Massachusetts trooper pleads not guilty to manslaughter in death of State Police Academy trainee

Lance Reynolds, Boston Herald on May 6, 2026

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BOSTON — The last state police officer arraigned in connection with the 2024 death of trooper trainee Enrique Delgado-Garcia has pleaded not guilty, and his defense attorney says he wasn’t at the boxing matches.

Worcester Superior Judge Daniel M. Wrenn released Casey LaMonte on recognizance after the trooper pleaded not guilty to a manslaughter charge in connection with Delgado-Garcia’s death in September 2024.

LaMonte is the fourth and final state police officer to be arraigned in the case.

Fellow troopers Edwin Rodriguez and David Montanez, also instructors in the Defensive Tactics Unit, pleaded not guilty last month to the shared charges of manslaughter and causing serious bodily injury to a person participating in a training program.

State Police Lt. Jennifer Penton, the supervisor of the Defensive Tactics Unit, which oversaw the boxing matches at the New Braintree training academy, pleaded not guilty to a perjury charge on April 15, nearly two weeks after she was arraigned for the manslaughter charge alongside Rodriguez and Montantez.

LaMonte has been accused of accessing and revising a “previously-approved” lesson plan for defensive tactics exercises on Sept. 11, 2024, shortly after Delgado-Garcia suffered “concussion-like symptoms” during an unauthorized sparring match, according to special prosecutor David Meier.

The prosecution alleges that LaMonte revised the approved lesson plan “after the fact,” inserting language “suggesting that ‘Boxing Fundamentals’ were part of the approved … exercises.”

In the Commonwealth’s statement of the case, filed in early April, Meier accused LaMonte of creating a “second boxing-related document” that “inaccurately described the training activities” of Sept. 11 and 12, when Delgado-Garcia was knocked unconscious.

Delgado-Garcia died the following day, Sept. 13, at the age of 25.

“It’s obviously a tragedy what happened to Mr. Enrique Delgado Garcia,” LaMonte’s attorney, Brian T. Kelly, told reporters outside of Worcester Superior Court on Wednesday, “but not every tragedy is a crime.”

“And what the Commonwealth has done here,” Kelly added, “has made the tragedy worse by charging an innocent man who didn’t do the crimes that are alleged in this case.”

Kelly said that the revisions that LaMonte made to the lesson plan were “totally appropriate,” saying that edits are routinely done at the end of the day. The court denied the attorney’s request to strike the prosecution’s statements about the revisions with prejudice.

LaMonte’s defense has filed a motion outlining why the court’s denial is “unfair.”

“We pointed out it’s unfair in large part because they make much ado about the sparring session where he wasn’t even present,” Kelly said. “They’re saying he was reckless by being at this sparring session; he wasn’t even there.”

An attorney for the Delgado-Garcia family, Mike Wilcox, told reporters Wednesday that the four state police officers charged in the case are criminally negligent for the recruit’s death.

“There were a lot of things they could’ve done better,” Wilcox said. “They’re held to a standard. They’re supposed to protect these young men and women, and they failed.”

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