WASHINGTON — The man convicted of a brutal 2015 quadruple murder in D.C. has been denied a new trial. The D.C. Court of Appeals handed down a decision Thursday that upheld Daron Wint's conviction, but conceded that his defense team should have been allowed to call an additional witness during the 2018 trial.
The decision said due to overwhelming evidence against Wint, not calling that additional witness was ultimately "harmless."
Wint was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the kidnapping and murder of four people inside a Northwest D.C. home.
In 2018, jurors found Wint, now 42, had held the four for $40,000 in ransom. Even after it was paid, they found he stabbed and burned to death Savvas and Amy Savopoulos, their son Phillip, 10, and their housekeeper, Vera Figueroa.
Prosecutors said Wint barged into the home on May 13, 2015, tied up Phillip and Figueroa with duct tape and zip ties, and then captured Amy and Savvas as they came home. He held the four overnight until Savvas’ assistant left a bag of cash in the garage, and then murdered all four on the afternoon of May 14.
Wint had tried to blame his brother and half-brother for the killings, testifying that Darrell Wint had lured him to the house with a promise of a job painting and dry-walling. He said when he got there, Darrell Wint gave him a piece of pizza, and then asked him to help empty the house of belongings. Daron Wint says he refused and walked out of the house, never realizing the family was being held hostage upstairs.
Firefighters found the murder victims in two different rooms after responding to calls for flames shooting out of the windows of the stately home in the wealthy Woodley Park neighborhood.
Wint had been a welder at the Savopoulos family company, American Iron Works, in Prince George’s County, until he was fired, and then spent years looking for steady work.
Detectives found Wint’s DNA on a pizza crust and a knife inside the house, and a hair that matched him in the bedroom with Phillip Savopoulos’ badly burned body.