“Saturday, May 5, 2007, was Sylvester Mitchell’s 40th birthday, and he intended to celebrate on Friday and Saturday into Sunday morning,” a top domestic violence prosecutor told a Superior Court jury this morning. “He ultimately spent the morning hours of May 5 bleeding to death.”

During opening statements in the murder trial of Mitchell’s wife, SHARON FITZPATRICK (D.O.B. 7/26/71), Assistant District Attorney David Deakin, chief of the Suffolk DA’s Family Protection and Sexual Assault Bureau, told the court that on the evening of May 4, Mitchell made plans to go out to a bar with friends to celebrate his birthday. Mitchell told his wife that he would return to their Evans Street home before midnight, Deakin said.

Deakin told the court that Fitzpatrick had bought a cake and champagne so that the two could have a private celebration when he got home.

“One o’clock became two o’clock,” Deakin said. “She expected him home and he didn’t come home.”

Evidence suggests that when Mitchell finally did get home, at or around 4:30 a.m. on the morning of May 5, the couple became engaged in a heated argument. Deakin described how a tire on the couple’s minivan was slashed, and a chain lock on the apartment door was broken.

The victim’s family member, who lived in the apartment downstairs, heard “sounds of a commotion, a struggle” and woke up to a “loud thud and thumping sound.”

That family member went upstairs to the second floor, and “the sight that greeted [him] was horrifying – Sylvester Mitchell was bleeding from a stab wound to the abdomen,” Deakin said. He told the court that Fitzpatrick – who appeared uninjured – was found in her pajamas, seated near her husband’s body pressing on his wounds.

“She stabbed him not once, but twice. Once in the abdomen, eviscerating him, and once in the heart,” Deakin told jurors.

The family member called 911, and within a few minutes Boston Police officers responded to the couple’s home. They spoke both to Mitchell, who was still alert but in extreme pain from his wounds, and to Fitzpatrick.

“I love my wife,” Mitchell allegedly told police.

Emergency medical technicians transported Mitchell to a local hospital “and he died on the operating table,” Deakin said.

Fitzpatrick was interviewed by Boston Police detectives “and she lied over and over again,” Deakin said. “Sharon Fitzpatrick stabbed her husband to death and then she lied about it over and over.”

Fitzpatrick – who “had no signs of injuries whatsoever” – allegedly told detectives that her husband had been stabbed before arriving at home.

“You will hear a tape recording of her statement [to police]. You will hear Sharon Fitzpatrick affirming over and over again that her husband came in stabbed,” Deakin said.

“Listen to what she says and how she says it. Listen to what she doesn’t say, and how she is asked over and over again whether she acted in self-defense, and over and over again she denied it.”

Boston Police homicide detectives obtained a search warrant the next day and conducted a search of the bedroom, Deakin said. In a corner behind a free-standing mirror, detectives recovered a kitchen knife with reddish-brown stains on the blade, which was bent. Criminalists determined that the stains were Mitchell’s dried blood.

“There was no evidence that anyone heard her call for help – no 911 calls,” Deakin said. “There were no signs in that room of a life and death struggle.”

Deakin told jurors that by the end of the trial, “you will know beyond any reasonable doubt that Sharon Fitzgerald is criminally responsible for the death of Sylvester Mitchell.”

Fitzpatrick is represented by attorney Rosemary Scappicchio. Paula Connor is the district attorney’s victim-witness advocate on the case. Judge Judith Fabricant is presiding in courtroom 817 of Suffolk Superior Court.