A judge raised Ronald Joseph’s bond after a Mecklenburg County jury indicted him for the first degree murder of a Charlotte man during an auto-shop card game on Feb. 4, 2024.
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He’d been to her house. He sat at her dinner table. And during a Sunday night card game, he killed her husband, police say.
Ronald Joseph, 45, of Huntersville, stood with bloodied clothing and hands when police lights illuminated a northwest Charlotte auto shop off Brookshire Boulevard on Feb. 4. A witness grasped him close, waiting for officers to handcuff him, police reports say.
Rudolph Acolaste was dead in the corner. A game of Spades sat unfinished.
Joseph had robbed Melissa Bethea and her two kids, 13 and 19, of a husband and father, , the now widow said through weeps inside the Mecklenburg County Courthouse Friday, her eyes bloodshot from tears.
She and a district attorney also challenged Joseph’s low, $100,000 bond.
“This man doesn’t need no bond, sir,” Bethea said in front of Superior Court Judge Robert Bell Friday.
His bond needed to be retracted or raised to something “remotely close to reasonable,” Bill Bunting, the Homicide Unit Chief at Mecklenburg County’s District Attorney’s Office, said in court Friday.
A jury Monday said the case presented enough evidence to indict Joseph on first-degree murder.
Joseph was originally booked in jail without bond, but District Court Judge Fritz Mercer, Jr. set a $100,000 bond on Feb. 5.
An unprovoked argument and a gun
Witnesses say Joseph shot Acolaste, but they don’t know why.
Joseph came into the room, unprovoked, started an argument, unprovoked, and brandished a silver Taurus revolver. Then, Acolaste collapsed, two bullets in his chest and shoulder, Bunting said.
“There was no reason for the argument… (he) was not even part of the game,” a witness told officers, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department records.
Judge increases bond
Joseph’s attorney, Anthony Monaghan, defended the $100,000 bond, saying Mercer, the district court judge, had heard all relevant information before setting it.
Joseph lived at the auto shop, which had been partially converted with two bedrooms and a kitchen, where the argument with Acolaste started, Monaghan said. It was an interpersonal conflict, he said. He would not be a risk to the public.
Bell, the superior court judge, raised Joseph’s bond to $250,000 before he was sent back to Mecklenburg County Detention Center. His next court date has not yet been set.
