LYNN —A level 3 sex offender Thursday admitted to failing to properly register with the city when he purchased a local home in Sept. 2011, but he agreed to a sentence where he avoids a one-year jail sentence if he does not violate his probation for the next 18 months.
“I don’t think a ‘continued Without a finding’ [ruling, as the defense recommended] is a reasonable disposition for someone who’s served time for assaultive behavior,” Lynn District Court Judge Ellen Flatley said Thursday. “But I think due to the nature and circumstances of the case ”¦ a suspended sentence would be appropriate for 18 months.”
Richard Galzerano, 58, was convicted in 2008 of trying to entice a 14-year-old boy into his car in Revere.
Galzerano came under scrutiny after Ward 1 parents discovered he bought a home to live in and renovate near the Shoemaker Elementary School and Gowdy Park in September 2011. A subsequent investigation determined that Galzerano was in violation of the city’s sex offender ordinance, which bans Level 3 offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, playgrounds or parks – and he stopped living in the city last January.
Prosecutor Susan Dolhun told Flatley that neighbors have reported Galzerano visits his Daytona Road home every day for about 12 hours a day to continue his renovations.
The Commonwealth subsequently charged Galzerano with failing to register as a sex offender when he planned to move to the city on purchasing the home – saying he did not register in Lynn within the allotted time before changing his residence and his workplace.
Defense attorney Alfred Saggese told the judge that Galzerano did “shirk his responsibility,” as Dolhun said, to register in Lynn within the allotted time. But Saggesse said there was a “short window of time” of an estimated two or three weeks during which Galzerano was non-compliant in Lynn. Meanwhile he had been both complying with probation and registered as a sex offender in his former community of Winthrop at that time.
Galzerano admitted to sufficient facts that he had failed to register within the allotted time, and accepted Flatley’s recommended sentence of a one-year jail sentence suspended for 18 months.
Cyrus Moulton is continuing to work on the story and will have a complete report in Friday’s edition of The Daily Item.
