cabinet and retrieve his hatchet which he then used to strike Cooper several times; that, due to bloody drag marks and the saturated blood in the comforter in which appellant was found, that appellant dragged Cooper’s body on the comforter to the front porch and there placed the comforter and body under a mattress.
