Madison County Sheriff Todd Hood said he warned authorities that releasing Justin Sislo on $10,000 cash bail was a mistake, weeks before Sislo killed his parents and himself.
Sislo had been charged with 24 crimes stemming from allegations that he severely abused his girlfriend in Madison County. He had also been arrested about a month earlier in Cayuga County on allegations that he strangled her.
Hood described Sislo as a dangerous person who should have remained behind bars.
“It was time for this person to go to jail,” Hood said. “That’s where he should have been.”
About a week after being released on bail, Sislo fatally shot his parents, Steve Sislo and Donna Walker-Sislo, at their home in the town of Madison before killing himself. Deputies found the three bodies on Aug. 7.
The killings came after months of alleged physical, emotional, and psychological abuse of Sislo’s girlfriend. He was arrested in Madison County on July 29 after she provided police with a sworn statement detailing an escalating pattern of abuse that began in December 2025 and continued through July 2026.
The statement described broken bones, burns, and other injuries, as well as threats and constant fear. The woman said the abuse became so severe that she twice attempted suicide to escape it. She ultimately suffered 32 fractured ribs.
The statement also described Sislo’s apparent mental deterioration, including paranoia and frequent seizures.
Despite the allegations, Sislo was released from jail the same day he was arrested after a town justice set bail at $10,000. His parents provided the money.
The charges against the 35-year-old included second-degree assault, first-degree reckless endangerment and promoting a suicide attempt. He was arraigned before D. Christian Fischer, a part-time Cazenovia town and village justice who was overseeing the county’s centralized arraignment court.
The Madison County District Attorney’s Office had requested $50,000 cash bail. Fischer instead set bail at $10,000 and issued an order of protection requiring Sislo to stay away from his girlfriend. He was also prohibited from possessing firearms.
Sislo’s attorney, Scott Brenneck, declined to comment.
Fischer declined to answer questions about the arraignment, citing state restrictions on discussing a pending case.
Madison County District Attorney Robert Mascari said prosecutors had recommended $50,000 but acknowledged that the judge was responsible for making an independent decision.
Even if bail had been set at $50,000, Mascari said, Sislo’s father had enough money to pay it.
Mascari also said he did not know whether Fischer reviewed the girlfriend’s detailed statement before making the bail decision.
Sislo’s most serious Madison County charge was second-degree assault, a violent felony. Mascari said prosecutors did not believe the evidence supported a more serious first-degree assault charge because of the difficulty of proving that Sislo acted with the required mental state of “depraved indifference.”
“Does it sound like depraved indifference? I’m going to say yes, but unfortunately, not to the Court of Appeals,” Mascari said.
The district attorney said prosecutors charged Sislo with the most serious offense they believed the evidence supported.
Sislo had also been arrested in Cayuga County on July 1 after allegedly abusing his girlfriend at a rehabilitation facility in Moravia, where she was recovering from injuries related to a suicide attempt.
He was initially charged with third-degree assault, criminal obstruction of breathing and second-degree harassment. Prosecutors recommended $10,000 bail, which a judge approved. Sislo’s father paid the amount, and Sislo was released the following day.
Cayuga County prosecutors later presented the case to a grand jury, which resulted in more serious charges, including second-degree strangulation, a violent felony, and first-degree endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person.
Sislo was scheduled to appear in Cayuga County Court on those charges in late August.
Prosecutors said they would have sought increased bail after the more serious charges were filed, but Sislo was killed before that could happen.
When Hood learned Sislo had been released on $10,000 bail following the Madison County arrest, he said he contacted people involved in the case to warn them that they were making a mistake.
“I talked to people involved in the whole process,” Hood said. “I reached out to everybody involved and they all know how I feel.”
Hood said he was never given an explanation for why Sislo was not kept in jail.
Hood has been a vocal critic of New York’s bail laws, but those laws did not prevent the judge from setting bail in Sislo’s case. The charges of second-degree assault and second-degree strangulation were both offenses for which bail could legally be imposed.
Mascari said he believed the judge could not have ordered Sislo held without bail based on the circumstances known at the time. He said the judge would have needed to determine that Sislo posed a flight risk, and there was no evidence indicating that he did.
Sislo had significant ties to the community, no known criminal history before the two recent cases and no history of failing to appear in court.
Mascari said New York’s requirement that judges impose the least restrictive conditions necessary can sometimes limit their ability to keep potentially dangerous defendants behind bars.
“The laws were properly applied,” Mascari said. “Decisions were made by people charged with making those decisions. Sometimes, even when people do the right thing, wrong things happen. This is such a case.”
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