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