Dad of alleged mall shooter: Son not in gang, was out shopping
The father of a Quincy man suspected of opening fire on a rival gangbanger inside a South Shore Plaza department store acknowledges his son was at the mall during the panic-inciting confrontation, but to buy presents for the 24th birthday he missed behind bars Sunday.
“Michael is not in no gang. He might know people, but he’s not in no gang,” Michael Spence Sr., 55, said yesterday at Quincy District Court after his son and namesake pleaded not guilty to firearm and ammunition charges and was ordered held on $75,000 bail by Judge Robert P. Ziemian.
“Michael really is a good kid. It was his birthday Sunday so he decided to go buy himself something for his birthday and all of a sudden this whole mess happened,” Spence said.
Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Peter Tilley knew Michael J. Spence Jr. was at the Braintree mall Friday evening because the GPS anklet he wears as part of his probation for a prior firearm conviction placed him there when shots rang out in the men’s section of Macy’s and hundreds of shoppers started fleeing for their lives.
In addition, Tilley said Boston police gang unit officers identified the former Dorchester resident from surveillance video.
“This appears to be potentially gang-related,” said Tilley, who persuaded Ziemian to impound the entire case file in order to protect the identities of witnesses.
The Herald reported Sunday that the gunplay is possibly fallout from a longstanding beef between the Lucerne and Morse street gangs. Michael Spence Jr. served two years in a house of correction following his conviction for an April 2014 gun arrest that occurred on Morse Street, police and court records show.
Tilley said mall surveillance video captured Spence following close behind two other individuals, one of whom, he said, “appears to be trying to evade the suspect.”
In addition to two .32-caliber shell casings recovered from the floor of Macy’s, Tilley said an officer later found a loaded .32-caliber handgun in mulch outside the Cheesecake Factory, where a witness saw a man toss it.
Spence was arrested at his mother’s house Saturday morning by the Quincy police SWAT team. His public defender, attorney Sandra Gant, accused Tilley of making “bold assertions ... that are completely unsupported by the facts. What they have of Mr. Spence on video is that he was present at the South Shore Plaza. They don’t even need that because his GPS records show that he was there — shopping.”