SAN ANTONIO — A porn star from San Antonio accused of stabbing a 60-year-old millionaire to death will have to wait to face trial in southern Florida, where his case had been set to start this week.
John Snavely recently celebrated his 27th birthday in Broward County’s main jail, where he has been held without bail since his July arrest. His attorney, Miami-based Raul Recoba, declined to comment.
The exotic dancer and adult film star once known as “Champ” is now set to face trial on June 16 in connection with the 2010 slaying of Samuel Del Brocco, who owned a marketing agency in Alexandria, Va. Del Brocco also was known to peruse Fort Lauderdale’s gay strip joints while he stayed in a vacation home in a gated neighborhood in Pompano Beach, where he was killed.
His death was a mystery to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office until last summer, when Snavely had to submit his DNA into the national system as a term of his probation in a drug possession case.
The DNA matched a sample taken from a Diet Coke can at the scene, and Snavely’s fingerprints were matched to some found on Del Brocco’s 2009 Porsche Carrera. His feet were the same shoe size — 12 — as the bloody footprints found throughout Del Brocco’s $900,000 townhome, according to authorities.
After years and thousands of dollars in unclaimed reward money, sheriff’s Det. John Curcio said he has found who he believes to be Del Brocco’s killer.
“There was a scenario of what we believed happened to Mr. Del Brocco — he was looking for some companionship that night, based on his phone records and his driving pattern,” Curcio told the Express-News. “But exactly who he picked up was a mystery until the DNA hit.”
Snavely first denied knowing Del Brocco, according to Curcio, but in a second statement he said the two had met at The Boardwalk — a 199-person-capacity club that contracts porn stars to join its company of 35 dancers on weekends. Snavely, who got his start in the porn industry after a porn producer discovered him working as a dancer in San Antonio’s gay nightclub district, had agreed to work at the club one weekend in September.
Curcio said Snavely was also known to routinely trick people who thought they were hiring him for sex, and he may have done so with Del Brocco.
“He would go home with guys to dance privately, and when anything turned to the point of being sexual he would not go through with it,” Curcio said. “That could have caused a fight between him and Mr. Del Brocco.”
Snavely has said he was framed by a rival porn star or otherwise set up. His lawyer has pointed out that a DNA match doesn’t mean that his client was present when Del Brocco died.
[…] The DNA matched a sample taken from a Diet Coke can at the scene, and Snavely’s fingerprints were matched to some found on Del Brocco’s 2009 Porsche Carrera. …read more […]