A Suffolk County prosecutor today told a Superior Court jury that MARVIN RUANO GARCIA (D.O.B. 4/28/85) stabbed his roommate a total of 30 times – including 10 times in the neck – before dumping him head first into a trash barrel and heading off to work.

Assistant District Attorney John Pappas told the court that Garcia, a resident of 96 Grove St. in Chelsea, started Jan. 5, 2010, in one of the most morbid ways possible.

“Before he had a cup of coffee, before he brushed his teeth, before he took a shower, he had something dramatically different to do than anybody else,” Pappas said. “This person had to clean up a bloody mess that was inside his apartment. And he had to clean up that bloody mess because a little while before, he had savagely stabbed his roommate, 50-year-old Israel Vasquez, to death.”

Garcia is charged with first-degree murder for Vasquez’ death.

Vasquez suffered a total of 30 stab wounds on his body, “ten of those wounds to his neck alone, any one of which would have been fatal,” Pappas said, calling the trauma Garcia inflicted on the victim’s body “massive” and “a total destruction of Mr. Vasquez’s carotid arteries and jugular vein.”

After taking Vasquez’s life “without justification,” Pappas said, “he took his dignity. He took his dignity by taking the blood-soaked, mutilated body of Israel Vasquez, and stuffing it head-first into a barrel. And after he did that, he took the barrel away from 96 Grove St., and dumped it in the area of 122-124 Grove St. on the street in the freezing cold.”

Later that morning, Pappas told the court, after Garcia had gone to work “as if nothing had happened,” witnesses came upon the “grisly discovery,” including a man who was dropping off his 3-year-old son at a daycare across the street.

Shortly after that discovery, Chelsea Police detectives responded to the area.

“Very quickly after they responded,” Pappas said, “they noted what appeared to be a blood trail leading from the barrel containing Mr. Vasquez’s body all the way to 96 Grove St. – a distance of almost 400 feet.” Detectives also observed “reddish-brown stains” on that building’s front steps, on the railing going up the stairs, and on the front doorway and in the common area.

After knocking on the front door to that apartment and receiving no answer, detectives went to the rear door in the back of the house. There, they made “another disturbing observation – dumped in the snow a short distance from the back door at the bottom of the back steps…a saturated bloody mop.”

Pappas told the court that police officers knocked on people’s doors looking for witnesses and also secured 96 Grove St. until a search warrant was authorized by a judge. One of the tenants of the apartment, who returned that day to find swarms of police at his home, told police in an interview that when he had come home from work around midnight or sometime after, he had seen the victim in the bathroom so intoxicated that he had passed out.

Pappas told jurors that forensic evidence will show that Vasquez was, “so intoxicated in fact, that it’s highly unlikely that he could have stood on his feet, never mind attack anyone with a knife.”

After that, the witness then went into his bedroom. Although he never heard a violent struggle, Pappas said, the man did tell investigators that he had heard sounds consistent with “somebody either mopping or cleaning up in the bathroom.”

Serendipitously, at about noon the same day, an off-duty Massachusetts State Police trooper happened to be a customer at a Malden business that employed Garcia as a meat processor. An employee at that business told the trooper that “he had some concerns regarding information provided by one of their employees; that employee being the defendant, Marvin Garcia,” Pappas said.

As a result of that information, the off-duty trooper contacted the State Police Crime Scene Services Section in Boston, and was able to provide that information to the detectives involved in the ongoing homicide investigation.

Based upon the evidence they had gathered up to that point, Pappas said, investigators asked Garcia if he would be willing to accompany them to the Chelsea Police Department to be interviewed. During that interview, Garcia made a statement “borne out of necessity,” Pappas said. “A statement made by a man willing to say anything and everything to direct the attention away from his own actions…and to avoid responsibility.”

Calling the evidence against the defendant “powerful and damning,” Pappas told jurors, “You will know at the end of this case, that everything he did in word and deed is inconsistent with self-defense. In the end, the wounds on Israel Vasquez’s body in death, is going to be able to tell you what he’s not going to be able to tell you on the witness stand himself.”

Garcia is represented by attorney John Tardif. Proceedings are before Judge Thomas Connolly in courtroom 806 of Suffolk Superior Court.