Police say the 18-year-old called 911 after Joseph Falvo was stabbed inside the home he shared with family.

EAST NORTHPORT, N.Y. — An 18-year-old was charged with second-degree murder after police said he attacked and killed his grandmother’s fiancé inside a trailer parked in a driveway in East Northport before dawn on March 29, then called 911 to report what happened.

Noel Bermudez-Chin was arraigned the next day in Central Islip in the death of Joseph Falvo, 61, whose killing quickly drew attention because of the setting, the alleged sequence described by prosecutors and the close family ties among the people living there. Police said officers found Falvo with multiple stab wounds in the trailer’s living room after a 3:42 a.m. call. Prosecutors later told the court that the attack began while Falvo was asleep on a couch, and Bermudez-Chin was ordered held without bail as the case moved into its earliest stage.

According to Suffolk County police, officers were sent to 8 Catherine St. at 3:42 a.m. Sunday after a report of a stabbing inside a trailer parked in the driveway. There, they found Falvo wounded in the living room. He was taken to Huntington Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Police said Bermudez-Chin, who lived at the same address, was found a short time later on Laurel Hill Road in Northport, about a mile away from the property, and was arrested. At Monday’s arraignment, prosecutors added a more detailed account than the brief police release. They said Bermudez-Chin told investigators he threw boiling oil and hot water on Falvo while Falvo was sleeping on the couch, then stabbed him in the back, neck and chest. Court reporting cited documents saying Bermudez-Chin told police he stabbed Falvo five or six times in the back and then once in the stomach.

The public record still leaves key pieces of the case unresolved. Police have identified the suspect, the victim, the place and the charge, but they have not publicly described a motive. Court documents cited in local reporting did not immediately explain why Falvo was targeted, and authorities have not publicly detailed whether anyone else was inside the trailer when the attack began. What has emerged instead is a narrow account built from the emergency response and what prosecutors said in court. They said Bermudez-Chin called 911 and told the operator what happened. Police said the arrest came shortly after officers reached the scene. The murder charge places the case among the most serious criminal filings in Suffolk County, but it remains at the accusation stage. Defense attorney Peter Mayer, speaking after court, said, “I don’t want anybody to rush to judgment here because my client is presumed innocent.” He entered what News 12 described as a denial, similar to a not guilty plea.

The broader setting gave the case an added layer of loss. Falvo was not only the dead man named in court papers and police releases. He was also part of a household that had already been disrupted months earlier. Cecilia Bermudez, Falvo’s fiancée and Bermudez-Chin’s grandmother, told local television reporters that all three had been living in the trailer after part of their home was damaged in a fire in December 2025. She said she and Falvo got engaged in February and were planning a July wedding. That timeline turned a homicide case into a story of a household already living through one upheaval before another. Relatives told reporters that the living arrangement had followed trouble at the teen’s own home, and Cecilia Bermudez said the family members had been getting along. Those details do not answer why the killing happened, but they do show how tightly shared the space was and how quickly an ordinary family arrangement became the center of a homicide investigation.

The next steps are more straightforward than the unanswered questions. Police charged Bermudez-Chin with second-degree murder, and the Suffolk County Police Department said on the day of the arrest that he would be held overnight at the Third Precinct and arraigned March 30 in First District Court in Central Islip. By the end of that court appearance, he had been ordered held without bail. Law and Crime reported that his next court date was scheduled for April 3. In the days ahead, the case would typically turn on the usual building blocks of a homicide prosecution: statements attributed to the defendant, forensic examination of the scene, autopsy findings, recovery and testing of the knife authorities said was used, and any additional witness interviews. None of that had been publicly laid out in full by Monday evening. For now, the formal posture is simple: one man is dead, one teenager is charged, and prosecutors are beginning to shape the record they will rely on as the case proceeds.

Outside court and in television interviews, the emotional center of the story came from the family members left to speak in the open while the legal case was just beginning. Cecilia Bermudez said she was overwhelmed by grief. “I only have pain, anger, pain. I’m never going to be okay,” she told NBC New York. She said she wanted to remember Falvo “the way he is.” Falvo’s loss was described in similarly personal terms by Glenda Arroyo, identified by NBC New York as Noel’s mother, who said Falvo “was the father I never had” and called him kind and generous. Another relative, Anthony Ortiz, said Bermudez-Chin had been struggling since a schizophrenia diagnosis a couple of years ago and had been unmedicated by his own choice. That account has not been presented by prosecutors as an explanation for the killing, but it became part of the public conversation around the case because it came from the defendant’s own family as they stood outside the courthouse trying to make sense of the death.

The case stood Monday with Bermudez-Chin jailed without bail, Falvo dead after the early morning attack and the next court milestone set for April 3 as investigators and prosecutors continued building the homicide case.

Author note: Last updated April 19, 2026.