The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (17 page)

The first sighting by the Boston police brought a sudden focus to the manhunt. For some officers, it meant realizing they were nearby. For others, it meant they were way off track, like Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan. They’d raced into Dudley Square but then got all mixed up. Confused, they made turns that took them farther away from the action. It didn’t help when they heard Dave McBride start “calling off” the Lexus’s whereabouts. “We didn’t know the streets,” Kenny said. They couldn’t make any sense of the information and took turns yelling out in frustration: “Where the fuck are they!”

Mike and Craig were not lost, but the moment they heard McBride reporting the Lexus’s location, they knew they were off the mark. They’d gone up Warren Avenue toward the gang unit and Dudley Square, but the Lexus had now reversed direction and was working its way back south toward Franklin Park. With McBride reporting the Lexus’s movement, Mike turned to Bullard and told him to turn off his radio. “His radio was still blaring and our radio has two different signals, and it was too confusing.” Craig turned around so they could work their way toward Franklin Park.

It wasn’t until Tiny approached a traffic light that he discovered the Boston police cruiser in the rearview mirror. He hadn’t noticed the cruiser fall in behind him; it seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. Tiny turned off his headlights, and he didn’t stop at the light.

McBride watched the Lexus go dark and accelerate. It was time: He turned on his siren and blue lights. What had been a watch-and-wait shifted abruptly into an actual police pursuit. McBride was on his radio shouting out his location.

“We got a Lexus going down—uh—Crawford!”

Jimmy Rattigan and Mark Freire, listening to the frantic tone in McBride’s voice, realized the Lexus was heading their way. They were on Humboldt Avenue. Crawford Street intersected Humboldt. The two were thinking they could cut off the Lexus. “We still thought a police officer was shot,” Rattigan said.

Rattigan turned onto Crawford. He ignored the fact Crawford was a one-way street lined with parked cars. But he was forced to pay his full attention to what he saw coming his way, “This car just flying, I mean, it was moving.” They had not expected to see the Lexus so quickly. “I’m like, holy shit!” Rattigan had a split second to make up his mind. “I’m either gonna let this guy hit me head-on, and they were going a lot faster than we were, or I gotta get out of the way.”

Rattigan saw there was an opening between two parked vehicles. It wasn’t a full space, but maybe big enough to make it in. He turned sharply to the right to avoid the head-on collision, but the space was too small and he crashed the cruiser into an empty van. The two cops were thrown around the front seat of their car as the air bag exploded. “The cruiser was destroyed,” Rattigan said. He wrenched his neck, twisted his back, and suffered minor burns on his forearms from the air bag, but he didn’t feel anything at first.

Instead, Rattigan leaned hard into his door trying to get it to open. It had buckled and wouldn’t budge. The Lexus slowed to navigate past the crash. Rattigan looked over at the driver, who was not much more than an arm’s length away. “We locked eyes,” Rattigan said. “I’ll never forget looking at that face. He didn’t care.”

While Rattigan was stuck in the car, Freire squirmed out of the passenger’s side. He pulled a 9mm semiautomatic Glock handgun from his holster. “Mark was on him with his gun,” Rattigan said. Freire aimed at the moving car. Rattigan could practically feel his partner’s struggle over whether to shoot at Tiny Evans. The driver was behind the wheel of a getaway car. But Freire did not have enough to go on at that moment: who the driver was and his role, if any, in the shooting. Freire began grunting and growling, as if wrestling with his weapon. “Literally in seconds a thousand thoughts go through you mind,” Rattigan said. “What do you do?”

And in those seconds, the Lexus rolled past them and began picking up speed.

Rattigan pushed his door open enough to be able to see the Lexus’s taillights. Then he watched several Boston police cars go by while the security car stopped to help. Freire was standing over on the sidewalk. “He’s screaming, ‘Fuck,’” said Rattigan, “and I’m like, ‘Fuck!’”

Rattigan slumped in his seat. He and his partner were out of the chase, done for the night. Adding insult to injury, Rattigan watched a resident come storming out of one of the apartment houses to complain about his van. The man even got a camera to photograph the damage.

He never asked about the officers’ injuries.

Making its way past the crashed cruiser, the Lexus picked up speed as it continued down Crawford and turned right onto Elm Hill Avenue. Four blocks later, Tiny turned left onto Seaver Street, a wide, two-lane corridor bordering the northern side of Franklin Park.

The police chase was moving up a notch. While most officers by now knew a civilian, not an off-duty cop, was the shooting victim, they’d all just heard on channel 3 the frantic yelling, the radio static, the sudden radio silence, and then Mark Freire calling for an ambulance for him and his partner. The getaway car meant business.

“The suspects, these are murder suspects,” Mike Cox said. “They’re on the run. They’re obviously scared. One cruiser down, and we’re trying to figure out where the hell they’re going.”

Tiny had exploited the crash to put a few blocks between his car and the nearest police vehicle. Indeed, McBride had fallen off the chase, as had the security company car. But Ian Daley was on Seaver Street driving alongside Franklin Park when he spotted the Lexus as it came down Elm Hill. Daley watched the Lexus turn onto Seaver Street and saw that it was alone.

Daley radioed in the Lexus’s location. He was the first to call in the car’s complete, correct license plate: 676 ZPP. Soon enough, police cars from all over were looking for ways to join what was developing into the largest and longest-lasting police chase anyone in the department remembered. Jimmy Burgio, for one, later said “only on TV” had he ever seen anything like it. Mostly Boston police officers participated, but state troopers and officers from the city’s housing police and the municipal police, nicknamed “munies,” also got involved.

The high-speed chase is one of the ultimate cop moments, carrying the hugest of rushes. But such chases also frequently get the better of the participants. Or, as one police expert dryly put it: Officers involved in a pursuit too often “do not conduct themselves consistent with their training nor written directives.” This chase was no different. Boston police rules requiring supervision of high-speed chases, particularly at their conclusion, were words on paper signifying little. It was Wild West time in Roxbury.

Ian Daley turned on his siren and lights. He saw the cars’ occupants looking around. “You know, one head would pop up, another head would pop up, and one would go down.” He pulled up behind the Lexus.

Daley wasn’t the only one who saw the gold-colored car. Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio were approaching from the opposite direction. They’d made the right onto Seaver from Blue Hill Avenue and spotted the Lexus. Williams saw the Lexus’s lights were turned off and that Daley’s cruiser was behind it.

Williams thought he might be able to cut the Lexus off if he jumped the median. But he quickly decided not to—the concrete strip was eight inches or higher, and he’d more likely get hung up on it than make it over.

Instead, Williams shifted the cruiser into reverse and roared backward. Looking over his shoulder, he saw other cruisers, including a munie car. Williams had to slow down to navigate his way back to Blue Hill Avenue. The slow-down incensed the intensely competitive Burgio. When they almost collided with the munie car, he screamed out the window at two municipal officers, “Get out of
my
chase!”

Tiny turned off Seaver Street onto Blue Hill Avenue, heading in the direction of Mattapan. Ian Daley followed, making the right turn onto Blue Hill. Williams, seeing an opening, jumped in behind Daley. Other cruisers fell in behind the two lead cars. Burgio saw cruisers behind him “as far as I could see.”

Daley radioed in the new location—Blue Hill Avenue—a street so well-known it was like saying Broadway to a New Yorker. When they heard it, for example, Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan erupted with the click of recognition. “Now we know where to go,” Kenny said. They’d been monitoring the chase feeling useless, but Kenny was now flooring the accelerator and hitting speeds of 90 mph as they raced up Columbia Road, which emptied onto Blue Hill Avenue at Franklin Park.

Richie Walker, meanwhile, listened to the progress of the chase and began thinking if it continued heading south in his direction, this might be something he’d want to join. Mike Cox and Craig Jones, for their part, turned onto Blue Hill knowing they were getting back on the right track. They saw no sign of the chase ahead of them, but headed down Blue Hill, playing catch-up.

Tiny drove down Blue Hill along the east side of Franklin Park, past the entrance to the zoo, where construction was scheduled to begin soon on a new exhibit to house a dozen African lions, marking the return of lions to the zoo after a twenty-five-year absence. Past the zoo at the first intersection, Tiny turned right onto American Legion Highway. The others bounced around inside. They were all rattled by the growing line of cruisers behind them. For his part, Smut decided he was going to have to direct their escape. Turning down American Legion Highway, he thought, was a bad move. Since it was straight and wide open, he figured no way they’d be able to outrun the police on it. What they needed to do was to get into the side streets.

Then they saw trouble—flashing lights up ahead, where police were hastily setting up in a roadblock. Tiny braked. Smut was yelling at him to turn around. Tiny crossed the grassy median dividing American Legion Highway and began driving back toward Blue Hill Avenue. Behind them, Ian Daley copied Tiny’s moves.

Farther back, Dave Williams watched the two cars slow down to execute the maneuver. He thought, “Okay, yeah, we got him.” He began driving across the grassy median too and told Burgio to get ready. “We’re going to ram this car.” They snapped on their seat belts. Burgio opened his window to eliminate the possibility of shattered glass flying all over them. They braced for a collision.

But then the Lexus was gone. It had taken a right down a side street, Franklin Hill Avenue. “I was about to do it and it was like a black hole appeared,” Williams said.

Smut had ordered Tiny to turn onto a street running along the south side of the Franklin Hill housing project. It was where Smut lived as a boy, and the Lexus was soon speeding past the actual building where his family’s apartment was located.

Instead of the Lexus, Williams was bearing down on Ian Daley. The two cruisers skidded to avoid colliding. Daley turned right and Williams followed. Daley kept yelling out locations on the radio, “He went over the median here! He went over the median here!” Then, seconds later, he yelled, “Franklin Park project! Franklin Park project!”

The dispatcher called out the update: “Franklin Park project now. Looking for a gold Lexus. 676 ZPP.”

Mike Cox and Craig Jones were making their way down Blue Hill Avenue trying to get their bearings. “We weren’t really going fast,” said Craig, “because we were listening to the transmissions.”

When Mike heard that the Lexus had turned down American Legion Highway, he had a hunch. “They’re probably going to Franklin Hill,” he told Craig.

Mike was putting himself in Smut’s mindset. He wanted to anticipate the Lexus’s next move. It was a game, of sorts, where the checkerboard was the streets of Roxbury. He and Craig did not want to follow the others and turn down American Legion Highway; instead, they wanted to make a calculated guess where the Lexus was going.

With that in mind, they picked up their pace. They turned off Blue Hill Avenue onto Harvard Street. The right turn took them past a red-brick building where for the past two years Boston Red Sox slugger Mo Vaughn ran a youth program for city teens who gathered after school to work on their homework and eat a catered meal.

They turned knowing that Franklin Hill Avenue, once it made its way through Smut’s boyhood housing project, intersected Harvard Street. Mike was even thinking the shooting suspects might bail out. Projects were often where suspects looked to shake cops pursuing them.

Instead, within seconds of making the turn onto Harvard Street, Mike saw the gold Lexus. It was their first sighting of the night. The car was flying down Franklin Hill Avenue. “Literally kind of come off the ground and come down the hill,” Mike said. He didn’t see any police cars behind it, but he could see lights from the cruisers reflecting in the night sky.

Mike and Craig, and the Lexus were perpendicular to each other—Mike and Craig on Harvard, and the Lexus coming fast down Franklin Hill. “It came directly in—virtually right at us at the intersection,” Mike said. The Lexus roared into the intersection, skidding onto Harvard.

Suddenly, said Mike, “we are side-by-side.” He saw four black men inside the car. He and the driver exchanged looks, and Mike noticed the driver wore his hair in braids. The two cars drove parallel for a few seconds, and then the Lexus cut left.

“The car tried to ram us,” Mike said.

Craig swerved into the oncoming lane. “It just barely missed us,” Mike said. Craig had another worry—the weapons. “I was basically thinking that, you know, I don’t want him to start shooting into our car.” He jammed the brakes to slow the cruiser. The Lexus sped ahead of them. Craig then turned the steering wheel to the right, and the cruiser moved in behind the Lexus. The two cars were speeding down Harvard Street.

“Okay, we’re the lead car,” Craig yelled on the radio.

Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio did not seem happy about falling from second place behind the Lexus to third—as if someone cut in front of them in the lunch line at the school cafeteria. “The unmarked cruiser cuts right in,” Williams noted later. Burgio was peeved; the way he heard Craig’s broadcast was: “The
real
cops are in the lead now.” The mistaken version played into his view of Craig as glory hound.