DOUGLAS BROWN NOW IN CUSTODY FOR NOVEMBER DEATH OF DOMINIC ALETTO, 17. COPS: RAN OVER TEEN, DROVE TO FAU.
UPDATE AT 6 p.m. — Bond is being posted. House arrest ordered. No weapons. No contact with victim’s family.
BOCA RATON, FL (BocaNewsNow.com) (Copyright © 2026 MetroDesk Media, LLC) — A 19-year-old Boca Raton man was arrested Monday night on a first-degree felony charge after investigators say he drove his pickup truck over a teenager and fled the scene late last year. Douglas Keith Brown Jr., of the 900 block of Jeffery Street, is charged with leaving the scene of a crash involving death, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Boca Raton Police Department. The victim, 17-year-old Dominic Aletto, died at Delray Medical Center shortly after the November 30, 2025 incident. BocaNewsNow.com reported exclusively at the time that Brown is the son of a retired Boca Raton Police officer.
According to the probable cause affidavit obtained by BocaNewsNow.com, the deadly night started earlier that evening at a bonfire at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, where a witness, Mason Delahoz, told investigators he had gotten into a fist fight with Brown’s friend Damien Segall. After the bonfire broke up, Delahoz, Aletto and others returned to Aletto’s home on SW 14th Street in Boca. Brown, who had been told about the fight, called Aletto and arranged to meet up, then drove to the neighborhood with two passengers — Alessandro F. Serpone Barbella and Grant J. Fawcett — in his blue 2006 Chevrolet Silverado.
Just after 2 a.m., Brown’s truck stopped on SW 14th Avenue near Aletto’s home. Aletto ran up to the passenger side, ripped the door handle off the truck and tried to swing at the passengers through the open windows, according to statements from everyone in the vehicle. Delahoz told investigators that Aletto stood at the passenger side for 15 to 20 seconds before the truck veered right and accelerated, running over the teen with the right rear tire. Aletto’s father, Alberto Aletto, told detectives he watched the truck speed off and found his son lying face down on the pavement.
Brown didn’t stop. He drove to Florida Atlantic University, dropped off his two passengers and headed home, the affidavit says. Police caught up to him on Jeffery Street about 20 minutes later. A neighbor turned over a Snapchat audio message that Serpone Barbella had sent immediately after the crash, describing the impact as feeling like a speed bump and recounting that he had told Brown to stop the truck — to which Brown allegedly responded that he had to get out of there. During an interview at the police station later that morning, Brown told detectives he never felt anything unusual and didn’t believe he had hit Aletto, though he acknowledged “there was a thought in the back of my mind that I possibly could have hit him.”
Crime scene technicians later got a positive result for blood on the rear passenger-side tire of Brown’s truck using BLUESTAR, a forensic blood-detection agent. The Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the cause of death as multiple blunt force injuries and the manner of death an accident. Bond is set at $100,000.
