‘This should have never happened': Murder suspect dodged accountability in earlier cases
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Grimes was already frustrated with the criminal justice system's handling of her ex-husband. As she reflected on his lengthy history of crimes, each one seemed like a warning sign. She couldn't help but think Kerri Fidalgo should still be alive.
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'He wouldn't have taken her life if he was incarcerated and being held accountable for any of the crimes that he had done to me — or anyone else,' she said.
Brittany Grimes survived years of abuse from her ex-husband Tyler Baglini, who had a criminal record of attacking at least four other women before murdering his girlfriend in New Bedford last September.
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
In the years since Grimes went to the police in Rhode Island, Baglini had committed a raft of new crimes in Massachusetts, records show. He was arrested nearly a dozen times, including being charged with another rape, beating two homeless men, attempting to push a window air conditioner onto a partner's head, and flouting judges' orders to leave his victims alone.
He pleaded guilty in several of these cases, sometimes to reduced charges.
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A Globe review of court documents and police records shows a cascade of missed opportunities — owing in part to poor interstate coordination — that allowed Baglini to escape full accountability for his past crimes. Instead, he benefited from a series of lucky breaks, lenient decisions by court officials and prosecutors, and gaps in domestic violence programs.
As happens too often in such
cases, officials missed signs of escalating violence. A specialized unit in Bristol County that monitors high-risk abusers didn't have Baglini on their radar, saying his record was not lengthy enough to warrant the team's enhanced scrutiny.
And Baglini's commission of new crimes in Massachusetts, ironically, delayed efforts to hold him accountable for the rape Grimes reported in Rhode Island.
That rape charge is still pending, but now it's taking a back seat to the murder charge Baglini faces in Fidalgo's death. He has pleaded not guilty and is due to stand trial in Bristol County
later this year.
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A timeline of Tyler Baglini's alleged crimes and court dates
November 2019
Baglini charged with raping and strangling his wife Brittany Grimes in Rhode Island. A judge grants him bail. Grimes by then had filed for a divorce and received a restraining order against Baglini in Massachusetts.
April 2021
Baglini charged with assaulting two homeless men in North Attleboro and violating a restraining order from another woman. He is jailed for several months before being released on probation.
October 2022
Baglini is charged with raping a woman in Worcester County, a charge later pled down to assault and battery. Baglini is jailed for 18 months in connection with multiple Massachusetts cases.
April 2024
After finishing his sentence in Massachusetts, Baglini is taken to Rhode Island, where he is still awaiting trial. He is sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating bail, but only serves about half that amount.
June 2024
Baglini released while awaiting trial in Rhode Island.
September 2024
Baglini is charged with murdering a woman in New Bedford, Kerri Fidalgo. He has pleaded not guilty and is currently being held without bail as he awaits trial. The Rhode Island case is again on hold.
Experts say it's a familiar pattern.
'As a system, we don't take these cases that seriously, and we know that domestic violence and sexual violence are patterns,' said Margo Lindauer, a professor at Vermont Law School and longtime advocate for victims around New England. 'People who batter or who harm people this way typically continue to do it.'
There were 39 intimate partner homicides in Massachusetts in
2023 and 2024 tallied by the state's anti
-
domestic and sexual violence advocacy coalition. The alleged perpetrators in more than a third of those incidents had previous contact with law enforcement for domestic violence, according to a Globe review of news reports, court documents and the coalition's research.
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Several judges and county prosecutors in Massachusetts who handled Baglini's criminal cases declined to speak with the Globe. Baglini, 32, also declined to be interviewed for this story, as did his attorney in the murder case, Michael Hussey.
Prosecutors with the Rhode Island attorney general's office defended the handling of their case against Baglini, saying they pulled the limited legal levers available to them to bring Baglini to justice. They said the case has languished since 2019 for reasons outside of their control, including Baglini's frequent arrests in Massachusetts and trial cancellations due to the pandemic.
Kerri Fidalgo.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
For Kerri Fidalgo's family, that's a maddening explanation.
'That just blows my mind,' said Kaila Whalen, Fidalgo's oldest sister, who found her bleeding in the basement of the family duplex. 'This should have never happened because he should've been paying for what he had previously done to another victim.'
'Way too much, way too soon'
Grimes hardly knew Baglini, a high school classmate, when they first traded Facebook messages in the spring of 2017.
She was exiting a decade-long relationship, and Baglini felt familiar. Within months, they began seriously dating.
Their lives seemed on a similar trajectory. She'd just finished a master's program, while he said he was in graduate school and doing accounting work for his uncle. Baglini seemed smitten.
'He was just being way too much, way too soon, in retrospect,' Grimes said.
They wed outside her apartment on a clear day that fall with only her family in attendance. 'I felt happy,' Grimes said. 'I felt like this was going to be a long-term thing.'
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But within a week, Baglini's personality shifted, she said. He told her he lost his job. He began drinking copiously.
His outbursts at their Westport, Mass., apartment would stretch hours, Grimes remembered. Their landlord asked if she was safe — and later asked the couple to leave. They moved to Bristol, R.I.
In 2018, she said, Baglini's abuse became physical, often with no provocation. The first time, he grabbed her and threw her on their bed as she struggled to get away. A week later, he tackled her to the ground and choked
her, she said. When he finally let go and she gasped for air, he told her to stop being dramatic.
Then, a few weeks after New Year's, she said, Baglini sexually assaulted her in their home. The next time he attacked her, she grabbed a small duffel bag with essentials she had stowed in the back of her closet
and fled.
That night, she slept on a friend's air mattress. She took pictures of her bruises, thinking
I'm gonna need these, or no one's gonna believe me
.
Months later, she filed for divorce, and soon after,
with the encouragement of her attorney, told
police in Rhode Island of the attacks, the strangulation, and the rape.
When Baglini was arraigned in Rhode Island on four felony charges a few months later, the judge ordered Baglini not to contact Grimes and released him on bail.
Within 10 days, Baglini sent her an email with a link to his location on Google Maps. Police in Dartmouth, Mass., where Grimes had moved after the separation and
obtained a stayaway order, issued a warrant for Baglini's arrest.
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Across the border in Rhode Island, though, there were no repercussions.
The attorney general's office could have asked a judge to revoke bail and hold Baglini for up to 90 days. But prosecutors were unaware of the violation, the AG's office told the Globe, because the arrest did not show up when they pulled his record a month after his indictment.
That's because Baglini was never booked by police and fingerprinted — the step that results in a report to the FBI database. Instead, he turned himself in on a court warrant, a routine procedure that doesn't show up on an FBI background check.
If Baglini had been arrested in Rhode Island, the office would have been automatically informed.
But Stephen Dambruch, chief of the criminal division of the AG's office, acknowledged that when it comes to other states, 'it's spotty.'
'You deserve this'
Records show there were other warning signs — and missed chances — well before Baglini's arrest in Rhode Island. They date to his days as a student at East Carolina University.
Cassandra David crossed paths with Baglini one night in the fall of 2013, when she saw him in two fights at her apartment complex and encouraged him to go home.
He returned with about 10 other young men, some armed with baseball bats. She recalled Baglini's chilling glare, which made her feel 'like he did not see me as a person anymore.'
David ran into her apartment and deadbolted the door. Then, the window shattered. The door frame splintered. David looked through the window and caught Baglini's eye.
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'You deserve this,' he said, his face framed by the broken glass.
David called the police.
Baglini was never arrested.
Hearing Baglini's name again — and learning he is charged with murder — David said she began to tremble.
'It does make you pause and think if he had been held accountable earlier, maybe things would have been different in his life and more people wouldn't have been affected,' she told the Globe.
Shortly after his last semester at East Carolina in 2015, Baglini returned to Massachusetts.
Police were called to the Baglini home at least twice in the ensuing months
after Baglini allegedly attacked members of his family.
In both cases, Baglini was charged with assault and battery, but prosecutors did not pursue the charges. The Baglini family
did not respond to the Globe's request for comment.
'Consider this a chance'
Five years ago, as Grimes pursued her divorce and tried to move on, Baglini could not, repeatedly violating her restraining order by contacting Grimes through texts and email.
He also aimed his anger at others, records show.
Baglini was booked in a brutal attack on two homeless men and allegedly accosted a driver, slashing his tires.
But most of Baglini's victims were women. One woman said Baglini had tried to push an air-conditioning unit out of a window onto her during a fight.
Another told officials that he had destroyed her cellphone in a fit of rage.
A Worcester
County
woman told police that after she had refused to have sex with
him, Baglini repeatedly raped her.
All three obtained restraining orders.
'He had these deep, dark eyes that looked like they go right through you, like he has no feeling at all inside of them,' recalled the former partner who had her cellphone destroyed. 'It's just like he wants to kill you.'
Tyler Baglini was brought into the courtroom by a court officer in 2024. He is accused of stabbing Kerri Fidalgo, 31, to death at her New Bedford residence Sept. 20, and is charged with murder.
Frank Mulligan/Standard-Times
In all, the charges Baglini faced could have landed him behind bars for over 20 years. But again and again, he evaded significant jail time.
In one stretch in late 2019, a magistrate in Fall River found probable cause that Baglini had violated Grimes's restraining order, yet held the case for a year. Three months later, Baglini was back in the same court — this time for violating Grimes's restraining order again and for allegedly assaulting another woman.
Even so, a judge declined to revoke Baglini's bail.
District Court Judge Sabine Coyne said she thought Baglini's texts to Grimes were 'not of a threatening nature' and that the rape case against him in Rhode Island was 'weak.'
'Consider this a chance,' she warned Baglini.
Through a court spokesperson, Coyne declined to comment for this story.
Baglini ultimately spent about half of the five years leading up to Fidalgo's killing behind bars after taking plea deals in several cases.
Prosecutors dropped the case in which he allegedly pushed an air conditioner onto a woman's head because she declined to testify. The Massachusetts rape case ended with a misdemeanor assault and battery conviction, a disposition the Worcester County prosecutor's office said the victim supported. Baglini pleaded guilty in several other cases — including the assault on the homeless men.
One of his plea deals,
on a charge of violating Grimes's protection order, required Baglini to complete an 80-hour program on intimate-partner abuse. But he never finished the sessions because he was arrested on another case, voiding his probation.
Baglini was one of roughly 90 people in Massachusetts that year who failed to complete the program because of new charges, according to the Department of Public Health.
Despite his ever-growing record, Baglini did not draw the scrutiny of Bristol County's 'high-risk team,' one of several in the state that target repeat domestic violence offenders.
Jen Sowa, a prosecutor for the Bristol County district attorney's office, said in a statement that the team, which receives no dedicated funding, focuses on 'the most high-risk repeat serial batterers.'
She said the average defendant targeted by the team has a tally of 54 Massachusetts adult and juvenile charges. Baglini's rap sheet was far shorter.
Individuals who are flagged by the team receive increased scrutiny from officials across the criminal justice system, who monitor their movements in and out of jail and communicate with prosecutors in other jurisdictions any time they are charged with new crimes, a Bristol County prosecutor noted in a 2018 webinar.
She described the team's primary goal as 'homicide prevention.'
Another lucky break
Grimes has felt like she had to act as her own advocate, continually pressing prosecutors for updates, as her case has wended through Rhode Island courts over the last six years.
'It's on me to kind of be able to navigate and figure it out,' she told the Globe.
Rhode Island prosecutors told the Globe they communicated with Grimes more than with most victims and did their best to push the case. They said they have been ready to go to trial since the charges were filed, but that outside factors including the pandemic, Baglini's arrests in Massachusetts, and defense requests for discovery stalled the case. They twice attempted to jail Baglini on bail violations, they said.
Yet in January 2024, they missed an opportunity to act, records show. Baglini was jailed in Massachusetts but
had no other open cases there, meaning Rhode Island officials were free to extradite him to the Ocean State while he was finishing his sentence.
Brittany Grimes sits amid her exhibit at Gallery X in New Bedford, Mass. Grimes, a domestic violence survivor whose ex-husband Tyler Baglini murdered his girlfriend last September, created the exhibit to emphasize the healing power of artistic expression.
Erin Clark/Globe Staff
But in emails to Grimes that month, the prosecutor wrote — incorrectly — they still needed Baglini's signoff to be extradited.
The attorney general's office acknowledged the mistake to the Globe but said the prosecutor's confusion was unrelated to their decision to not seek Baglini's extradition.
Instead, Baglini finished serving his Massachusetts sentence in April 2024, then was transported to the Ocean State, where prosecutors asked to hold him as a bail violator. The judge agreed.
Yet in another lucky break, Baglini only served roughly half of the 90-day penalty, after the judge gave him credit in Rhode Island for six weeks of his Massachusetts incarceration, the Globe found.
The Rhode Island attorney general's office told the Globe that they objected, unsuccessfully, to Baglini receiving credit for any time that he was not in the state of Rhode Island. But it appears the office was unaware until informed by the Globe that the judge overlapped the two sentences.
When Baglini was released in early June 2024, he returned to the South Coast of Massachusetts.
Soon, he started spending time with Fidalgo, another high school acquaintance. She told her sisters she was not romantically interested in him,
but he began to rely on her for financial
support, according to her family.
Later that summer, Colby Blixt, Baglini's former roommate, ran into him outside a local Market Basket. Baglini said he had stopped taking his medication. Blixt asked if that was a good idea.
'He's kinda psycho,' Blixt said, 'when he's off his meds.'
'Never a day I'm not devastated'
For Kerri Fidalgo's parents and three sisters, all that's left are memories.
Harry Potter movie marathons with her niece and nephew. Daily chats with her sister Jacquelyn. The childhood dance classes the siblings went to together.
Two of the sisters and mother of Kerri Fidalgo, left to right, Kaila Whalen, Melissa Fidalgo and Jacquelyn Fidalgo, show off tattoos they got in honor of Kerri Fidalgo who was murdered.
Suzanne Kreiter/Globe Staff
'There's never a good day,' Jacquelyn Fidalgo said recently in the family's New Bedford home. 'There's never a day I don't think about her. There's never a day I'm not devastated.'
Kerri Fidalgo was a friend to everyone, her sisters added — but no doormat. 'She was kind, but don't push her,' Jacquelyn Fidalgo said.
The family said they didn't know the full extent of Baglini's criminal history until after Fidalgo's death. That Baglini has yet to face accountability, five years after Grimes came forward, is wrenching, her sister Kaila Fidalgo said.
His trial is months away. At a short hearing in March, the Fidalgos
dressed in all black with matching checkerboard slip-on Vans, Kerri Fidalgo's signature shoe. Two of the sisters, along with their mother, Melissa Fidalgo, also share a new tattoo: a butterfly on the right forearm, Kerri Fidalgo's last tattoo before her death.
They vow this time will be different for Baglini.
'We will be there every day. And we need to be for her, you know, to make sure that he pays for everything,' Kaila Fidalgo said. 'Because there's a day you got to pay for it.'
Tricia L. Nadolny can be reached at
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