Eight months later, on Dec. 29, officers patrolling the South Providence neighborhood arrested Barros after seeing him go into a Taylor Street home with a gun stuffed in his back pocket. He was arrested on an unrelated gun charge and said during questioning that he had received the gun from Tonea “Nut” Simms.

In an unrelated incident, Simms had been shot and killed the night before, according to the Attorney General's Office.

Under questioning, Barros said that shortly after he had been released from the ACI -- on April 15, 2005 -- he had shot a person sitting in a Ford Explorer in Providence. Barros said that although he didn’t know the person, he had seen him twice before with Simms. He also said the person he shot owed Simms money.

Barros -- when shown Felipe’s driver’s license -- identified Felipe as his victim, the Attorney General's Office said. He also identified the Ford Explorer as the car Felipe was in.

When questioned on whether he realized he had killed Felipe, Barros "appeared shocked and stated he didn’t know Felipe was dead because he had left town for Washington, D.C., immediately after the shooting," according to the Attorney General's Office.

Barros refused to have his statement recorded unless he saw a photo confirming the death of Tonea Simms. After seeing an autopsy photo, he gave a recorded statement, including that he killed Felipe because Felipe owed Simms money and because Felipe was with people who had killed Barros’s cousin.

But a police search of murder-victim databases did not find a victim with the name provided by Barros as belonging to his so-called cousin.

A jury convicted Barros of the Felipe murder in January, after Barros’s first trial ended in a hung jury in June 2007. He has been held without bail at the ACI since Dec. 31, 2005.

“Given his lengthy record and obvious lack of remorse, it’s apparent that any attempt to rehabilitate this defendant would prove hopeless," Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said in the statement. "Judge Krause has imposed a sentence that will prevent this vicious criminal from ever harming another individual in free society again."