DA: Video shows Adam Saalfield approaching, falling to ground with victim Maggie Rosales

Video surveillance shows a Huntington Station man sneaking up behind a high school student in a fatal attack that left a quarter-mile trail of blood toward his home, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Assistant District Attorney Raphael Pearl told State Supreme Court Justice William J. Condon in Riverhead that before the blood was left on the ground, Adam Saalfield, 21, is seen on video surveillance approaching Maggie Rosales from behind before falling to the ground with her.

Condon unsealed a grand jury indictment Thursday against Saalfield, who is charged with second-degree murder.

Video from a gas station on the corner of Lynch Street and Depot Road in Huntington Station also shows Saalfield at the station 15 minutes before the Oct. 12 attack, Pearl said.

Saalfield's attorney, John LoTurco, said the video does not clearly show his client's face and that there is no motive for the stabbing.

LoTurco also said prosecutors have yet to provide the defense with DNA evidence; in an Oct. 30 court proceeding, prosecutors said DNA recovered from a blood trail at the Rosales crime scene matched DNA taken from an unrelated arrest of Saalfield nearly a week after Rosales was killed.

Saalfield again was ordered remanded without bail. He is due back in court Dec. 17.

He has been in jail since his arrest Oct. 29.

LoTurco told the court that Saalfield, a diabetic, was being denied his medicine in jail.

Authorities have offered no motive for the late-night attack that severed several blood vessels in Rosales' neck and produced two stab wounds.

Asked again about a motive, Pearl said Thursday that the killing remains under investigation.

"There's always a motive, but you can't get into the mind of the killer," he said.

Pearl told the court Thursday there was a trail of blood from the crime scene all the way to near where the suspect lives, on Leyden Street.

Both Saalfield and Rosales lived on Leyden, but authorities and family members have said the two did not know each other.

Rosales, a senior at Walt Whitman High School, was walking along the street near the gas station wearing earbuds when she was attacked stealthily from behind, prosecutors said.

As she and her attacker struggled, falling behind a parked car, the motion-activated video surveillance camera stopped recording and Rosales was stabbed to death, according to Pearl.

Rosales' father, Cesar Rosales, said Thursday he was satisfied justice was being done and the suspect was being denied bail.

Rosales said investigators told him the evidence against Saalfield "carries a lot of weight."

Ignacia Rosales, 50, the victim's mother, said: "I want the whole weight of the law to fall on him. She was my baby. "