Activist needling gov, family appeals order to stay away
Says it’s a legitimate protest
The Boston activist who was banished from Swampscott after placing used needles outside Gov. Charlie Baker’s house is challenging the stay-away order in court, saying he should be allowed to come back and keep at it.
“My demonstrations are legally protected,” Domingos DaRosa insisted to the Herald on Friday a few hours after filing an appeal of the order.
Baker’s wife, Lauren, obtained an anti-harassment order against DaRosa, a 43year-old longtime Boston activist and two-time city council candidate, last week after an Oct. 4 protest in which he readily acknowledges he brought used needles from Boston’s “Methadone
Mile” area to Swampscott and placed them on the sidewalk outside their home.
A copy of the stay-away order says he must remain 100 yards from the home, and also notes that he’s also “not to discard any refuse within the town of Swampscott.” The order runs through Monday — at which point it can then be extended and made more permanent, which would then show up on DaRosa’s record.
DaRosa’s top-line point echoes calls from various Boston politicians — to decentralize services, so people suffering from drug addiction don’t end up just flocking to the “Mass and Cass” area of open drug use, crime and homelessness that seems to become worse every year.
His group had planned to grab some more needles and head back to Baker’s house this week, but scrapped that as DaRosa didn’t want to be arrested. But he wants to be able to go back and protest some more.
“Governor Baker is an elected official of the Commonwealth and I am one of his tax-paying constituents,” DaRosa wrote in his motion to appeal. “I have a right to assemble peaceably in public and express my opinions on his leadership, or lack thereof, and on issues that are important to me as a taxpaying citizen within the Commonwealth.”
DaRosa argued that none of these actions were aimed at Lauren Baker, so she shouldn’t feel “intimidated,” as she told police.
Baker’s office referred comment to the State Police, which provide protection for the governor — and don’t comment on it.
Baker’s Swampscott home — a handsome six-bed, 3.5-bath colonial worth $1.2 million, according to the town assessor’s database — periodically weathers protests outside, from these Methadone Mile-oriented ones to others this summer complaining that the Republican governor was siding with the liberals too much in his coronavirus reopening plan.
And just earlier this week, a man was charged with wandering into the house on Monument Avenue through an unlocked door in the hopes, the man’s lawyer said, of dropping off some “innocuous stuff in an envelope that he thought Charlie would have interest in.”