At half-past 1:00 in the morning on November the 20th, 2018, an automatic notification from Nest arrived in Keith Canario’s email.
The security system of his home in Ocean Township logged any disruptions in its operation.
The message said that the surveillance camera on the garage had gone offline.
>> >> This was not a technical malfunction.
In the last frame of the recording, a fraction of a second before the image disappeared, the silhouette of a shirtless man was visible.
He walked right up to the camera and switched it off by hand.
No one knew about that notification that night.
When investigators found it 7 years later, it became one of the key pieces of evidence in a case involving the murder of four people.
The shirtless man’s name was Paul Canario.
He was 51 years old.
He was Keith’s older brother.
To understand what exactly happened that night and why, we need to start from the beginning in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, where in the 1970s and 1980s, the three Canario brothers grew up.
Paul, Keith, and Corey.
The family was Italian-American, not wealthy, tough in the way families are tough when children learn from childhood that money comes from hard work.
Over time, all three would move out of that world into New Jersey, to Monmouth County, one of the wealthiest counties on the East Coast.
But by the time the events we’re about to describe took place, their paths had diverged so much that within one family, there were now two completely different people with nothing left in common except their last name
and a shared business.
>> >> Keith Canario was that rare kind of person capable of starting with literally nothing and rising to a great deal through sheer persistence and a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
In the early 1990s, he took a job as a janitor at a small computer company in Brooklyn >> >> and worked out one unusual arrangement with the owner.
He would take the technical manuals home every night >> >> and read them.
He studied networks, protocols, system architecture.
By the time the internet boom of the late 90s began turning IT specialists into gold, Keith already knew enough to launch his own company.
It was called Square One, based in Asbury Park, and its first major contract was big enough to set someone up for years, providing technical support for Citibank’s entire nationwide network of offices.
In its best years, Square One earned five and a half million dollars a year.
Keith brought his older brother into the business.
Paul received 10% of Square One, a salary, and a place in life.
Later, the brothers opened a second company, a pest control service called EcoStar PM, which they owned in equal shares.
By all accounts, in those years they were close.
Keith also had another trait that everyone who knew him remembered.
He never stopped.
Already the owner of a thriving business and a grown man, he enrolled at Columbia University.
First a bachelor’s degree, then an MBA, specializing in IT management.
A classmate from the program told reporters that Keith had one specific goal.
He wanted to become the chief technology officer of a major Fortune 500 corporation.
He brought it up constantly.
In the final months before his death, he was going to job interviews.
He planned to sell Square One and take a position at a large company.
His family life was solid, too.
His wife, Jennifer, with whom he had built a life together.
His son, Jesse, 11 years old.
His daughter, Sophia, >> >> eight.
They lived in Colts Neck, a quiet, green town deep in Monmouth County, known for its horse farms and expensive real estate.
The house, on 10 acres, was worth 1 and 1/2 million dollars.
It was a success story, not a flashy one, but a real one, built step-by-step from nothing.
Paul’s life had gone differently.
Around the year 2013, he was in a serious car accident, several surgeries, chronic pain.
When he walked into the courtroom for the first hearing in November 2018, he walked with a noticeable limp.
This was not for show.
It was the lasting effect of that accident.
After the accident, he filed for disability insurance payments, which were supposed to compensate for lost income, but he never actually stopped working for the company.
His income from the job was simply rerouted, on paper, to his wife Susan, who didn’t work there at all.
Investigators classify this as >> >> years of insurance fraud.
At the same time, he had been appointed trust of an irrevocable trust tied to Keith’s $3 million life insurance policy, a policy Keith had opened back in 1999 as part of his tax planning.
The role of trustee requires complete financial transparency toward the beneficiaries and strictly forbids using trust funds for personal purposes.
Paul treated the trust account like his own personal ATM.
Between January 2017 and November 2018, he withdrew roughly $78,000 from the trust and from the accounts of the two companies.
In 2017, he paid back about $19,880, which created the appearance that the money was being used legitimately.
In 2018, he paid back nothing at all.
Meanwhile, his own household expenses came to more than $402,000 in 2017 and more than $314,000 in 2018.
Keith learned the money was missing in November 2018.
On the evening of November the 19th, >> >> he wrote an email to two business partners saying he had discovered a shortfall and was suspending all payments to Paul’s wife until the matter was sorted out.
He forwarded a copy of the email to Corey, the third brother, who at the time lived in Fairhaven.
That same evening, Keith called Paul twice.
Both calls were recorded by the home security system and later played in court.
In those calls, Keith demanded his brother hand over the login credentials for the trust account.
According to what Corey later told investigators, Keith was furious.
He said he was tired of constantly covering for his older brother, that he wanted to sell one of the businesses, and that he intended to cut all financial ties with Paul for good.
How much Paul knew by the end of that evening is unclear.
But by 1:00 in the morning on November the 20th, he had made his decision.
He shut off the home security cameras.
He already had an explanation ready for his wife.
The cameras were slowing down the Wi-Fi.
The lie had been prepared in advance but never checked for plausibility.
The cameras ran on a wired connection and physically could not affect a wireless network.
Susan Canero would later tell investigators she had never before seen her husband turn off the cameras.
She would also say that lately they had been sleeping in separate rooms.
At 2:08 a.
m.
, a neighbor’s surveillance camera caught a white Porsche SUV pulling out of Tilton Drive.
>> >> Keith’s house on Willowbrook Road in Coltsneck was about 25 miles away.
Paul arrived there in the dark, and the first thing he did was deal with his brother’s cameras.
The last thing Keith’s home system recorded, the garage camera footage cuts off at 1:28 a.
m.
It shows Paul switching off the recording by hand.
Then he found the electrical panel or the home’s power supply unit and cut power to the building.
Then he severed the line to the backup generator in case the power came back on its own.
Verizon would later confirm that power to the house on Willowbrook Road went out at 2:52 a.
m.
Keith woke up in the dark.
>> >> At 3:18 a.
m.
he sent Paul a text message saying he was going outside to check why the power was out and the generator wasn’t working.
>> >> That was the last message Keith Canaro would ever send.
By all appearances, this was exactly what Paul had been waiting for.
For his brother to go outside alone in the dark with no witnesses.
The gun was fitted with a suppressor.
A SIG Sauer pistol barrel with sound and flash suppressing attachments was later found in a backpack in Paul’s car.
The shots were heard anyway.
Dr.
Dennis Corpora, who lived nearby, woke up in his bed shortly after 3:00 a.
m.
Later, at the trial in January 2026, he testified that when he heard the shots, he said to himself exactly this, “Someone just got taken out.
” Those exact words are on the record.
He waited for the silence, waited a bit longer, and then called the police.
The call was logged at around 3:30 in the morning.
Another neighbor who suffered from insomnia remembered the time from her cable box, 3:10 a.
m.
, five loud bangs, then one more separate from the rest.
A patrol car drove out, circled the area, and found nothing.
Keith’s body lay on the lawn with four bullets in the head and one in the lower back.
The medical examiner would later determine that all the shots were fired at point-blank range.
Paul went into the house.
According to investigators’ reconstruction, the events that followed unfolded in this order.
Jennifer Cantero was killed on the staircase leading from the basement, shot in the head, then stabbed multiple times.
The knife was taken from the kitchen set in the house itself, a silver chef’s knife that investigators found a day later in the charred debris near where Jennifer’s body lay.
It matched the knife block in the kitchen.
Jesse, 11 years old, was stabbed to death in the kitchen.
>> >> The case file also notes near his jaw that the medical examiner could not rule out as a gunshot wound.
Blood stains were found nearby on the kitchen cabinets.
8-year-old Sophia was found on the landing between the first and second floors.
The court heard exactly what happened to Sophia in early February 2026 when forensic pathologist Alex Jang presented the autopsy findings.
The official cause of death was a combination of stab wounds and carbon monoxide poisoning.
Nearly the entire body of the 8-year-old showed signs of violence.
There were more than 40 stab wounds.
One of the blows went through the nasal cavity with such force that it fractured the sinus bones and damaged the brain.
Another pierced the chest cavity and punctured a lung.
Her right leg showed injuries that the examiner classified as defensive wounds.
Sophia’s blood carboxyhemoglobin level was 49%.
The medical examiner explained to the court that 40% is sufficient to cause death from smoke inhalation.
That means that when Paul Cantero left the house and headed out, Sophia Cantero, who weighed 45 lb, was still alive.
Paul set the basement on fire.
He started a slow smoldering fire in a storage room, the kind that would build for hours before anyone outside would notice.
That should have given him plenty of time.
At 4:08 a.
m.
, a neighbor’s camera in Ocean Township caught the white Porsche returning to Tilton Drive.
Paul got out of the car, then he set fire to his own house with his wife and two adult daughters inside.
>> >> He used gasoline.
In his Porsche Macan parked in the driveway area, investigators would find distinctive stains on the hood, >> >> traces of spilled and burned accelerant.
Next to the car lay a red plastic gas can and a burned latex glove.
In the shed behind the house stood three identical gas cans lined up in a row with a gap where a fourth one should have been.
Two lighters were found in the living room.
At 5:01 a.
m.
, a call came into emergency services, a house fire on Tilton Drive.
By the time police arrived, Paul Canero’s family was already sitting in a car in the driveway, all four of them.
Susan and both daughters had managed to get out.
The plan was transparent, to make the attack on the Canero family look like something aimed at both brothers at once.
If someone had set two houses on fire in one night, investigators would have to consider Paul another victim, not the perpetrator.
What this plan failed to account for was that investigators would have plenty of time and the technical means to examine every detail.
On November the 21st, Paul Canero was arrested.
Searches began that same day.
What investigators found amounted to enough evidence to close many cases before they ever reached trial.
In the Porsche Cayenne parked in the yard was a tactical backpack.
Inside, Paul’s driver’s license, his passport, a stack of savings bonds made out to his daughters, a pile of bank and credit cards, a SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol barrel wrapped in paper towels and sealed in a zip-top bag, a set of sound and flash suppressor attachments, a night vision device for mounting on a weapon, >> >> an automatic knife, a a card, and a thermal imaging scope.
In the basement of that same house, a a state police K9 found a plastic container hidden among frozen junk.
Inside were jeans and a latex glove with red stains.
DNA analysis >> >> showed it was the blood of Sophia and Jessica Canero.
The kitchen knife found in the debris of his brother’s house also bore Sophia’s blood.
The shell casings from the scene of Keith’s murder were marked Fiocchi 9mm GFL10 9 by 19.
Matching ammunition was found in the basement of Paul’s house.
Ballistics analysis established that every shot fired on Willowbrook Road came from the barrel recovered from the backpack in Paul’s car.
In addition, the investigation uncovered one more detail concerning the $3 million insurance policy.
The policy was structured so that the payout would go to Paul and Corey, but only if Keith’s wife and children died along with him.
If the killer had left Jennifer, Jesse, or Sophia alive, the insurance money would have gone to them, not to the brothers.
That explains why all four were killed.
The criminal case was opened in November 2018.
The trial did not open until January the 12th, 2026, >> >> 7 years and 2 months after the murders.
During that time, Paul remained in the Monmouth County jail, having waived a bail hearing.
His attorneys changed several times.
The first two withdrew from the case, citing a conflict of interest.
Further procedural disputes dragged the case out for years.
The proceedings lasted 5 weeks.
The prosecution called dozens of witnesses.
The final text exchange between the brothers was played for the jury.
Keith telling Paul he was going to check the generator just minutes before the shots were fired.
Recordings of Paul’s prison phone calls were played as well.
In one of them, he tells his wife, “I just can’t believe I’m here.
” In another call to the company’s manager, Tiffany Rodriguez, he asks her to help his wife sort out the bank accounts and pay the bills.
When Rodriguez mentions that Corey had stopped by the office in Asbury Park, Paul grows wary and asks, “What does he need there?” Prosecutors drew special attention to that question.
A brother accused of murder himself >> >> reacting with suspicion to another brother’s presence in their shared office.
The defense built its case around several ideas.
“Paul loved his family,” defense attorney Monica Mastellone said in her opening statement.
“He could not have killed his brother, his sister-in-law, and his young nieces and nephew over money.
>> >> The investigation,” she argued, “focused on Paul too quickly and failed to look into other possible suspects, in particular, the third brother, Corey.
” Mastellone pointed out that the STRmix DNA program used to analyze the blood stains on the jeans did not include a sample of Corey’s DNA to either rule him in or rule him out.
Lead investigator Lieutenant Patrick Petruziello addressed this directly, not hiding his irritation.
“Corey Canarozzi was never a suspect.
The investigation followed the evidence, and the evidence always led to Paul.
” On February the 13th, 2026, the jury reached its verdict, guilty on every count, four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of aggravated arson, and two counts of felony murder.
The latter applying to the deaths of the children in the fire.
After the conviction, his attorneys sought a new trial, arguing that the judge had been biased and had influenced the jury through his conduct in the courtroom.
The judge denied the motion.
>> >> The sentencing hearing was held on May the 19th, 2026, at the courthouse in Freehold.
Relatives of the victims spoke one after another.
Jennifer’s sister, Bonnie Karrid, said that after 7 and 1/2 years, the pain hadn’t faded.
“An entire branch of our family was wiped out 2 days before Thanksgiving.
The calculation it takes to look your own nephew and niece in the eye and kill them.
That is a level of evil that cannot be rationally understood.
” Jennifer’s mother said that Paul had torn the source of all joy out of their lives and replaced it with bottomless grief, >> >> that he had done it out of greed and selfishness, and that he embodied the worst that a human being is capable of.
Prosecutor Nicole Wallace reminded the court that that day, Corey lost his brother, his sister-in-law, his nephew, and his niece.
And throughout the entire trial, he also had to sit through accusations that he himself had done it.
Paul Canero chose to say nothing.
His attorney stated on his behalf that he continued to maintain his innocence and had nothing further to add.
Judge Mark Lemiue read out the sentence, prefacing it with a few lines that made it into the transcript and were repeated in every news report.
He said that the little 8-year-old girl, weighing 45 lb, had fought back against a 200-lb man armed with a knife.
That the terror he inflicted on her could not be overstated.
That this was not a tragedy.
A tragedy implies chance, the absence of intent.
This was the deliberate murder of four entirely innocent people.
Paul Canero, the judge said, is a manipulative, cold-blooded killer who destroyed everyone close to him in a ruthless attempt to protect his own position.
Four life sentences without parole, to run consecutively, not concurrently, plus 18 years.
>> >> His permanent address will now be the New Jersey Department of Corrections.
There was no audible reaction from where the convicted man sat.
Paul Canero stood motionless as the judge spoke, then he was led away.
By 2018, Square One, the company Keith had built from nothing, starting as a night janitor in Brooklyn, >> >> barely existed anymore.
One client.
Keith was preparing to leave it behind and do something else.
The money over which Paul killed four people, a brother he owed everything to, a sister-in-law, and two children he had known since birth, amounted to roughly $78,000 and the remnants of a business that was already dying anyway.
The trial dragged on for 7 years while Corey Canero lived with that loss and with accusations pointed at himself.
>> >> The one branch of the family that was wiped out that November night is gone for good.
Paul Canero will spend the rest of his life in a New Jersey state prison.
His last words in court were that he had nothing to add.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
