Man charged in 2016 Vanessa Marcotte murder to stand trial in December

WORCESTER - The murder trial for Angelo Colon-Ortiz, the man charged with killing Vanessa Marcotte nearly six years ago, will start December 8, according to the Worcester County District Attorney's Office.

Marcotte, a 27-year-old Google employee from New York, was visiting her mother in Princeton on August 7, 2016 when she failed to return from a run. Her body was found hours later naked and burned off Brooks Station Road, just a half mile from her mother's home.

Colon-Ortiz was arrested in April 2017 and pleaded not guilty to murder. He worked as a delivery driver at the time of the killing and was familiar with Princeton and the surrounding area, prosecutors said.

DNA evidence allegedly linking him to the murder was found under Marcotte's fingernails.

Colon-Ortiz's lawyers argued that DNA samples collected from him by state police in March 2017 were obtained illegally because police did not have a warrant, because a consent form in Spanish explaining Colon-Ortiz' rights was not properly translated, and because the state police did not send a trooper with adequate Spanish translation skills to his home.

A judge denied a motion back in January to suppress that DNA evidence and it will be admitted at trial.

Colon-Ortiz's DNA sample was one of about 330 samples obtained in the investigation.