C H A P T E R 10
IT WAS JUST ME NOW AT 8 PATTERSON WAY, AMONG THE abandoned wreckage of mattresses, collapsing bureaus, and a generation’s worth of kids’ clothes—whatever Ma hadn’t been able to fit into her bags—piled in a heap on top of Coley’s wooden couch that looked like a coffin. It was spooky coming home now to the ten-room apartment, which had once seemed too small for the excitement coming and going through those heavy steel doors. The doors squeaked whenever I opened them, and I tried to remember when that had started or if I’d just never noticed the sound before.
Every time I came up those stairs on a Friday night after passing by the parties on front stoops, I knew for sure my family would be there, all together again in the apartment. Ma, all dressed up to go to the Emerald Isle, would be bent over the washer doing her last load of laundry, holding the hose in place to keep the machine from rattling like thunder. Seamus and Stevie would be watching “World Wrestling Federation” and practicing Hulk Hogan moves on each other. Davey would be pacing the floors and smoking cigarettes. Mary and Jimmy and their two kids might be over with Chinese food for everyone. Joe would be waiting for Frankie to finish devouring every last bit of protein in the house, before the two headed out to meet girls. Kevin wouldn’t be there, but there’d at least be a story going around about his latest exploits. Johnnie would be calling in from some undisclosed location with the Navy Seals. And Kathy would be all dolled up and sneaking out the front door, as sure-footed and determined as she once had been. But the door creaked shut, and the screams, sirens, and laughter from the street overwhelmed my memories. I wasn’t home. I knew I never would be again.
I started sleeping at friends’ houses all over Boston, coming back every day just for a change of clothes. I came and went fast, so that I wouldn’t have time to sit and wonder what had happened to the family that had once surrounded me. I kept all the windows shut, and the air in the apartment was so thick and heavy that I felt I was swimming through ghosts. I changed my clothes and fled out the door every day.
Johnnie took the apartment after leaving the Seals. Never did I think I’d see the day he’d have anything to do with the Old Colony Project. He was the one who’d “gotten out.” He’d never spent much time in the project before. He was always at Latin School, playing football in the afternoons, and studying at the library at night. He’d gone right from Latin to Tufts University, and then straight into the Navy to become a lieutenant. The only time Johnnie came home was when he was on leave for a funeral, taking his position as a pallbearer, investigating the details of the kids’ deaths, and leaving dents with his fist in our concrete walls when nothing seemed to make any sense. But now Johnnie was back. He found the cleanest mattress in the rubble of someone’s old bedroom, and made a spot for himself in a corner of the parlor.
Johnnie was immediately welcomed back into Southie, especially by Frankie’s old gang. He knew a lot of them from his own days at McDonough’s Gym. He started working as a bouncer at some of the gin mills and drug dens on Broadway, owned and run by gangsters and boxers. Johnnie and I hardly crossed paths in Southie. I wanted nothing to do with the town, and he was getting more into it. One night, though, I was starving and came to Southie to borrow ten dollars from Johnnie. I went to find him where he was working at Connolly’s Cafe, Eddie McGlaughlin’s hole-in-the-wall bar on Broadway. It was all boarded-up looking, except for the window with a blinking Budweiser sign between some dirty country-kitchen curtains. Word around town was that Eddie had defrauded Tim Connolly out of ownership of the bar, now known to be a front for guns and drugs. I walked into the smoky narrow room looking for Johnnie. I passed a woman wheeling a baby carriage through the tavern and bumming spare change, and then by two older men “offering each other out,” the way we used to do as little kids in the tunnels of Old Colony. The guy working the front door was leading me through the crowd; he knew me to be a MacDonald. He pulled up a barstool for me, and once again I was surrounded by muscled tough guys recounting Frankie’s championship fights. Johnnie was sent for, and when he showed up, the muscle men brought him into the boxing tales too, with a few funny stories thrown in about Kevin being a hell of a con artist. Johnnie’s face lit up as he listened to stories about his brothers. That’s what he’s doing here, back in Southie, I thought, and I couldn’t blame him after hearing my brothers kept alive like that.
Johnnie had someone give me a twenty from the register behind the bar, and I walked back down Broadway to the train station, passing through the once colorful boulevard that my family had loved, now gone dark and busy with suspicious characters darting in and out of bars, stuffing things into pockets, and looking over their shoulders.
Ma swore she’d never look back. The kids told me they hated Colorado though. They missed their friends. They missed saying they were from Southie, and having it mean something. In their Colorado trailer park they wore the shamrocks, Notre Dame gear, and Southie T-shirts. But it meant nothing. They were in an all-American world out west, where kids their age took buses for miles to hang out on fake street corners at the indoor shopping malls. There was no front stoop excitement. There wasn’t even a front stoop. And Seamus and Stevie commented on how poor everyone in their trailer park looked—as if they’d never met poor people. But when I visited them out there, I saw what they were talking about. These weren’t just poor people; they were poor people living on the edge of a godforsaken highway. There was no pretending you were anywhere else, no pretending you weren’t poor, and no pride about being from the Federal Heights Trailer Park.
I could tell Ma didn’t like Colorado much either, although she talked it up and begged all her old friends from Southie to come out west and move into Federal Heights. “We’ll call it the New Colony,” she said. She must have promised airfare to about ten different friends, who’d stop me on the street to show me her letters. When I was out there, I could see Ma was trying to find ways to make conversation with the Colorado people. She was thrilled to see this one redheaded guy walking by her tiny kitchen window. “Ohhhh, for Chrissake, are you Irish?” she said to him, opening her window. “Mother of God, he looked at me like I had two heads and he just kept on moving,” Ma said in defeat. But she continued to look for any signs of home, pointing out to me the boarded-up highway bar named McIntyre’s, and a town alderman named O’Reilly. But the few Irish names were nothing more than names, passed down through generations. In the end, Ma could only point to the green foothills of the Rockies, and say they were more beautiful than Ireland itself. That’s when she talked Joe into hauling the trailer to a town called Golden, surrounded by the green foothills.
But Golden still wasn’t home. “It’s just the people!” Ma decided. “There’s no hell-raising to them at all.” Ma talked about missing “the craic,” as the Irish called a good time. “With the long pusses on them, you’d think they just came from a funeral.” Ma said Golden was full of Germans. “That explains it!” she said. Joe bought a house dirt cheap in Golden. It looked like a shack compared to the Swiss-style chalets that surrounded it, with floors that Ma complained made her feel she was walking up and down hills. There was a huge yard, though, for Maria to play in, and a picnic table for Kathy to sit at smoking cigarettes and going at her new hobby of scrawling endless words onto piles of lined paper. Ma didn’t want to give up the trailer, so she had Joe plop it into their backyard. The town was up in arms about that one, saying the trailer was an eyesore. They passed an ordinance and made Ma and Joe build a high fence to conceal the trailer.
Ma stopped calling me once her phone was blocked for long distance calls. When I called her, she said Stevie had rung up a big bill calling his friend Tommy Viens in Southie. The two little kids were begging Ma to send them back to Southie that summer to see their friends. Ma swore she’d never look back, but with a place like Southie, it was hard not to. Johnnie was living in the apartment, and she knew I came by each day for a change of clothes, so Ma gave in and sent the kids for a two-week visit. There’s no place like Southie. And at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, Stevie and Seamus knew that better than anyone.
It only took a few days of the little kids’ visit back home before our world fell in on us again. Mary was working in the operating room at the City Hospital when she was told Tommy Viens was downstairs with a gunshot wound to the head. “I was a nervous wreck,” she told me on the phone. “I thought I’d have to dismiss myself from the case.” Mary told me all she knew: that Tommy had gotten hold of one of Johnnie’s guns. That Stevie had found his best friend, face up under a big swivel bamboo chair. Tommy’s eyes were open and blood was streaming from the back of his head. “Stevie’s still shaking,” she said. “Eighteen cops held him for two and a half hours in the apartment right next to where it happened.” The detectives hadn’t allowed Johnnie into the house for the interrogation. In the end, they let Stevie leave the apartment to the crowds that had gathered, and to Johnnie. “Oh, one more thing kid,” Detective O’Leary said to Stevie, throwing his head up in a quick laugh, “your buddy’s Ocean Kai.” Ocean Kai was the local Chinese food restaurant, and Stevie didn’t know what he meant. “Your friend’s dead,” O’Leary clarified.
We spent the night and the next day at Mary’s. Steven was wearing the same clothes from the day before, and couldn’t stop crying. He looked worn out and numb, and kept asking: “When can I go see Mr. and Mrs. Viens?” Seamus was watching cartoons with Mary’s two sons when Steven wandered into the kitchen and saw the headline “Cops Say Teen May Have Pulled Trigger on Himself” and the picture of Tommy being brought out on a stretcher, with neighbors covering their mouths in shock. Steven was staring in a daze at Tommy’s picture. I grabbed the newspaper and got rid of it. Within the hour Detective O’Leary showed up to take Steven to the homicide unit for more questions.
Johnnie went in the cruiser with Steven. When I arrived at homicide with Mary and Seamus, TV cameras filmed us going in. The homicide detectives were now praising themselves for arresting the alleged “child slayer.” Mary’s downstairs neighbor, Detective O’Leary’s girlfriend and secretary, led us into the detective’s office, and there we found Stevie crying in a chair and shaking his head in disbelief at the news O’Leary was telling him, about him being a murderer.
“You want a Pepsi or something kid? Your mouth is gonna get dry.” O’Leary looked like he was tired of his job. When the detective left the room, Stevie asked me why his mouth would get dry. I didn’t know the answer. He wondered if they’d soon be shining a big bright spotlight on him and interrogating him, like he’d seen in old movies. I felt relieved to be reminded of the innocent child Steven still was through everything he’d seen in life. “How come? … How could they think? …” Steven started crying too hard now to finish his sentences. He looked at us, trembling all over. O’Leary came back in and let out a big sigh, “Your mouth getting dry yet, kid?” He explained that people’s mouths get dry when they’re charged with murder. “He was my best friend,” Steven said to O’Leary, hyperventilating between each word. “Ask his mother, she’ll tell you!”
“Hey, I would advise you to stay mum until a lawyer shows up,” O’Leary said, pointing his finger at my thirteen-year-old baby brother about to be formally charged with murder. I wanted so badly to tell O’Leary to fuck himself. Better yet I wanted to grab the broken pipe hanging from the ceiling and beat him to death for what he was doing to my scrawny helpless brother. I wanted to make the pig bleed through every one of his despicable orifices. I’d never felt that way before, but if I could’ve gotten hold of the gun in O’Leary’s holster I would’ve shot him dead, and gladly gone to prison for it. I helped raise Seamus and Stevie; I changed their diapers and saw their first steps. The hate building up inside me was enough to chase every demon out of hell. But O’Leary had the power of the entire Boston Police Department and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts behind him, and Stevie was just a kid from the projects.
Detective O’Leary was famous in Boston that year. Not for passing out upside-down in stairwells outside his girlfriend’s subsidized project apartment—that we knew about after many nights of having to step over his big belly, although it never made it into the papers. But O’Leary, along with Lieutenant Detective Eddie McNeely, was at the center of one of the most racially explosive murder investigations in the history of Boston. Charles Stuart, a suburban white man driving his wife from birthing classes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, called police from his car phone to report that he and his wife had just been shot in the mostly black section of Mission Hill. His pregnant wife had been killed, and he was bleeding from a minor gunshot wound. Stuart said he’d been carjacked by a black man who ran into the Mission Hill Housing Project. In following days, Mayor Flynn and Police Commissioner Mickey Roach dispatched police into the project. That Mrs. Stuart was pregnant might have had something to do with the mayor’s promising to leave no stone unturned until the killer was brought to justice. But black ministers, who hadn’t seen this kind of attention paid to the neighborhood’s black murder victims, were wondering if race also played a part.
Then O’Leary and McNeely found their black scapegoat. They targeted a petty criminal and junkie named Willie Bennett, holding him up to the press as public enemy number one. In the end, though, there was no black carjacker. Charles Stuart jumped to his death from the Tobin Bridge, once the truth started to come out: He’d murdered his own wife, and shot himself to make the hoax more convincing. O’Leary and McNeely’s heroic investigation fell apart. Now the newspapers said the witnesses’ testimonies against Bennett had been falsified, coerced, and that drugs had been planted on some witnesses to put them at the cops’ mercy, so they would sign whatever testimony they had to sign, saying that Bennett had bragged about the murder.
As I sat in O’Leary’s dirty office, with piles of disorganized paperwork and posted headlines about this being Boston’s worst year ever for homicides that brought few arrests, it all became clear. Steven was just another easy target. His arrest would bring weeks of splashy Boston Herald headlines and a feather in the cap of the harassed detective. And Stevie was white, so no one could claim racism with this case.
When Johnnie showed up with a Southie lawyer, Steven was formally charged with murder in the first degree. It was Thursday night and Stevie couldn’t be arraigned until morning. He’d have to spend the night locked up. They handcuffed him and took him to Station 6 to await transport to an overnight juvenile lock-up. We walked behind Stevie, and when we all came out of the dilapidated homicide building, the camera crews had the bright lights back on and were about to film Stevie being led to the paddy wagon in cuffs. The police didn’t say anything; they just posed with Stevie. “He’s fucking thirteen years old!” I yelled. I knew it was illegal to identify juvenile defendants. Stevie had become the city’s youngest homicide suspect, fitting into the media’s current trend of portraying a generation of child “superpredators.” “Steve, don’t worry,” Seamus yelled to him as he was escorted into the wagon.
When we got to Station 6, Stevie was excited to see us, as if it had been a month instead of a half hour. His voice was a little calmer now, but his hands were still trembling when he wiped his eyes and said something about having bad luck. “Does Ma know yet?” he asked. “She’s gonna go crazy.” Then he started crying again. He said he hoped the detectives would talk to Mrs. Viens soon, “They’ll straighten it out.” I didn’t have the heart to tell Stevie we’d already seen the Vienses on TV saying they thought he’d killed Tommy, that there was no way their son committed suicide.
Stevie was sitting on top of a table in a small box of a room, wearing his baggy basketball shorts and swinging his skinny legs nervously. We all tried to change the subject a few times, talking about basketball or what lotion Steven might try to get rid of the pimples he was starting to get. But every subject brought Steven right back to stories about Tommy, funny ones about Tommy’s pranks in the neighborhood. Like the morning he’d knocked on the door, asked me in the most innocent voice if Stevie was home, and then whipped three eggs at my head while running down the stairs. Tommy always reminded me of Kevin. You had to love him.
Then Seamus interrupted, asking with worried lines in his forehead, “Steve, what happened before you found Tommy shot?” Everything turned serious again, and that’s when I asked the question I’d been needing to ask: “How did Tommy know about Johnnie’s guns?” Steven and Seamus told me they’d seen Johnnie’s Navy Seal duffel bags with the guns in them, and had bragged about them, and that after that kids would go up to the apartment when Johnnie wasn’t home, on what they called “gun hunts.” Tommy had found the guns, but as far as Seamus and Stevie knew, there was no ammo. Seamus and Stevie still couldn’t figure out where the bullet that killed Tommy had come from.
The two began to go over that day for us. Seamus said Tommy had come to the apartment while Steven was still sleeping. Seamus took a shower, and when he came out Tommy was on the telephone. He slammed the phone down saying, “Hey, some cop on the phone said he’s gonna come up here and arrest me.” Seamus said he didn’t believe Tommy. “Let him come, I’ll grab one of Johnnie’s guns and shoot him,” Tommy said, getting more worked up. When the telephone rang again, Seamus picked it up and was told, “If you kids don’t stop pranking those adult sex lines, I’ll come up there and make you stop.” The voice said he was a police officer, and knew they were at John MacDonald’s apartment at 8 Patterson Way. Seamus said he apologized, telling the guy that he didn’t know Tommy was calling the party lines.
Tommy continued to dance around, talking about how he’d grab one of Johnnie’s guns, hide in the second apartment, and shoot the cop when he came through the door. Eventually Seamus left to go to the noon movie, telling Tommy not to touch Johnnie’s guns, “or we’ll all get our asses kicked.”
By then Stevie had come out to watch TV with Tommy. “ ‘The Price Is Right’ was on,” Steven told us, excited that he could add something to the story. Stevie said that Tommy told him the whole thing about the cop, and then started calling the party lines over and over, each time getting disconnected. Stevie said he didn’t pay much attention, except to laugh when Tommy started swearing at the moderator before she could disconnect him again. Tommy hung up the phone. “You think that cop would come up here?” he asked Steven. But Stevie told us that he was too tired to get into all the excitement about cops and Johnnie’s guns.
Steven said Tommy seemed to get bored with “The Price Is Right” and kept carrying on about the cop on the phone. He asked if he could go to the kitchen for a cup of water. Stevie shrugged his shoulders, wondering why Tommy would ask permission in our house. “He walked toward the kitchen, looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then made a sharp turn, jumped on the washing machine, and reached up to the shelf.” Stevie said Tommy pulled out the .357 Magnum.
“Put it back!” Stevie screamed as Tommy ran into the second apartment of our breakthrough. But Stevie said everything was quiet; Tommy was hiding. “Johnnie’s gonna come home and be pissed!” Stevie yelled into the rooms cluttered with broken-down furniture. But there was no response, not even a movement to give away Tommy’s hiding place. Then Stevie told us he gave up, thinking Tommy would come out of hiding if he just ignored him.
“The Price Is Right” ended and the midday news came on. “Let’s go out,” Stevie said he yelled, shutting off the television. Nothing. Just silence. Then the blast.
“How the fuck did he find the ammo?” Johnnie asked, pounding the wall. Johnnie told us that he’d hidden the ammo separately, in a pouch, under a pile of old shoes in Ma’s closet in the other apartment.
Steven said he walked through the narrow passage into the second apartment, and saw only the .357 on the floor. There was no sign of Tommy. He said he grabbed the gun, and that’s when he heard the noise underneath the chair tipped over in a corner.
“What noise?” I asked. Steven couldn’t talk anymore. He started crying again. “What noise?” I asked again. “He was trying to talk.…” Steven could barely get the words out himself. He was hyperventilating again, taking deep breaths and wailing from a hell that I couldn’t begin to imagine. He finally told us that he turned the chair over and found Tommy, and all he remembered, he said, was the sound of gurgling, and a moan, like Tommy was trying to say something. The bullet hole was in his head, and a puddle of blood was growing around the two of them. “He was my favorite person, we were like brothers.” Then Stevie laughed through his tears as he said, “We were trying to figure out how I could miss the plane back to Colorado. He didn’t want me to go back.”
I asked straight out if Tommy had ever talked about killing himself. Steven snapped at me, “You didn’t know Tommy like I knew him. No one did. He’d never kill himself.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
On the morning of the arraignment, nothing felt real. I’d stayed up all night at Mary’s apartment drinking a bottle of whiskey to get back that numb feeling I’d had after Kevin died, and flicking the cable TV channels every time another gun appeared on the screen. But there were guns on every channel, so I turned the TV off and paced the floors drinking, while Seamus, Mary, Jimmy, and their two kids slept. Seamus kept getting up, pretending to go to the bathroom, checking up on me, and asking questions about Stevie. I hid the bottle and sent him back to bed, telling him to stop being such a worrywart. I was worried too though, even though the cops said Stevie would be kept on a suicide watch, “given the circumstances.”
It seemed like the sun would never come up as I paced, watching through the window for the faintest hint of dawn. I got dressed for the arraignment. When we all finally went to the Southie courthouse, we were dying to see Stevie again. He was kept in a holding cell downstairs that morning, a dingy cold room with a toilet overflowing with what looked like generations of shit from nervous defendants.
After getting five minutes with Steven, I ran out to the corner store to get a pack of cigarettes and started smoking away as soon as I got them. News reporter types, with a pad and a pen, started hovering around me, staring and wondering who I was in relation to Tommy’s death. As I lit up my smoke, the radio on the counter started broadcasting about Boston’s youngest murder suspect, my own little brother, “in a case that has shocked city officials.” I ran out of the store. It was hot out and a taxi driving by the courthouse was blasting the rest of the story, about how the defendant came from “a troubled family.” I felt as if I was outside my own body—nothing seemed real. On my way into the courthouse, a group of older men sat around reading the Herald and talking about the tragedy, and saying how it would make Southie look bad.
Eventually, Stevie was brought up to the courtroom and stood in the defendant’s box. The judge arraigned him for murder in the first degree. He pleaded not guilty, and was put on $250,000 bail. That was that.
“Where the fuck are we gonna get $250,000 bail?” I asked out loud. Johnnie shhhed me, explaining that it was $250,000 surety, meaning if you owned a house or anything worth that much, you could put that up. But that it meant $25,000 if we used cash. “Oh,” I said. I was relieved for a second. Then I said even louder, “Where the fuck are we gonna get $25,000?”
When we went to the cell after the arraignment, Steven was crying again. “He thinks I did it!” he said, talking about Mr. Viens; he’d seen Tommy’s father sitting far away from us in the courtroom. I couldn’t answer him. Steven had a bruise on his neck, and explained that he had gotten a beating the night before in the transport van. He said it as if it was nothing, just another part of his bad luck. He said that some older black teenagers had beat him once they found out he was from Southie. “What did the cops do?” Mary asked. Stevie shrugged his shoulders. “They laughed.” Stevie himself attempted a laugh now too, but his face was vacant, as if he didn’t know how to feel about anything anymore.
The next day’s Boston Herald said that Stevie was “stoic” in the courtroom, that he’d shown no emotions, or as they put it, “no remorse.”
Eddie McGlaughlin had arrived at the courthouse wanting to help out. We all followed him into the office of his new attorney, Al Fallon. Fallon was a fast talker, and my head was already spinning. He told us there was nothing to worry about, that the police had already done so many illegal things in this case that all they’d want now would be to cover their asses before letting Stevie go. “The two-and-a-half-hour interrogation without a lawyer or legal guardian present was illegal,” he said, throwing on his coat and rushing us out of his office just when I was getting comfortable enough to ask a question. “But … ,” I said. He halted all questions, saying we just had to wait for the results of the gunpowder tests done on Steven’s hands the day Tommy died.
Mary, Joe, Johnnie, and I scraped up the $25,000 to bail Steven out, emptying our life savings. We were all relieved to see Stevie walk out of the Department of Youth Services, into whatever freedom he might hold on to, while we hoped for this big mistake to be cleared up.
I made Mary come back into the apartment with me, one last time, to gather up my belongings. The neighbors cleared a path and stared silently as we walked up the front steps. Being in that apartment again was like being in a house on fire. I gathered up what I could, as if I was in the middle of an emergency—and I was. I could feel it all moving in on me. I ran out of my bedroom with two full trash bags to rush Mary out the door. I felt out of breath. “What are you doing?” I asked her, watching her bend over to clean something. “There’s brain on the floor,” she said calmly, as if she was at work in the OR. That’s when my knees went. I fell onto the couch and for some time couldn’t move a limb. I could barely get up the strength now to make it out that door. But I did, and it was the last time I ever saw our old home. I swore I’d never come back to Southie again.
I spent the rest of the summer with Seamus and Stevie, hiding out in a cottage on Cape Cod we’d rented from one of Johnnie’s new Southie friends. We came back to Boston once in a while for pretrial hearings and visits to Fallon’s office; or else to visit Mary, who’d also abandoned Southie once and for all, moving to Quincy. Other than those journeys, we sat in the cottage and talked about the fatal day over and over again, trying to figure out what had happened to Tommy, what was going on in his head when he hid out, and how the gun might have accidentally gone off. Steven wasn’t allowed to leave the state, so Ma came to Cape Cod for a few weeks. She talked and talked about her own theories. I felt I was suffocating in the stories. Steven was free, but he wasn’t really. None of us were. We were drowning in it. Steven couldn’t wait for the gunpowder tests to come back from the FBI in Washington, proving that he hadn’t shot the gun.
Finally, in September, the test results came back in Steven’s favor. The FBI report was complicated, explaining the properties of “barium” and “antimony,” the two chemicals that would show up on Steven’s hands in large quantities from the blast of a .357 Magnum. The report said that the blast would’ve covered his hands in the chemicals, and that, given his age and lack of criminal experience, it was unlikely Steven had fired the gun. Fallon explained that the chemicals were difficult to get off one’s hands. He said that even “some of the best criminals” he’d defended didn’t get the stuff off.
But the Herald report only said the tests were “inconclusive.” In the article, the police and the DA’s office said that barium and antimony tests were unreliable, and that the department couldn’t depend on them. This, even though they’d made such a big deal of the test on the day Tommy died. Even worse, the DA’s office said that they had new evidence that would prove “the juvenile’s” guilt.
After reading the article, we went into Fallon’s office, to find out what this new police evidence was. He closed the door, looked at Stevie, and said, “You know you can tell me anything. No matter what, I have to challenge the state’s evidence.” He added, “Even if you shot Tommy!” Fallon pulled out an official typewritten police transcript of Steven’s call to 911 on the day Tommy died. I scanned the piece of paper and found two lines where it had Steven saying he’d shot Tommy in the head.
In spite of Stevie’s reaction—he was crying, saying, “I feel like I’m going crazy, like I’m just losing my mind”—for the first time I thought maybe he had shot Tommy, accidentally. Maybe he blocked it out, I thought. On the long journey back to our hideaway on the Cape, I asked him once again to go over everything that happened the day Tommy died. Stevie just looked at me as if to say, “Not you too!” He said he didn’t want to go over it again, that whatever might happen to him, as long as he knew—and Tommy knew—the truth, that was all that mattered.
I should’ve known better than to trust anything handed down officially, having grown up in Southie. It took two weeks to get the original cassette of Stevie’s call to 911 we’d demanded. I went to Fallon’s alone, anxious for the truth. It was nightmarish to hear Steven pleading with the dispatcher, seconds after finding Tommy. It brought me back to my own calls for help after Davey had jumped. Stevie was begging them to hurry up. He gave his address a few times to the dispatcher, who asked him to calm down and to speak slower. I listened and listened, waiting for the line, “I shot my friend in the head.” But it never came. Nor was there anything that could’ve been mistaken for those words typed on the transcript that homicide had given us.
Fallon called the DA and asked him if he’d listened to the tape. He said he didn’t need to, that he had the transcript. “What, are the cops lying?” he laughed. But he agreed to listen to his copy while Fallon waited on the line. I heard the Assistant DA’s voice come through the phone. “Holy shit,” he said.
I fled Fallon’s office. I wanted to get back to Steven to tell him what I’d heard, and to apologize for questioning him, even for one moment. I sped on the highway back to the Cape. It started to rain. The rain beat down on the car, and my heart felt as if it would explode with hate. I wanted to murder again. I was sure of it. I thought of ten people I would kill. But the amount of suffering I would inflict on them could never match the pain I was feeling for a helpless child railroaded by a cast of demons. Agents of the state, district attorneys, cops and detectives, the police commissioner who ran a department so corrupt it would send children and neighborhoods to hell before admitting a mistake, even the mayor. I pulled over to fantasize about killing every last one of them, and about how to make it worthwhile I’d have to keep from getting caught until I’d gotten them all.
But in the next minute I only wanted to die myself. The world’s nothing but pain. It’ll never get better. It’s completely useless. Stevie’s going to be found guilty of something he didn’t do, and how much more suffering and death will that lead to? How soon will Stevie be found hanging in a cell? I felt the pain of all these thoughts converging on me, and I wanted out. I thought about Tommy, and about the brothers I hadn’t had time to cry for, and about my mother, whose suffering was never-ending. The rain poured down so that the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up. I was stuck there on the side of the road, and I realized that I could just put the car into drive, and press the gas peddle, and kill myself right then. I couldn’t see anything through tears and rain.
I couldn’t do it, though. I decided then, that if I ever made it out of this storm, I’d have to spend my life fighting—not only for Stevie, but for everything else that had happened over the years, for the dignity of my family, and for other families like mine. I didn’t even have words for what I was promising myself, but something told me that I was making a lifelong commitment. It was justice I wanted, that’s all. I wasn’t even sure I knew what justice was anymore. But I knew it had to be sweeter than blood.
Steven’s case went to trial twice: the “de novo” system in Massachusetts allows defendants to go before a judge for the first trial, and then, if found guilty, to take it to a jury.
For the first trial, Steven had been charged with first-degree murder. The DA worked on a theory that Steven and Tommy had been playing Russian roulette, based on a rumor that two weeks prior to Tommy’s death, Stevie had put a bullet in Johnnie’s gun, spun the chamber, pointed it at their friend Greg, and pulled the trigger. Greg and Tommy’s brother Brian, one of Seamus’s best friends, were to take the stand as witnesses. But when questioned under oath, they contradicted the written testimonies that Detective O’Leary had submitted to the court. Similarly, the eight-page memo submitted to the court by the first officer on the scene was undermined by the initial incident report, which said nothing about Russian roulette or a confession from Steven.
When O’Leary took the stand, he denied that holding Steven incommunicado, under questioning without a lawyer or legal guardian, was an interrogation. This, even though Steven testified that when he’d asked to see Johnnie, O’Leary had said to him, “You’re going nowhere, kid,” obviously meaning he wasn’t free to leave. O’Leary said that the questioning wasn’t illegal because Steven wasn’t a suspect at the time. When questioned about the thirteen-year-old’s demeanor on that day, O’Leary said, “He was very calm. He had no remorse.” I’d noticed that all of the detectives and officers testifying that day had been huddled in a corner outside the courtroom, going over what they were going to say on the stand. A black detective with a foreign accent stood apart. He clearly wasn’t part of the club. When questioned on the stand about Steven’s demeanor, this Detective Hensaw said Steven had been hysterical, slumped over in a crouched position, holding his stomach with both arms and crying his eyes out.
The state’s experts took turns testifying that the FBI’s report on the gunpowder tests wasn’t credible, and that the tests weren’t an exact science. The police ballistician, Mr. Bogden, showed white cotton sheets that were shot with the same gun at various distances, creating circular patterns of powder burns, or “stippling.” He was followed by the state medical examiner, Dr. Feigen, who stared straight ahead as he reported that the stippling pattern created by the gun at a distance of twenty-four inches resembled the stippling pattern on Tommy’s face. Then he added that he’d measured Tommy’s arm—from armpit to the end of his middle finger—in the autopsy and that it was only eighteen inches long, and that Tommy couldn’t have shot himself. When asked if Tommy’s hands were ever tested for gunpowder, Feigen said no, and that barium and antimony tests weren’t reliable anyway. Even though they thought the tests were crucial when they tested Steven’s hands, I muttered quietly, struggling to stay in order before the judge.
During a recess, Mary approached Fallon, telling him that it would be impossible for someone Tommy’s age, who was five feet eight inches, to have an arm only a foot and a half long, unless the person had some kind of bone disease. “And,” she said, “I get all those gunshot victims at the City Hospital, and when they’re pronounced dead, their hands are always bagged for the barium and antimony test swabs.” She said they must have tested Tommy’s hands, but that the results might not have been the results they wanted. Fallon patted her on the back a few times and asked Mary’s husband if “the little lady” could cook at all. “You should have married a Greek woman,” he laughed, “now they can cook!” Then he patted Mary on the back some more and escorted us all back to our benches.
The evidence, such as it was, was in. Fallon came out of his private meeting with the judge and the DA, and explained that the charges were being reduced to involuntary manslaughter. He said that meant Steven was playing with the gun, “acting in wanton and reckless disregard for another’s life.” “Like when someone runs a red light and, in the course of breaking the law, runs someone over, even though they never meant to kill anyone,” he explained, as if it wasn’t so bad after all. Fallon took Steven into a corner alone, trying to encourage him to plead guilty to the new charge, and the next thing I knew Stevie was weeping, “But I didn’t do it.” Fallon said that Steven would get very little time, and maybe none at all if the judge thought he was finally admitting he did it. But Steven hadn’t shot Tommy and he said he wanted to stick to the truth. So we kept fighting.
Grandpa showed up at the courthouse in Southie. He was starting to look a lot older. He came into the courthouse lobby shuffling his feet, with wide blue eyes, bright as ever, and a black leather aviator’s hat that was all puffed up on top of his head. He said his heart was very bad, but that he came to the courthouse to warn us. He said he had seen Fallon on the news the night before, and that he couldn’t hear a word he was saying about Steven’s case, but that he had “an awful criminal face on him.” “Where’d you find that blackguard? I suppose some no-good-bum-of-a-gangster led you to him.” We all laughed, but he was right, and in walked Eddie McGlaughlin to talk to Fallon about his own case, as he was facing federal drug charges from the Whitey Bulger roundup.
While we awaited the second trial on the new charge, we were able to keep Steven out on bail. He attended school in Worcester, living with Ma’s sister Mary. Ma had to go back to Colorado to take care of Maria and Kathy while Joe went off to work every day. Seamus missed Steven terribly, going back to Colorado without him. Steven was discovering that suburban life wasn’t that bad after all—it was better than being in the Department of Youth Services and getting beatings from black kids when they found out he was from Southie.
The spring of 1991, Grandpa was dying. Ma had flown back again from Colorado, after hearing that her father kept asking, “Where’s Helen,” from his deathbed. We all got to see Grandpa one last time in the ICU, and he held Steven’s hand the longest, assuring him, “It’ll be OK.”
Then Ma, knowing that Grandpa had been drifting in and out of consciousness, asked if he’d seen the kids: Patrick, Davey, Frankie, Kevin. Grandpa was hooked up to machines keeping him in his old body. He looked tired and thirsty, but the nurses said he couldn’t have water, so Ma kept wetting cloths and pressing them on his trembling lips. Grandpa spoke: “Sure, hasn’t Davey been sitting here with me? And your mother, your mother’s here.” Ma took what Grandpa was saying casually. She’d become used to saying that for her, the line between this world and the next had been blurred. She even joked with Grandpa. “Well, my mother would be bullshit, knowing that you’re seeing another woman,” Ma said, referring to the female companion Grandpa had befriended in the nursing home. Grandpa laughed.
My cousins, brothers, sisters, and I said goodbye to Grandpa and left the hospital. Ma and her sisters sat up with him for a couple nights. Ma was the only one in his room when he went. She told us that the two of them had said an Act of Contrition together when they knew it was time for him to pass on. Grandpa slipped into a coma state, and the doctors asked Ma if they should try yet another medicine. Ma said, “Let him go.”
Grandpa’s was the best funeral I’d ever been to. The West Roxbury Church was filled with green and gold carnations, and the choir sang “Danny Boy.” Ma’s sisters wept bitterly, and Ma scolded them, “What, would you want him to suffer forever?” Ma was elated by the send-off and looked as peaceful as Grandpa in his casket. As I sat in the long procession to the cemetery, I wondered why I was so happy at a funeral. Then I realized it was the first time I’d seen off someone who’d died naturally, from old age.
After the funeral, I went back to our pursuit of justice. I spent days and nights in the library at Suffolk University Law School, reading books on forensic pathology, studying the pictures of stippling patterns on gunshot victims, crying about Tommy, wondering what had happened, and throwing up in the bathrooms. I photocopied the pages that said that stippling tests, especially done on white cotton sheets, which are so different from flesh, were increasingly being discredited as having a twelve-inch range of error. Then I found out that the guy who wrote the book on forensic pathology, Dr. Werner Spitz, was not only one of the foremost forensic experts in America, he was also Dr. Feigen’s teacher. But Fallon, who would have been the one to front the money for experts, still said we wouldn’t need them to win the coming jury trial. “Piece of cake,” he said. I was encouraged to find books that discredited the state’s experts, even if only for my own peace of mind and sense of justice. And I was relieved when Mary came back from Southie Savings Bank one day, telling me she’d just bumped into “that black detective.” She said he came up to her in the bank and asked how her little brother was doing. He said he felt terrible over the tragedy. “I tell you one thing,” he added, “that kid didn’t kill anybody!” He shook his head, “He’s innocent!”
For the jury trial, the state had gotten rid of the teenage witnesses and the Russian roulette theory. The DA was now calling it “horseplay” that had led to Tommy’s death, but he claimed that Steven had pulled the trigger and should be removed from society. Detective Hensaw was now part of the clique. On the stand, he looked down at his hands when he said that when he’d arrived on the scene, Steven was very calm for someone who’d just lost his friend. My heart dropped when I heard him say those words. They even got to him, I thought. He’d been the only one I trusted to tell the truth. And you could tell by the way he spoke, slowly, with obvious regret, that he was doing something he didn’t want to do. Fallon never brought up the fact that his testimony had completely changed since the first trial.
The state filed in its expert witnesses. We had no experts to do independent test firings with the gun, to challenge the credibility of stippling tests, or to testify to the average arm length of a five-foot-eight teenager. Steven tried to hold up through the whole trial. I kept telling him to have faith in God and in the truth. Ma’s friend Mary Scott showed up and gave Steven a rose, a symbol of faith in the divine intervention of St. Theresa, she told him. I gave Steven a small silver cross, one that I’d kept in my pocket the whole time Kathy was in a coma.
Steven took the stand and told the truth, the same truth of every single detail he’d told from day one. Then Fallon threw Tommy’s 8 × 10 autopsy photos in front of Steven while he was on the stand. Steven buckled over, wailed in agony, and held onto his stomach. Fallon was asking a barrage of questions about the identity of the person in the photo, who had a bullet hole in his head, and whether it was, in fact, his friend Tommy. I wasn’t sure what Fallon was doing. We all cried for Steven. “What’s he doing that for? That’s wrong to torture a little kid like that!” My Aunt Mary said out loud. Mrs. Viens, too, buckled over at the sight of the photos. The judge called the court to order, and Fallon calmly put the photos away and dramatically requested a recess, speaking in a soft low tone. Fallon explained to us later that he’d wanted to show the jury Steven’s gut reaction to the picture of Tommy, without any warning. Steven said he hated Fallon now. “I don’t ever want to see those pictures again,” he moaned in the marble halls outside the courtroom.
The day we filed into the courtroom for the verdict, a number of court officers followed to keep the peace. Throughout the trial I’d studied each juror. Some guys looked as mean as O’Leary, big fat Irish Americans who kept looking at their watches as if they were wondering when lunch was. My biggest hope was the Haitian woman. She’s black, I figured, she knows what the cops are like. I got nervous whenever I saw her dozing off during the trial, or reading her pocket Bible during recesses—“She’s reading the fucking Old Testament, too!” I told my sister. I wanted to rip it from her hands and open it up to the part where Christ is accused by the Pharisees, but we weren’t allowed to communicate with the jurors. The lead juror was a black woman too, but I didn’t trust her because she looked wealthy and had the sober, oppressive face of a barrister herself.
“And how do you find the defendant?”
“Guilty.”
I wanted to do something drastic. I wanted to speak, but I was afraid that the judge would give Steven a harsher sentence if I said the words I wanted to say. I wanted to lash out at every whore representing the government, and every weak sucker on the jury. I wanted to kill again. But I was feeling so weak that I slid from the bench and my knees hit the floor. Johnnie dragged me back up to my seat and told me to stay calm for the judge. Fallon gave his arguments why the judge should be lenient, given the tragic circumstances of the case. It sounded like he was agreeing that Steven had shot Tommy, but that the court should let him go since it was an accident, a double tragedy. The prosecutor called Steven dangerous, and said he should be put away. And the judge determined that he should be sent to the Department of Youth Services. The DYS would be in charge of deciding how long to keep him; it could be a year or until his eighteenth birthday.
The guards led him away. We were allowed down to the basement to see Steven in his cell, before he was transported. We went down the same stairwell that Steven had been taken down five minutes earlier. On the way down, there on a windowsill, I found the crumpled-up rosebud that Steven had been keeping in his pocket, and there also was my cross. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. When we saw Steven, I wanted to ask him why he’d dumped the symbols of faith. But I didn’t bother. It was one thing to feel forsaken by the criminal justice system. It was another to feel forsaken by God. I wanted to dump the symbols of faith too, but I couldn’t. There was still some fighting left to do.
“My brother, you’ve got some nerve, strolling in here with no coat on!” Muadi DiBinga was talking about me to an invisible audience, and waiting for my explanation. I had walked to my new job through a blizzard, and I wasn’t wearing a coat. Our boss Kathie came out of her office to see what was going on. Then she joined in, harassing me for looking like I wasn’t sleeping or eating.
After I’d left Old Colony, I rested a few hours a night on friends’ couches around Boston, secretly eating at soup kitchens, and spending my days and nights investigating for Steven’s appeal and getting involved in efforts against violence and police abuse, especially in Roxbury, where things had only gotten worse since the Stuart case. At the same time I was trying to finish my studies at UMass, and taking extra courses in juvenile justice. I’d found Citizens for Safety only after many liberal organizations in Boston had shut the door in my face, since my story didn’t fit with their upper-middle-class white plans to organize around civil rights issues. While Steven was locked up in the Department of Youth Services, I called every organization in town that talked about violence and the police department’s reactionary ways in the black and Latino neighborhoods. One guy listened for fifteen minutes while I told him about the abuses in Steven’s case, until I said “South Boston.” Then he asked me if Steven was, by chance, a minority who’d moved into South Boston. “Nope.” “Well, unless he’s a minority or gay, I’m afraid there’s not much we can do.” That was the end of that conversation.
I finally decided to call just one last place to volunteer. I didn’t like the name Citizens for Safety. It sounded wimpy and suburban, and I was looking for a revolution to put all my rage into. But Kathie and Muadi were cool, and I soon figured out the name was a front; they were ready for battle.
Kathie Mainzer had come from a white middle-class background. She said she’d grown up liberal, but blind to the realities of poor people’s lives. “I fell from the safety of that high horse,” she said. She’d left an alcoholic husband and been forced to raise her child alone on welfare. Kathie found that being on welfare was no picnic, experiencing firsthand the insults and abuses of the welfare bureaucracy. That’s when she started fighting, leading welfare rights organizations up the grand steps of the State House. Before long she was executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, and was eventually asked by a group of civic leaders and activists to run a new citywide organization to deal with the violence that was making headlines every day in Boston. She took the job, and started wearing suits that contrasted sharply with her bright red lipstick and matching hair that looked as if Ma’d gotten hold of her with the scissors.
Muadi DiBinga was from Zaire. “Africa!” she’d add, loud and proud, just in case I needed to brush up on my geography. But she’d grown up in Roxbury, where her family got involved in all aspects of community development in their beleaguered neighborhood. Muadi was pro-black. And she wore her hair in natural twists, and dressed in an urban hip-hop style, with African trinkets that said she was damn proud of where she came from. I thought for sure she’d have resentments toward a white guy from Southie wearing claddagh symbols and lots of green that said I was damn proud of where I came from.
But Muadi was one hundred percent behind my cause after hearing the truth about Southie. She asked every day about Steven in DYS. I’d received no welcome from the white liberals running organizations that claimed to champion the cause of people like Muadi. But here was Muadi now, calling me her “brother” and us getting along just fine without them. Muadi called the white liberal organizations “plantations,” and said they were dominated by whites who had no clue, “with all these ‘house Negroes’ running around and fetching their coffee.” Muadi was all about black power, which I learned had nothing to do with taking over the housing projects of Southie. I wished that the people from my neighborhood could know someone like Muadi; they’d have been for black power too. They’d love her, I thought. But she was black, and the plantation folks had already divided “us” from “them,” as far as I could see.
We were a good team, Kathie, Muadi, and I. We ran around the city, strategizing while riding on buses and pulling together groups in Roxbury for meetings with the police to air complaints from kids who were being detained and harassed and sometimes called “nigger” by cops. Residents spoke out about specific officers they felt were only adding to the violence of the streets. Just like in Southie, I thought to myself as we passed on a bus through the dark boulevards of Roxbury’s Dudley Square, where I’d always been told never to set foot.
I still hated the cops for what they’d done to my little brother. I was working with many black people now, and even some of the liberal types who ran organizations. But the cops? Never. The strange thing was, whenever I went to meetings with activists from around the city, as much as I related to the black residents, there were still no people from the same place I was. The cops attending those meetings were the closest thing to my Southie neighbors, with shamrocks pinned to their lapels, heavy Boston accents, and stories about growing up tough. I found out that some had become cops because of their experiences with crime and violence. I decided to give them a chance in my own head.
We ended up working with the Boston Police Department when we started to organize a gun buyback program in the city. We had no choice in order to collect turned-in guns legally. The police had already committed themselves to “a new era of community policing,” which activists like us had been pushing for. We wanted to make sure their “community policing” was more than just another press conference catch phrase to shut people up after the Stuart case debacle. So we pushed the gun buyback as a way they could prove they meant what they were saying. We held our own press conference, announcing our plans to collect working firearms in exchange for money, amnesty, and anonymity. We knew the cops would jump on board; and they did, once we started getting thousands of dollars in private donations for buying back guns. Eventually, as thousands of guns were handed over, the cops wanted all the credit. We didn’t care as long as the deadly weapons were coming in.
“Dudley Square, you’re liable to get shot!” Ma screamed over the phone at me when I told her about my new job. “It’s not that bad,” I told her. “Black people shoot black people, and white people shoot whites,” I added. I told her that according to statistics I was safer in Roxbury than I was in Southie or Charlestown. Ma was worried, but she told me proudly that she was an activist now too, in Colorado. Ma had gotten involved in fighting for the handicapped, and was leading a class-action lawsuit against the state on behalf of residents like Kathy, who’d become brain injured before the age of twenty-two, and was labeled “developmentally disabled.” Ma had found out that the developmentally disabled had no access to rehabilitation services, except to be thrown into a nursing home, while waiting on a list of eight thousand. The state took only two new clients a year from this list for services. “Now let’s see,” Ma said in court to Judge Matsch, who presided over the case. “That means Kathy’ll be eligible for services when she’s four thousand and thirty years old.” Ma told me the whole court burst into laughter after she’d done the math on her hands, but the judge wasn’t smiling.
Ma was speaking up passionately and leading other mothers in King vs. Colorado. She said she felt as if Davey was with her in the struggle—hundreds of mentally disabled people had signed on to the class action suit. She said the Association for Retarded Citizens had presented her with a “My Hero” certificate: “Because of her perseverance, and never taking ‘no’ for an answer, her daughter and thousands of Coloradans will have services rather than remaining unserved on D.D. waiting lists. Helen King is a model of ‘parent power’ at its finest.”
I too felt as if I brought “the kids” to work with me every day. In Roxbury and Dorchester I met survivors of the bloody streets who were helping us appeal to people to turn in their guns. I saw black mothers telling their stories at rallies, turning their pain into songs of redemption. I started speaking publicly about my own experiences growing up; but only in the black neighborhoods that welcomed my story with open hearts and minds. Never in Southie.
But despite all our keeping busy—Ma in Colorado and me in Boston—the painful truth was that Steven was locked away every night, without the freedom even to go to the toilet unsupervised. Each time I telephoned Ma, it seemed her voice got more and more shrill—she couldn’t bear being thousands of miles from her baby. A lawyer had taken on the case for free, but he warned us it would be an uphill battle.
Finally, Steven was sent home to Ma in Colorado, after officials at DYS decided that he’d been “rehabilitated.” Some staff members said they didn’t even know what he was doing there in the first place. On the day he was released, the DYS psychiatrist apologized to Steven, in front of me and all of his superiors, who sat around the table for Steven’s final release. “Even if I do believe you’re telling the truth,” he said to Steven, having spent hours in one-on-one sessions, talking about Tommy’s death and the entire court trauma, “I’m supposed to assume you did shoot your friend. But even if that were the case, I still wouldn’t know why the hell you were ever sent to DYS.” Tears came to the psychiatrist’s angry eyes, and it was obvious that he was breaking the rules here. “For what it’s worth, I want to apologize to you for the entire criminal justice system.” He went on, talking about all the times he’d heard about kids in affluent suburban towns playing with guns, and accidentally shooting another. “Those kids,” he said, “are hardly ever prosecuted. And if they are, they never get put away.” In the end, he said, he couldn’t help but think that what happened to Steven had everything to do with who he was and where he came from.
There was a long silence around the table. I could tell Steven just couldn’t wait to be set free. He looked toward the open window, with a grille breaking up the spring view of trees in bloom. My own anger welled up with the anger of the psychiatrist, who was gripping the table now with both hands. The other case workers gave their testimonies, saying that they would miss Steven, since he got along with everyone and acted as a peacemaker on his floor, easing racial and gang tensions. One woman said she wanted to keep him, and that caught Steven’s attention. He laughed when he realized it was only a joke. Finally, they all wished Stevie the best of luck in the appeal process, and off we went.
When Steven walked out those front doors, I felt I too had been let out of the “secure treatment center.” I told Steven that we could call off the whole appeal if he wanted to, since it wouldn’t make any difference. He wasn’t going back to DYS no matter what—his sentence was over. I was relieved, though, when he said he still wanted to prove his innocence. “That was wrong,” he said, looking behind and shaking his head with an expression that struggled between anger and disbelief.
In the summer of 1994, two years after Steven’s release, I heard the words I’d been waiting for. “We won!” After four years of hell, I collapsed into a chair and wept at what Steven’s appellate lawyer was telling me on the telephone. The three judges of the state appeals court overturned my brother’s conviction, after calling into question police tactics and Steven’s inadequate defense in the face of such abuses of power. Charles Stephenson had taken the appeal pro bono, and the only bad news was that the judges, because of the unusual circumstances of the case, ordered that their finding not be published in law books. The heroic work of our appellate lawyer would never set precedent in Massachusetts Common Law.
As an activist, I’d spent the past three years meeting some of the best people I could ever hope to meet in a lifetime. That was important after years of witnessing so much viciousness and dirty dealing. Like the activists and the mothers of Roxbury and Charlestown, Charles Stephenson helped restore my faith.
At first I wasn’t so sure of Stephenson—I had little trust left in me. Although I was relieved Stephenson was from rural western Massachusetts, with no connection to the Boston Police Department, I worried that he wasn’t convinced by my ranting about police conspiracies in this case. He seemed to think that it was all a tragic mistake, the result of police incompetence and ineffective counsel.
But Stephenson became increasingly distraught and traumatized the deeper he got into Steven’s case, witnessing blatant corruption firsthand. In order to convince the trial judge, June Gonsalves, that the trial she’d presided over was worthy of appellate review, Stephenson said he had to be exact in showing that Steven might have been exonerated had his lawyer done his job. We went before the judge a few times with arguments to get access to the firearm that killed Tommy, so that new ballistics experts could do test firings in the presence of the prosecutor. The judge wasn’t budging; no access until Stephenson made the right argument. Stephenson traveled two hours into Boston every time, and the skinny bespectacled man sometimes looked as if he’d keel over from the emotional stress. “I have two young kids, you know,” he told me. Stephenson’s compassion struck me, and I realized then that this was probably my first exposure to what it meant to be a real father, and how similar it was to the protectiveness I’d only ever seen from mothers.
Finally Stephenson was granted access to the gun. On that day, he called me from a telephone booth, told me the good news, and went for lunch. When he came back to the clerk’s office he had a smile on his face and an order from the judge. “That gun’s not here, sir,” the clerk said, looking up from paperwork. “Says here it was sent to the Boston Police Ballistics Unit. To be destroyed,” she added. “This was issued about a half hour ago.” That’s when Stephenson found out what really had gone on in Steven’s case. He sped off to ballistics and saved the gun from destruction with his order from the judge. He later told me that he didn’t want to find out who’d issued the order, or to rock the boat, because by then all he wanted was to get through this case and clear Steven’s name. And that he did. The new test firings, combined with expert pediatric testimony about the absurdity of Tommy having an eighteen-inch arm, and evidence of questionable police tactics, made three judges unanimously agree to throw out the conviction. Charles Stephenson got nothing out of this case, in spite of what he gave to us. He said he knew Steven was innocent and he wanted nothing more than to undo an injustice—as much as he could. He couldn’t give Steven back his friend, but he certainly did help to restore Steven’s faith in people.
And for me, discovering there were people like Stephenson—and Steven’s DYS psychiatrist—in the world, helped me finally to understand what justice meant.