TRAPPED IN A CYCLE OF ‘VIOLENCE, RETRIBUTION’
Boston officials sought to soothe a restless city following an explosion of violence this weekend, announcing a quick arrest in one of the spate of Sundaynight shootings and pledging more police visibility in hot-spot areas.
“It’s certainly been a tough couple of weeks here in the city, and this past weekend was certainly the toughest,” Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox told reporters on Monday afternoon, a day after six people were shot Sunday night in three incidents in under an hour.
One man, Edwin Pizarro, 48, died following a double shooting in the first block of Orlando Street in Mattapan around 9:10 p.m.; then at 9:40 p.m. on Westview Street in Dorchester, a man was shot multiple times; and then three people appear to have been shot on Rosa Street in Hyde Park, as cops found one person who’d suffered gunshot wounds there and then two who’d police said they believe to have been shot there showed up at a hospital 20 minutes later. This follows another man shot to death Friday night near the Tent City apartments.
The five who remain alive are expected to survive, and all of the cases are still under investigation.
Cox and Mayor Michelle Wu, plus Boston Police Superintendents Felipe Colon and Lanita Cullinane, the heads of investigation and patrol respectively, held a press conference at BPD headquarters to announce new steps, including an arrest and attempted murder charge in the Westview Street shooting.
In that case, 24-year-old Aquan Hudson, of Brockton, was cuffed in his home city a couple of hours later after state police saw a car matching the description Boston Police had put out after reviewing video footage. Per the police report, video showed the SUV later determined to be the one Hudson was driving stop at a stop sign — and then another SUV plowed into the back of it. Hudson got out and opened fire, striking the man multiple times before driving away, according to the report. The damage to the back of Hudson’s vehicle was why it caught cops’ attention in Brockton, police wrote.
Cox said the department, which he characterized as “hundreds of officers down” in staffing from where it should be even following last week’s swearing-in of 103 new officers, will be moving more resources into the areas that have seen more violence of late.
“We need to have a presence in certain areas to make people feel safe,” Cox said. “Visibility has a way of deterring crime.”
Both Wu and Cox — the latter of whom walked the beat and served in the gang unit in the bloody days before the “Boston Miracle” of the 1990s saw the bottom fall out of crime here — correctly noted that overall street violence continues to trend downward. Total shootings year to date are down slightly from 2021, which was already below the five-year average. So too are homicides in Boston; Pizarro is the city’s 36th, police said, and there were 37 at this point last year.
Both did acknowledge, though, that these recent bursts of violence, particularly over the past month or two, are jarring and naturally make people feel scared.
“Numbers are some of the best that they’ve been in a very long time, but yet people don’t feel that way,” Cox said. “And so we’re going to try to do all we can to help people feel safe.”
Wu added that the city and police department are working closely with the schools because, she said, “One of the trends that we are seeing across various levels of public safety incidents is that there are more teenagers and young people involved.” She said Boston Public Schools, which had issues of high-profile violence incidents last year and this one, has begun convening a “safety task force.”
Cox declined to say whether recent violence is driven by a gang dispute or whether any of these shootings are retaliation for others. Both he and Wu talked about the general heightened emotional temperatures locally and nationwide, plus after-effects of pandemic isolation as hav
ing a negative effect on the youth.
Asked about the investigation into Pizarro’s slaying, Cox said, “We will not rest until we find the person who did that.”
He added in an echo of his emotional comments to reporters Sunday night, “When you see something, say something.”
City Councilor Brian Worrell, who represents the Dorchester-Mattapan district where Pizarro was shot to death, said, “Everything needs to be put on the table to break these cycles of violence, retribution, and trauma.”
“Plain and simple: what is being done to combat violence in our communities is not working,” Worrell, who just last week introduced a hearing order about gun violence and spoke passionately about his friend recently killed, said in a statement. “People need to feel safe in their neighborhoods. No child should grow up scared of being shot on their way to play and no senior should be scared of going out after dark.”
On Monday afternoon, the only sign that there’s been one man killed and another wounded the night before was a coil of “CRIME SCENE” tape coiled like a ruby-red serpent among some shrubs on Orlando Street.
The car the victim had been next to was gone, towed away as evidence.
Four small and separate groups looked on: Two residents helping an elderly woman to a car, two chatty middle-aged men out in a parking lot enjoying a beer and the unseasonably warm afternoon, a small group of young guys who exchanged items with another who showed up on a moped and then sped off, and four turkeys who glared around all of them
“He was a nice guy,” one woman who lives nearby told the Herald of Pizarro, the man who was killed. She said she didn’t know him well, but he was always out and about, fixing cars and just being generally friendly.
The woman, who didn’t want to give her name, gestured to a memorial just across the street. From about half a year ago, the empty bottles, prayer candles and large heart drawn on the pavement now partially obscured by the falling leaves. Around the corner on Almont is another sad tribute to a victim of violence.
“It’s not unusual, you know?” she said.