EDITORIAL ROUNDUP

Aug. 31 Boston Herald No parole for Ouillette’s killer

Rod Matthews is sorry.

Rod Matthews cries.

Rod Matthews struggles with his actions.

None of that changes the fact that he murdered his 14-year-old classmate with a baseball bat in 1986.

Matthews, who killed fellow teen Shaun Ouillette and was one of the first children to be tried as an adult in Massachusetts, was denied parole three times over the 35 years he’s been in prison.

A lot has happened in 35 years. To hear Matthews tell it, it’s been a journey of rehabilitation and therapy.

For Jeanne Quinn, Sean’s mother, it’s been a nightmare, made even more painful with visits to the parole board to fight to keep her son’s killer behind bars.

She must relive the panic of the day her son didn’t come home, the searching, the terror, the unfathomable pain when his body was found beaten in the woods three weeks later where Matthews had left it, showing it to friends in the interim.

Quinn had to do this again in June, when Matthews made his fourth appearance before the state’s parole board, trying again to win his freedom.

As the Patriot Ledger reported, Matthews claimed he was no longer the “emotionally disturbed” teen that committed a “sick and senseless act.”

Why did he do it? Teasing led him to violence, he said. Mental illness. His family was dysfunctional. His parents divorced. He told his friends about wanting to kill and apparently they didn’t “push back” enough.

But of course, he takes full responsibility and he’s “deeply sorry.”

Cue the tears.

“In taking Sean’s life, I decimated his family,” the 48-year-old Matthews said. “I continue to struggle with what I did … I truly wish that this nightmare never happened.”

This was not a “nightmare that happened.”

This was a nightmare that Matthews caused.

Matthews was the nightmare. Since his last failed bid for parole in 2016, Matthews’ crime was the subject of an Investigation Discovery documentary “Dead of Winter.” In it, Jeanne Quinn describes the life and loss of her son Sean, and the excruciating days when she believed he was alive and would come home.

Quinn spoke of opening the windows in her Canton home, baking trays and trays of cookies and setting them on the sills so the smells would waft and hopefully Sean would smell them and be lead back to her. Quinn did this with the Thanksgiving meal as well.

All the time his body lay in the woods and Matthews denied knowledge of his whereabouts.

At the June parole hearing, Quinn reminded the board of an essential truth: “There is no solace for a mother that loses a child. None.”

Matthews said he learned empathy in prison. He’s volunteered in the medical ward of the state prison in Shirley. Good for him.

But Rod Matthews took more from Jeanne Quinn than a son, more from Matthew and Yvonne than a brother — he took the chance for grandchildren, nephews and nieces, big gatherings and family memories. Who knows what Sean might have been, what he might have contributed to the community? What his children would be doing now?

Sean’s pictures stop at his freshman year in high school. Matthews saw to that. No amount of tears before the parole board, or psychology buzzwords du jour makes any difference.

Whether Matthews will kill again is a small part of the picture — he’s in prison for what he did, not for what he might do. And on both fronts, the parole board needs to keep him locked up.