The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (16 page)

The target was Lyle Jackson. Tiny had seen Lyle and thought Lyle was Little Greg’s driver. But Tiny was mistaken, and Lyle, at the counter waiting for his food, turned to see two guns aimed at him. He scrambled to get away, knocking chairs aside and stumbling to the ground.

Some said they heard two or three gunshots. Others said it was five or six.

The first call to 911 was made at 2:39
A.M
. and fifty seconds. “Can I get the policemen quick,” said an unidentified male.

“What’s the address?”

“451 Blue Hill Avenue. There’s been a shooting up here. Hurry up.”

Right away the call was broadcast over the Boston police channel 3. Hearing it, Mike Cox, Craig Jones, and the others in the gang unit froze in their tracks. The radios on their belts had exploded in a chorus with the initial shooting report. “The room goes quiet when there’s a call like that,” said gang unit supervisor Sergeant Ike Thomas. The location was just down from their office on Warren Avenue. No one in the unit spoke, said Thomas, as they all strained “to hear what else is going to happen.”

In Walaikum’s, Lyle Jackson lay on the floor on his back, a pool of blood widening around him. He had three bullet holes in his chest, one on the left side and two on the right. His eyes were open, but he was disoriented. His skin paled and quickly turned cold. One girl put her jacket over him. His friend Marcello was by his side, urging him to hold on. “He was trying to talk to me. But I told him, ‘Don’t talk. Just fight it. Stay a little.’” Stanley ran to get Lyle’s mother, who lived around the corner on Warren Avenue.

The second 911 call was made from a nearby pay phone one minute after the first—at 2:40
A.M
. and fifty seconds. This caller was a security guard who’d worked at the Cortee’s and knew a trick or two about jacking up the police response.

“I’ve got an officer down in Walaikum’s,” he said, “Walaikum’s on Blue Hill Avenue.”

The lie was tantamount to yelling fire in a crowded theater. In quick succession, a series of urgent calls went out over the police channel 3. “We have an officer down,” the dispatcher said. Then the dispatcher said, “451 Blue Hill Avenue. Officer down,” and a few seconds later repeated, “Officer down,” but added: “There were shots fired.”

In an instant, members of the gang unit were on their feet and heading down the stairs. “Everybody just ran out the door,” said Gary Ryan. Ryan jumped behind the wheel of one unmarked cruiser while his partner, Joe Teahan, climbed into the passenger side. Don Caisey got behind the wheel of a car carrying Sergeant Thomas and another officer. Mike and Craig jumped into their cruiser. Craig was in the driver’s seat. It was a moment when many different thoughts raced through Mike’s mind. “I hope he’s not hurt bad. I hope he’s not shot. I hope I don’t know him. I hope, you know, it’s a mistake.”

They were not the only ones responding. Police officers everywhere were on their way to Walaikum’s. The reason was a mixture of human nature and the solidarity of the cop world—a call about one of their own in trouble, said Mike, “would bring out more police officers than would normally come.”

Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio, coffees in hand, were approaching the party house they’d decided to stake out when they heard the call. They got on the radio with the dispatcher, identifying their car and saying, “We’re heading up.” Initially there was confusion about the restaurant’s name, with the dispatcher calling it the M & M Tavern, which was also on Blue Hill Avenue. Williams and Burgio overheard another officer jump on the radio and straighten the dispatcher out, saying the tavern was “all closed up.” In short order, the dispatcher had the correct name. The key piece of information was the address: 451 Blue Hill Avenue. Burgio had never been to Walaikum’s before, but Williams knew where to go. “Everybody’s coming, you know, there’s a police officer shot,” Williams said.

One of the officers who set off for Walaikum’s was Ian Daley. Daley, in his sixth year on the force, was born in England and moved to Boston when he was a toddler. He joined the force after graduating from college and had worked mostly in Roxbury in a one-man service car—the Bravo 431. He was at the police station in Dudley Square finishing writing a report when he heard about the shooting. Daley immediately ran outside and got into his cruiser.

The call was now going out on every police channel, not just channel 3. Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan had just pulled out of the liquor store’s parking lot, done with serving as backup in the handling of the “suspicious persons.” They looked at each other. “You never know who it is,” Bobby said. “Could be your brother, could be your friend.” Kenny tried to get a fix on the shooting’s location. Grove Hall was south from where they were—on the other side of Dudley Square. It was close by, but neither he nor Bobby was familiar with that area. Even so, Kenny got on the radio to report the Delta K–1 was in the area and “going in.” He activated the car’s siren and blue lights. “We took off,” Bobby said, “adrenaline pumped, you know, we’re flying.” The two hoped that by monitoring the dispatcher’s play-by-play, they’d be able to get their bearings and pitch in.

Richie Walker, listening from his cruiser as he awaited a tow truck, knew exactly where Walaikum’s was located. But he decided against racing immediately toward the shooting scene. He adopted a wait-and-see strategy of monitoring the radio for any developments—particularly any news about the direction of the suspects’ escape.

Given that Walaikum’s was in their district, officers from Roxbury were the first to arrive. Jimmy Rattigan and Mark Freire, partners in the Bravo 101 car, were only several blocks away dealing with a stolen car that had been torched. “It was still burning when we got there, and the fire department was coming,” Rattigan said. The two were known on the street as Rocky and Bullwinkle. Rattigan was taller—topping six feet—and he weighed about 270 pounds. Freire was at most five-ten and weighed 190 pounds. They’d always worked in Roxbury and became a team shortly after Rattigan joined the force six years before. “We kinda hit it off, kinda policed the same style,” Rattigan said. By that he meant they were pro-active. “We’d climb trees, we’d climb rooftops, we’d hide in bushes to catch these guys.

“Everyone knows cops who won’t get out of the car in pouring rain—and me and Mark would get out and just start walking the hallways of the projects and catch somebody with a pistol and drugs and stuff. So we were always aggressive. Something like this—a police officer shot—we gotta go give it 100 percent.”

Rattigan and Freire pulled up to Walaikum’s behind another officer from their station—Ronnie Curtis, who’d also been at the car fire. Curtis ran into the restaurant first, dodging bystanders. Rattigan looked and could see the victim. “You could see his legs inside the front door, pointing out towards the sidewalk.” Blood was everywhere. “It was one of those things,” Rattigan said, “you knew right away somebody’s gonna be dead.”

Curtis was yelling on his radio, “Get us an ambulance down here! Get us an ambulance down here!” The urgency in his voice confirmed for Rattigan the seriousness of the victim’s condition. He and Curtis had once worked together as emergency medical technicians. “It’s pretty bad if Ronnie’s saying that, because he’s a pretty calm guy.”

Rattigan was next to his cruiser when a car driven by a security guard pulled up. The driver said he’d seen the shooters take off in a gold Lexus and that he’d gotten a partial license plate number. Rattigan was on his radio right away.

“Bravo 101,” he yelled. “Bravo 101.”

The dispatcher replied, “The 101. Come in, 101.”

Rattigan told the dispatcher what he had, and the dispatcher was immediately broadcasting on all channels. “7—6—2,” he began. The plate number was actually incorrect, but that was what the guard had thought he’d seen. The car’s model, however, was on the money: “Gold Lexus. Heading down Warren.”

Other officers began pulling up. Rattigan yelled for Freire over by the restaurant’s entrance. “We still believed it was an off-duty police officer shot because neither one of us made it in to see if we recognized him.” The two climbed into their cruiser and sped off to search for the fleeing gold Lexus.

When Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio arrived, they found the scene chaotic and bystanders screaming, “He got shot, he got shot.” Burgio saw the bloodied man on the ground and thought he recognized him. He would have bet money it was Craig Jones. He yelled this to Williams, but Williams looked and knew right away this was wrong; the victim was not Craig. Williams also knew the victim was not a cop. He called in the update, that the shooting victim at Walaikum’s was not an officer down.

The officers arriving at Walaikum’s faced a number of key tasks at hand—attend to the shooting victim, secure the crime scene, gather witness information, find out where the shooters went. Williams and Burgio did some of each, talking quickly to the owner and then a few bystanders. The police channels were crackling with calls to be on the lookout for a gold Lexus, and when Williams and Burgio caught wind a pursuit was in the making, they wanted in. They hopped into their cruiser, leaving the crime scene to the officers from the Roxbury district.

Mike Cox and Craig Jones had just pulled up to Walaikum’s, no more than a minute or so after they’d left the gang unit, when they heard the update about the victim. “So we knew right away there wasn’t a policeman shot,” Mike said. But they hadn’t yet heard about the gold Lexus. They spotted other police cruisers and an ambulance. Craig headed toward the restaurant’s entrance. Mike stayed outside. “We were trying to find out what kind of car the shooters were in.”

Paramedics worked on Lyle Jackson, noting, in a report prepared later, Lyle was suffering from “multiple gunshot wounds,” “a very serious loss of blood,” and was “in a great deal of pain.” They immobilized his neck and back, gave him oxygen, propped up his legs to get blood to his brain. The diagnosis was “acute, major trauma.”

Lyle’s mother, Mama Janet, arrived as they were putting Lyle into the ambulance. She’d run from her house with another son. She saw Lyle and called out his name. “He kind of looked at me,” she said. “His eyes were closing. He looked at me and the tears started rolling down his cheeks.” Lyle Jackson lasted six days before dying on January 31 at Boston City Hospital.

When he’d heard gunfire, Smut bolted to attention—suddenly feeling cold sober. He watched as people began screaming and running from Walaikum’s. The other three were back, “huffing and puffing.” He yelled at Tiny to get going. “Pull off, pull off,” he ordered. Marquis was in the front seat, and Boogie-Down was next to Smut in back. They drove a block down Blue Hill Avenue and turned right onto Warren Avenue. Within a few blocks they turned left onto a side street, avoiding any oncoming police cars.

Smut and the others yelled and swore at one another for taking the Little Greg dispute too far and shooting up Walaikum’s. They also quickly decided it would be best to split up, and the first idea was to get Marquis home because he lived close by. Tiny began winding away from Grove Hall toward Dudley Square on what Smut considered “back roads.” They worked their way through a thicket of streets either intersecting or near Humboldt Avenue, the Roxbury boulevard known as the location of one of the city’s most notorious murders, the 1988 shooting death of a twelve-year-old girl named Tiffany Moore. Humboldt and its side streets were on the north side of Franklin Park, originally the “crown jewel” of Frederick Law Olmsted’s network of parks created throughout the city a century before. The 527 acres were now in the middle of the city’s poorest section and, while featuring a golf course and a zoo, always seemed in need of an overhaul.

Being inside the Lexus was like being inside a bubble. Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down had no idea of the size and scope of the police response to the initial report that an off-duty cop had been shot at Walaikum’s. They had no idea that throughout the city nearly every officer on duty was listening closely to the radio while those in the immediate area were either racing to Walaikum’s or looking for them. Ian Daley was among the latter. He’d left his paperwork behind at the station and, instead of racing to Walaikum’s, began cruising the outskirts trying to think where the shooters would go. He wasn’t alone—Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio, Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, and Jimmy Rattigan and Mark Freire were all driving around Roxbury looking for the Lexus.

Smut, Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down did not know about any of this. Nor did they realize that when they made a turn onto Martin Luther King Boulevard they were spotted—almost simultaneously—by two security guards riding in their company car and by a Boston police officer in his patrol car. The security guards immediately began broadcasting their location over a radio frequency used solely by their company.

Mike Cox was standing outside Walaikum’s when a black man dressed in a dark uniform approached him. He was a security guard named Charles Bullard. Bullard excitedly began telling Mike that two guards from his company were following the car—the gold Lexus. Mike asked what he meant. “They’re chasing the car?”

Bullard held up his radio and Mike listened to the voices talking about the Lexus. None of the police channels had yet broadcast information on the Lexus’s whereabouts. Mike summoned Craig. They told Bullard to get into the backseat of their cruiser. Craig jumped in behind the wheel and Mike was on his radio.

“TK,” he said.

“Okay, come in,” the dispatcher said.

“One of those security officers is in the car with us,” Mike said. “They seem to be chasing the car that did this shooting. He’s got the radio with him and we’re listening to this chase, trying to catch up to it.”

Mike and Craig were at Walaikum’s for all of two minutes. They headed down Warren Avenue hoping to get a bead on the Lexus.

The first Boston police officer to see the Lexus was an officer from the Roxbury station named Dave McBride. McBride was driving down Martin Luther King Boulevard when he heard Jimmy Rattigan putting out a description of the “suspect vehicle,” and there it was—the gold Lexus. The Lexus wasn’t speeding, just motoring down the street. Behind the Lexus, McBride saw another car, the one with the two security guards in it. McBride did not activate his lights or siren, but he called in his location.