Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 15, 1990 TAG: 9003152243
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
Six separate shootings and stabbings left three people dead and four wounded between 1 p.m. Tuesday and 1 p.m. Wednesday, and pushed Boston's murder rate 50 percent higher than during the same period last year.
"It was a night of violence no city should have to put up with," Police Deputy Superintendent William Celester, who runs the city's toughest precinct, Area B in Roxbury, said Wednesday.
"The next morning, the community lives in fear."
The violence erupted during a beautiful, sunny day, a day so warm it tied a record for the date. It occurred in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and Jamaica Plain, Boston's poorest neighborhoods.
It left the city with 31 people dead of homicide this year, up from 21 during the same period last year.
Police cited at least four other 24-hour periods since 1973 as having more homicides, but said the latest violence ranked among the worst in city history.
It began when 57-year-old Jean Strandberg was shot in the temple at the liquor store in Dorchester where she worked for more than 20 years. Two robbers fled with a jar of coins collected for Easter Seals, police said.
"She was the nicest person on the face of the Earth," said Jody Gatwinn, a co-worker. "She was the best friend of a lot of people."
Police arrested Michael Adams, 17, of Boston, on the second-floor porch of a nearby tenement after the shooting. Witnesses said he was carrying a shotgun and that a second youth had been seen fleeing.
The jar of coins donated to help disabled children was smashed on a sidewalk, the pennies, nickels and dimes and a few quarters scattered. Police said the change - no more than $10 - was all that was stolen.
Adams pleaded innocent in Dorchester District Court at a tense hearing during which Judge Darrell Outlaw decried the constant crime and suggested that the National Guard may eventually need to come in to quell the violence.
"Something drastic has to take place," Outlaw said. "These are unusual times and they call for unusual measures."
Around 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Delores Newberry, 33, a mother of five, was shot in the chest as she chased at least two youths who were apparently trying to set fire to her Roxbury apartment. Police said she picked up a pitchfork to protect her son before being fatally shot.
Newberry's family has been nearly decimated by street violence. Her husband was shot in the heart at a housing project last summer. Newberry's sister was shot to death by her boyfriend on a street in 1987.
About 90 minutes before Newberry's slaying, 30-year-old Carl Benbow was found shot in the head near a Roxbury housing project and taken to Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, police said. The Boston Globe reported that a man who said he was Benbow's brother and identified himself only as the "Terminator" promised revenge.
"They just erupted guerrilla warfare," the brother was quoted as saying. "You are going to have to take me in for a homicide."
Police Commissioner Francis Roache, Mayor Raymond Flynn and Celester all echoed a similar refrain when calling for a halt to the violence: tighter gun control.
"We've got to get the illegal guns out of the hands of drug runners," Flynn said when he arrived at the scene of Benbow's slaying Tuesday night.
Two 19-year-olds, Ernesto Morrison and Nathaniel Chaney, both of Dorchester, were in stable condition at Boston City Hospital on Tuesday night, following a shooting about 7 p.m. in Mattapan. A hospital spokesman said Morrison was shot in the back and Chaney was shot in leg.
A 31-year-old man was shot Tuesday night as he stood on a Dorchester street. Stanley Kelly was listed in stable condition at Boston City Hospital with at least two gunshot wounds.
Police have not arrested any suspects and do not have a motive in those shootings.
A Roxbury woman, Aishah Jamaal, 27, also was arrested Tuesday on charges of stabbing another woman in the face during a fight in the city's red light district, the Combat Zone.
by CNB