Pennsylvania woman’s beloved dog disappears after her mysterious shooting

On a summer night in August 2013, 22-year-old Chelsea Cicio received an alarming call from her father, Bruno Rocuba. He said there was a terrible accident and his mother, Melissa Rocuba, was injured.

Cicio, who lived next door to her parents in Simpson, Pennsylvania, was caught on a home security camera running frantically to see what had happened. She can be heard shouting “Mom, Mom” as she enters the house and discovers that her mother has been shot in the head.

“As soon as I walked in, you could see here…she was laying on the bed,” Cicio told “48 Hours” correspondent Anne-Marie Green as they revisited the scene from “The Last Moments of Melissa Rocuba,” now streaming on Paramount+.

“The blood was all over the floor, on the side of the bed,” Cicio said.

Cicio said his father would later tell him that he was sitting on the bed cleaning his gun, when his mother sat up and the gun accidentally went off. With a single bullet, Bruno Rocuba shot himself in the left hand and his wife in the head.

Melissa Rocuba was flown to the hospital and placed on life support, while her family rushed to her bedside. Bruno Rocuba was taken to another hospital, where he underwent surgery on his hand. “Everyone felt bad for him,” said Cicio’s older sister, Sabrina Rocuba. “She’s been his wife for 25 years.”

The day after the shooting, Bruno Rocuba agreed to accompany several Pennsylvania State Police troopers to his still-bloodied home and explain how the shooting happened. With a soldier videotaping him, Bruno Rocuba sat on a mattress stained with his wife’s blood and used a toy gun to demonstrate how he said he accidentally shot her.

Bruno Rocuba said his .40 caliber pistol was on the nightstand near their bed because there had been several robberies in the neighborhood. “I reached out. I grabbed it,” so he could put it away, Bruno Rocuba told investigators. “My wife was sitting on the bed on this side. I was on this side,” he continued. “And I pulled the trigger by accident.”

Sabrina Rocuba says her father’s story was very believable considering his hand injury. “We thought, like… well, who was going to… who was going to commit suicide?” she said.

Melissa Rocuba had been in intensive care for three days when her family made the heartbreaking decision to take her off life support. The next day, August 10, 2013, he was pronounced dead.

The couple’s daughters were devastated by the loss, but in the days that followed, they were so worried about their father that they focused on comforting him. “I always wanted to make sure he was OK,” Cicio said.

Cicio said she feared her father would be arrested, so she recommended he hire a prominent local attorney named Joe D’Andrea. But D’Andrea says he didn’t have to do much to stop Bruno Rocuba from escaping prison. The Lackawanna County Prosecutor’s Office, he said, did not have enough evidence to charge Bruno Rocuba with murder and so did not charge him at all.

“Not every shooting is a crime,” D’Andrea said. “He never gave up his story … that it was an accident.”

But as time passed, Melissa Rocuba’s daughters and her sister, Joanne Swinney, began to have doubts about the shooting and the events that followed.

For starters, Swinney said, Bruno Rocuba spent very little time by his wife’s side as she was dying. “He would come there, stay maybe an hour… then leave,” she said.

While their mother was still on life support, Melissa Rocuba’s daughters said their father asked them to clean his damn house and get rid of the mattress their mother was shot on.

“He says…I can’t go home with this…I don’t want to see all the blood,” Cicio recalled. “And here I am, 21, 22 years old. … Now, as an adult, I’m like, wow, I can’t believe he asked us to do that.”

Melissa Rocuba’s daughters said that even before their mother was buried, their father asked for help getting rid of her belongings.

“He wanted us to get rid of everything,” Cicio told Green. “It’s like he wants it erased.”

Sabrina Rocuba said her father even got rid of her mother’s beloved 10-year-old Rottweiler, Zeus. “My mother loved this dog. And my father got rid of it right after my mother died,” she says.

Melissa Rocuba’s sister said she was shocked when she saw that Bruno Rocuba had even deleted all the photos of his wife. “Bruno said he couldn’t look at them… he was grieving, he couldn’t look at them,” Swinney said. She said Bruno Rocuba also got rid of his sister’s entire wardrobe. “We had to go to the thrift store where they donated the clothes…and I had to buy clothes so my sister could bury him.”

But most alarming, Cicio said, was that a few months after her mother’s death, her father began dating a woman named Tonia Wilczewski. “I remember looking out my window and she was cooking Christmas dinner in my mom’s kitchen. I wasn’t invited,” she said.

Swinney began to wonder if her sister’s husband had had an affair with Wilczewski before the shooting. Swinney said that shortly after her sister’s death, Melissa Rocuba’s best friend received a call from Bruno Rocuba asking, “How long do you think it will be before, you know, you could kind of go public with your relationship with someone?” And she said, “Are you kidding me?

Wilczewski declined “48 Hours” request for an interview, but sent a text message saying, “There was never an affair.” Bruno Rocuba never responded to interview requests.

Despite their suspicions, Melissa Rocuba’s daughters and sister said they did not have enough evidence that the shooting was intentional and so were forced to accept the prosecutor’s decision not to charge their father.

Then, seven years after the shooting, in 2020, Pennsylvania State Police investigators Greg Allen and Dan Nilon were assigned to investigate open homicide cases, and this one caught their attention.

“What struck you about this matter?” » asked Green. “For me, that was the initial 911 call,” Corporal Allen said. “During the 911 call, I hear three different accounts of what happened.”

Bruno Rocuba had called 911 to report his wife’s shooting, and when the operator asked him, “Was it self-inflicted?” Rocuba replied, “No, we were fighting.” Then he nervously changed his story and said he had been “playing with the gun” and accidentally “dropped it.”

Rocuba then denied all arguments and changed his version a third time. He said he handled the gun because he and his wife were “going to shoot,” and that’s when he accidentally pulled the trigger.

Investigators Allen and Nilon then watched the videotape of Rocuba’s questioning and interrogation by police the day after the shooting, and said they heard several other inconsistencies in Rocuba’s explanation of the shooting.

“There were so many red flags … that we knew he wasn’t telling the truth,” Nilon said.

Corporal Nilon then dug deeper into the case and discovered a key piece of evidence that had been collected from the Rocuba home but had never been examined. A home security system that had captured footage of Melissa Rocuba’s last movements and words.

“We were able to…hear…their last conversation together,” Nilon said. “And then a gunshot rings out.”

“It could very well be that it was your sister’s own voice that finally put him behind bars,” Green commented to Swinney.

“I never really thought of it like that. Yeah,” Swinney replied.

On June 3, 2022, almost nine years after the death of Melissa Rocuba, Bruno Rocuba was arrested and charged with her murder.

But two years later, in May 2024, as Bruno Rocuba’s trial approaches, the two sides agree on a plea deal. Bruno Rocuba pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 12 to 40 years in prison. After serving his sentence, he will be released on parole from 2035.