3 face charges in gravestone theft
Police say crime is tied to gang activity
Three men are behind bars after cops say they stole a murder victim’s gravestone while wearing their probation-provided ankle monitors in an action police and community members have said is related to a gang dispute.
Jiovanny Matos, 21, Tyler Greene-Davis, 21, and Tyrese Sealy, 20, all were arraigned Tuesday on charges including desecrating a burial site and larceny — and all will stay in jail after a judge revoked their bail from previous charges, according to the district attorney.
The gravestone in question was that of Gerrod Brown Jr., who was shot to death in 2017 at age 16. His headstone was reported missing from Oak Lawn Cemetery on Cummins Highway last week after photos of it in strange places began popping up on social media, as the Herald reported.
Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden’s office said this came in response to other people vandalizing a different gravestone, one of a 2015 murder victim.
“These senseless crimes do nothing but further heartbreak for these young victims’ loved ones and communities,” Hayden said in a statement, adding that authorities are investigating both incidents. “This is not a prank, it is not a game, and it will not be tolerated.”
According to new court documents, cops quickly had video of a couple of cars full of people showing up at Oak Lawn Cemetery a bit before 5 p.m. March 29. Video showed eight people piling out to “begin to walk with a purpose amongst the grave sites appearing to be looking for a particular headstone,” Boston Police wrote.
They found Brown’s, and rocked it until it fell over, and then kicked the headstone, police said. Then they picked it up and started to take it toward the cars, but got tired of that and dropped it, before backing up a Camry and throwing it in the trunk, departing, per the video, at 4:59 p.m.
They got back to Annunciation Road, home of a gang named after that street in the Alice Taylor Boston Housing Authority project, at 5:17 p.m., according to another camera that picked them up, per the cops.
Much of what they were doing was obscured from that camera, but detectives recovered yet more video from the housing authority showing people taking the headstone out of the trunk and placing it in a “shrub/ mulch area” on Annunciation Road.
It didn’t take long for cops to find either the headstone or their suspects. Various sources told the Herald last week that images of the headstone began showing up on social media, and per a police report filed last week, they led a woman to head over to Oak Lawn to see if the gravestone had been stolen.
It was, so she called the cops — who looked at the posts and then went right over to Annunciation Road and got the stone.
According to the court documents, the cops called up the whimsically named ELMO — probation’s electric monitoring program, the folks who keep track of all the GPS ankle bracelets — to see if they had anyone who was at the gravesite just before 5 p.m. and then at Annunciation Road 15 to 20 minutes later. And ELMO quickly delivered, fingering these three as being in both places right around the accompanying times, police wrote.
The three were then in the following days pulled over in the cars that had shown up at the graveyard, according to police.
The court documents didn’t speculate further about the specific motivations, though Hayden’s office said the theft was tied to the previous gravestone issue, and that authorities continue to investigate both.
Community sources said the Annunciation Road gang is feuding with the Heath Street crew in the Mildred C. Hailey BHA complex, and the cops had demarcated the police report of the theft as gang related.
Community activists have feared that the dispute involving the gravestone could further escalate heading into the summer, when street violence usually picks up.