WITH ALL due respect to Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan, it’s not about the guns; it’s about the violence.
During a press conference last Monday announcing the arrest of Trevor Bady in the alleged murder of 15-year-old Ahliana Dickey, Ryan segued into a rumination on the prevalence and use of guns in the community.
“This at least the fifth individual to die by firearms in Middlesex County,” Ryan said. “We just cannot continue to countenance this kind of violence, the use of firearms, and the using a firearm in an argument and turning that from an argument to the tragic loss of life.”
She said those were the “important pieces” when thinking about what happened to Dickey. The other deaths Ryan perhaps is referring to is April’s apparent murder-suicide in Lowell, with three dead, including a 7-year-old girl who attended Lowell Public Schools, and the murder of a 16-year-old Acton girl who was shot to death by her stepfather in what authorities say was a murder-suicide.
All of these were domestic cases that turned fatal. Of course, guns were used, but there are other cases where other weapons, including hands, are used to commit attacks on victims — predominately women.
In a jealous rage, Santos Lebron De Los Santos doused his wife, Celeste Marte-Lebron, in gasoline as she took a bath inside their Pawtucketville home in March 2021, and set her on fire.
At a White Ribbon Day event at City Hall in March, Ryan said Marte-Lebron suffered abuse from her husband for a very long time, often in front of other people.
“She had burns over 90% of her body,” Ryan said to a hushed crowd gathered in the first-floor lobby. “She survived for a month.”
Ryan’s office successfully prosecuted De Los Santos, with a jury finding him guilty of first-degree murder for the killing of his wife.
Intimacy and brutality don’t normally go together, unless, of course, it’s a case of domestic violence. Then, intimacy is part of the brutality.
Ryan sits on the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, which dedicated its 2023 report to “those who’ve died in Massachusetts because of domestic violence or occurring within the context of domestic violence, and to the victims, survivors, and surviving families of domestic violence everywhere.”
Gun violence as a factor in domestic violence deaths was not captured in the 13-member report that was presented to Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll.
But according to previous reporting by State House News Service, the report states that federal crime data showed a “dramatic increase” in domestic violence offenses from 2020 to 2022 in Massachusetts. The number of aggravated assaults — which include assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, strangulation, and assault and battery on a pregnant woman — climbed from 5,690 to 6,102.
Even before Bady allegedly shot Dickey eight times, there were reports of his physical and emotional violence against the teen, who was killed hours before her eighth-grade graduation.
During Bady’s Tuesday arraignment at Lowell District Court, Middlesex Assistant District Attorney Christopher Tarrant said family and friends interviewed during the investigation into Dickey’s death described Bady as being abusive to her, something she had confided to people about days before her death.
“Ahliana had informed others that Bady had been hitting her, giving her bruises and a bloody lip. Family members described seeing bruises on Ahliana’s legs, knees and arms as recently as June 13, 2024,” Tarrant told the court. “On June 12, 2024, Ahliana confided in one person that this defendant made statements such as ‘I am going to kill you. I am going to kill your grandma,’ and that he was going to shoot up her house, and that he threatened to kidnap her and shoot her.”
Except as an after-action report, it doesn’t appear anyone reported this alleged abuse on Dickey by Bady. It’s not clear whether mandated reporters such as teachers, school nurses or law enforcement were aware of abuse that included a bloody lip and multiple bruises.
In 2020, under then-Police Superintendent Raymond Kelly Richardson, the Lowell Police Department released a crime report prepared by its Crime Analysis/Intelligence Unit.
The report analyzed five years’ worth of computer-aided dispatch reports from 2016 through 2020, to compile the 2020 statistics. Officers use the CAD system to write accident, incident and arrest reports from their cruisers.
There were five homicides in 2020, four involved a firearm and three of those firearm deaths were gang related.
Already, in this sixth month of 2024, excluding the death of the alleged abusers, Lowell has already clocked three deaths, two of them children.
Lowell’s youngest residents are now victims of what Ryan herself called a “scourge.”
Violence against women has a long, ugly and tragic history. White Ribbon Day, the annual event that re-affirms the city’s commitment to end violence against women and all forms of gender-based violence, was started in 1991 by a group of men in Ontario, Canada, in response to a mass shooting of women at École Polytechnique, a technical/engineering college in Montreal. In 1989, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women and injured innumerable others, before killing himself.
LPD Superintendent Greg Hudon’s remarks during Ryan’s press conference called Dickey’s killing an “isolated incident” and that “with the arrest of the suspect today, there no longer appears to be any ongoing threat to public safety.”
He meant that there’s not a random killer roaming the streets of Lowell, killing 15-year-old girls, but his comments also reflect the idea that this kind of violence — now expressed against the children of Lowell — isn’t a threat to public safety.
On that subject, Maria Crooker-Capone, the executive director for Alternative House, may like a word. The advocacy organization is committed to providing comprehensive services to those affected by domestic violence, including teen dating violence.
In a December statement released following the arraignment of City Councilor Corey Robinson on two counts of domestic assault and battery on his Dracut girlfriend — who Robinson is alleged to have hit, chased, strangled and pulled out her hair — Crooker-Capone called domestic violence a “public health crisis” that “cannot be tolerated under any circ*mstances.”
In fairness to Ryan, even the Supreme Court recognized that domestic violence and guns don’t mix. Its Friday ruling preserved a federal law that prohibits people under domestic violence restraining orders from having guns. One place to start chipping away at the guns and domestic violence connection is to enforce this ruling at the local policing level.
Still, it’s not the guns; it’s the violence.
Rest in peace, Ahliana. You weren’t the first, but let’s all work to make sure that you are the last victim of domestic violence.
Rubbing elbows with the pope
UMASS PRESIDENT Marty Meehan and his wife, Jennifer Meehan, were among a Massachusetts delegation that traveled to the Vatican last month to attend the “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience” summit.
Convened by Pope Francis and hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the summit brought together leaders from around to discuss climate resiliency, including Gov. Maura Healey, state Climate Chief Melissa Hoffer, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, and UMass Chan Medical School Chancellor Michael Collins. UMass Boston Chancellor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, who serves on the executive committee of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, was one of the lead organizers of the event.
During the visit, the Meehans were able to meet the pontiff, as well as begin to chart a path forward for the UMass system to do its part to support climate resiliency.
Marty Meehan was among the leaders who signed the Planetary Call for Climate Change Resilience, for which Suárez-Orozco and Hoffer were authors in part. The measure aims to rapidly reducegreenhouse gas emissions and prioritize nature-based solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, make adaptations tounavoidable climate change, and create “societal transformation.”
An attorney returns to Billerica
AFTER GOING since the conclusion of the spring Town Meeting without formal legal counsel representing the town, the Billerica Select Board voted Monday evening to hire the services of municipal law firm Brooks & DeRensis to replace KP Law.
The board conducted interviews with representatives from law firms Brooks & DeRensis and Harrington Heep Monday, and immediately went to vote between the two.
The board asked questions to each of the two firms regarding how they would approach specific legal situations a town may encounter, their real experience in municipal law and how many client towns they represent.
After the interviews, the decision by the board shaped up to be another 3-2 vote, though each board member indicated that they thought both firms would be perfectly capable of representing the town. Board members Michael Riley and Kim Conway favored Harrington Heep, while board members Dina Favreau, Michael Rosa and Chair John Burrows favored Brooks & DeRensis.
After a 3-2 vote along those lines, Conway asked to redo the vote so that she and Riley could join with the majority to make it unanimous.
“Just to show unity. Because we are going to go with this law firm,” said Conway.
After making it a firm 5-0, the board also voted unanimously to allow the Town Counsel Subcommittee, consisting of Rosa and Favreau, to meet with the representatives of Brooks & DeRensis to set up a contract agreement.
With attorneys Paul DeRensis and John Hucksam at the meeting was Leonard Kopelman, who, funnily enough, was a co-founder of KP Law, which was originally called Kopelman & Paige. Kopelman retired from Billerica’s former law firm 10 years ago, and will now be returning with Brooks & DeRensis to take the place of that very same firm in representing Billerica. KP Law had represented Billerica through attorney Mark Reich, but less than two weeks after the election of Favreau to the Select Board, the firm announced it was choosing to pull out from Billerica. Favreau had been the lead plaintiff in the Town Center petition lawsuit against the town, for which Reich and KP Law represented the town. That lawsuit had gone in the plaintiff’s favor, forcing the special election for the Town Center project.
Dear Zoning Board of Appeals
CONTENTS OF correspondence received by Dracut’s Zoning Board of Appeals take time to be discussed in public, even on matters that could have a serious, negative impact on the town’s future.
The issue surfaced again this past week when ZBA Chair Scott Mallory acknowledged the board had received a letter by email from the attorney representing opponents of the Murphy’s Farm Chapter 40B proposal.
Mallory declined to discuss the email letter from Dennis Murphy, the lawyer representing Citizens Against Reckless Development in Dracut. (The attorney’s last name is coincidental to the project name.) The ZBA and its attorney had not had time to review it, Mallory said.
The ZBA meeting was held June 20. The email was received on June 13. Mallory noted that Karis North, who serves as town counsel for 40B projects, had not completed her review of the two-page document. North said she’d done a preliminary review of the letter and had questions, but wanted to go over it again.
Admittedly, the two-page letter was dense — 1,000 words on single-spaced lines — but it could have been summarized for the audience on Thursday night. In the copy The Sun obtained, Murphy challenges the claim of site control O’Brien Homes made to MassHousing in its application for a project eligibility letter last year — a letter O’Brien Homes received dated July 5, 2023.
In that letter, Murphy took on the issue of an 11-acre plot known as Parcel X. This land abuts Brox Industries and at a July 23, 2023 meeting of the Dracut Planning Board, O’Brien said “he had sold eleven acres of the fifty-acre Site (22% of the Site known as ‘Parcel X’) to the abutting quarry owner, Brox Industries Inc. That admission has since been corroborated by two public filings. In September last year, the Site owner O’Brien Homes Inc recorded the wetlands certificate for the Order of Resource Area Delineation for the Site, which expressly released from certification ‘Parcel X’…) Earlier this year, the O’Brien Homes Inc. mortgaged Parcel X for a million dollars ($1,000,000) to an entity affiliated with Brox, Sunset Rock, LLC,” the letter states.
According to Murphy, a similar representation was made at meetings of the Conservation Commission.
Since then, Kevin O’Brien, principal of O’Brien Homes, has denied the sale or intent to sell this land to Brox. And his attorney, Daniel Borenstein, repeated that denial on Thursday night,
Surely, it should have been possible to strip the letter of legalese and give a quick summary to those attending the June 20 meeting. Perhaps, something along the lines of, “The opponent’s letter challenges the claim of site control over 11 acres that O’Brien Homes made to MassHousing last year. We will review this letter with town counsel, and we will look at minutes of the Planning Board and Conservation Commission where the matter has also been discussed.”
Mentioning that the board will post the letter, which after all is a public record, on the ZBA website would also be appropriate.
This is not the first time an event like this has happened. In March, CARDD, which opposes the project, submitted a letter to the ZBA, which the board refused to discuss. This letter was received the day before the meeting, so perhaps members had not had time to digest its contents. Some members, however, had not even read it.
News of “the letter” overshadowed the meeting. Several references were made to “the letter” but what it said remained a mystery,
When it came time for public comment, however, CARDD member Linda Hayes urged the board to let her read the letter aloud. Her request was denied. In her comments, however, she disclosed that the author was CARDD’s attorney.
After the meeting, The Sun requested and received a copy of the letter from CARDD. The letter points to a decision by the Housing Appeals Committee staying, or halting, ZBA hearings in Methuen on the Murphy’s Farm project.
Attorney Murphy told the ZBA it must suspend its ongoing public hearing on the proposed Murphy’s Farm development in East Dracut. He told the ZBA it would violate the law to continue.
The contents of that warning, however, went undisclosed to anyone witnessing the March 21 ZBA meeting if they were not members of the ZBA, counsel for the ZBA, or the attorney for the developer of the proposed complex.
Several issues, which could delay the hearing process, coalesced at that meeting and “the letter,” as it was described by those who had it in their possession, pointed out one of them.
ZBA chair Scott Mallory acknowledged the letter in vague language, saying there were questions about “how the process should continue considering things that have come to light.”
But news of “the letter” seemed to overshadow his updates. Perhaps, if he’d been more open about its claim, the town would have been better served.
This week’s Column was prepared by reporters Melanie Gilbert in Lowell, Peter Currier in Billerica, Prudence Brighton in Dracut, and Enterprise Editor Alana Melanson.
