First part of this series: link.

After the trial was over, I looked for news about the trial. (To my surprise, as I was researching this piece, I found a news story about the original murder online: link.) The trial of Lazell Cook didn’t make it into the Boston daily papers — it wasn’t important enough. On Thursday, March 12, 1992, the weekly Cambridge Chronicle reported:

A third man has been convicted of murdering two city men outside Newtowne Court in January 1990.

After three days of deliberation, a Middlesex Superior Court jury on March 6 found Lazell Cook, 21, of Brookline, guilty in the murder of Jesse McKie and Rigoberto Carrion. Cook was convicted of two counts of first degree murder and of one count of unarmed robbery….

In a separate trial, which ended Feb. 12, Ventry Gordon, 20, and Sean Lee, 20, both of Mattapan, were also convicted of first degree murder in the stabbing and beating deaths of McKie and Carrion. They were sentenced to consecutive life terms in prison — one for each murder.

Assistant District Attorney David Meier, who tried both cases, believes Judge Wendie Gershengorn, who heard the cases, will also sentence Cook to two consecutive life terms….

Another defendant, Ronald T. Settles, 28, of Mattapan, was found guilty of being an accessory after the fact in the earlier trial. He was sentenced to 6-1/2 to 7 years in prison. A fifth defendant, Ricardo Parks, 19, of Dorchester, was cleared of two murder charges and an armed robbery charge.

Nothing good came of these murders. As far as I know, Lazell Cook is still in prison. Jesse McKie and Rigoberto Carrion are still dead. I have never been able to explain the murders — these young men killed McKie so they could steal his coat; they killed Carrion because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no sense in that. There is no satisfying ending to this tale of the city.

Nor can I make sense out of the recent murders in New Bedford. Those who are directly connected with those murders can tell the story of what happened, but I don’t see how they can make sense out of those stories. Those of us who are further away from the murders can listen to the stories, can look on in horror, but I’m not able to make sense of them. And I know there are all the stories that don’t get made public — the widespread domestic violence in America where people are beaten in the privacy of their own homes, other violence that isn’t reported.

As a minister, people expect me to make sense out of violence and violent acts. But if I’m honest with myself and with them, I am not able to make sense out violence. I have to look elsewhere for hope. Which, eventually, we will have to do here in New Bedford. We human beings do have that capacity: to not make sense out of something, and later to go on and lead hopeful lives. We just have to reach over and gently wipe the tears out of each other’s eyes, so that we can (sometimes) see hope again.

Coda, with link to another blog’s account of the same murders

First part of this series: link.

I did not make another entry in that journal until three days later….

7 March 1992

The trial is over; the deliberations are over. We the jury returned a verdict of guilty of armed robbery, guilty of two counts of first degree murder (felony).

We went out afterwards, 9 of us out of the 16, for pizza and beer. Afterwards, on the train ride home, I was overcome by lassitude; sinking into a state of —- letting inertia keep me from moving on. One has to be completely dedicated, utterly disciplined, in order to accomplish anything. That of course is not possible. And one would like to let go of ambition and drive, and let go and relax and sit and watch while letting go of action. But to do that is to allow death to overcome. Strife is the constant.

The man being tried was twenty or so, a slight black youth. The crime was what the legal profession calls a “joint venture,” that is, a gang or group of people together, armed with two knives between the four of them (although we were only allowed to know of one knife), roughed up one young man named Jessie McKie, held him while punching and kicking him and while one of them cut his face twice with a knife then stabbed him three times in the chest, two of the stabs almost simultaneous, a double thrust to the heart that severed a rib on the way in. They took his jacket and left him on a snowbank. They turned to someone who had been walking with McKie, one Rigoberto Carrion, and stabbed him, punched and kicked him, pushing him against a chain-link fence so hard that they rubbed skin off his buttocks through his jeans, and left him staggering down the street leaving behind him drops of blood. He died a week later in the hospital: brain-dead, so the doctor turned off the respirator. Jessie McKie died in the snow, they were unable to revive him in the hospital.

The photographs of the bodies in situ were horrific. As were the photographs taken during the autopsies. Senseless. No perceptible motive for the crimes. Enough said for now.

I wrote nothing further about the trial in that journal; indeed, I stopped writing in that journal soon afterwards, and there are still thirty-nine blank pages left.

Part four of the story…

First part of this series: link.

The details of the murders came out over the course of the trial. My most vivid memory, I think, was the testimony of the blood spatter analysis expert. As she was qualified as an expert witness, it became obvious that she was an extremely bright young woman: degree from one of the Seven Sisters colleges, a long line of qualifications for someone so young (she must have been in her early twenties), articulate. She was attractive in a geeky sort of way; at least she seemed attractive until she was asked when she first decided to become a blood spatter analysis expert: “When I was 13,” she said, turning to face the jury (she always turned to look at us when she testified), “after I read a true crime book where the crime was solved due to blood spatter analysis.” That was just a little too creepy; to know at thirteen that you wanted to become an expert in such an arcane, and, let’s be honest, such a gruesome job.

When the two victims were stabbed, the blood went everywhere. It was on the clothing of the defendant: little spatters of blood on his boots, on his pants, everywhere. We learned about the different types of blood spatter, and how a blood spatter analysis could tell how far away someone was standing when the blood was spattered. The defendant was standing very close indeed.

A week ago, I happened to stumble across a journal that I had kept in the summer of 1983; and tucked in the back, I just happened to find five entries from March, 1992. I don’t remember writing them. Two of those entries concerned the murder trial….

4 March 1992

We continued deliberations today; all twelve of us shut into the jury room, with the symbolic mace leaning across the closed door, from one jamb to the other. Because of Ash Wednesday, the judge allowed us to start an hour late, and our foreman came in with his forehead smudged. Ash Wednesday I know is the first day of Lent but aside [break in the original]

Carol just came in and wanted to talk….[long digression about our trivial conversation]

I had meant to write about the jury, our deliberations, the gory incidents brought out at the trial. At least I have gained a few minutes when I have not thought about the trial and our deliberations. Tomorrow, I am cooped up again in a small room with eleven others, becoming rubbed raw, each of us, against the others and the moral horror of events.

Part three of the story…

Before a church meeting today, J— asked me why I hadn’t yet written about the recent gang violence in New Bedford [Link]. I said because if I wrote right now, it would be too negative. But her question got me to thinking about violence in cities, and that got me to thinking about something that happened a couple of weeks ago. And if you bear with me, I’ll eventually get back to what’s going on in New Bedford right now.

Back on May 20, Carol and I were staying up in Cambrindge, and we walked from Porter Square to Inman Square, and then kept walking down Cambridge Street. All of a sudden, I felt funny, and I turned to Carol and said, “This neighborhood isn’t safe.” She didn’t understand why I said that, or why I felt that way — it was a beautiful sunny day, no one looked threatening, the neighborhood hadn’t really changed. And then I realized what was going on.

Back in February, 1992, I got called for jury duty, and I was empanelled on a jury that was going to deliberate in a murder trial. It was actually a relief to hear the trial would probably take three weeks:– I was working for a carpenter, he had no work to speak of, I was already down to three days a week; and if I served on a jury, the state would pay me fifty bucks a day for the duration of the trial.

On the first or second day of the trial, they took us all on a bus to go out and see where the murders had taken place. One of the two people murdered was Rigoberto Carrion. He was stabbed while walking through a housing project off Cambridge Street late at night, and managed to stagger out onto Cambridge St., and collapsed in the middle of the street at a set of traffic lights.

I saw those traffic lights, and that’s when I started to feel funny, and that’s when I said to Carol that the neighborhood we were walking through wasn’t safe. I had seen those traffic lights for all of five minutes through a bus window at the beginning of that trial in 1992. But the memory was still clear enough fourteen years later to set my nerves on edge when I walked by….

Part two of the story…