Related: The Rotten Reverends of Boston
Here is another one:
"Pastor, activist charged with shooting English High student" by Nestor Ramos, Laura Crimaldi and John R. Ellement, Globe Staff March 05, 2015
To the kids at Boston’s English High School, where the Rev. Shaun O. Harrison Sr. was considered the dean of students, the pastor and prominent antigang activist was known by the nickname that adorned his office door: “Rev.”
And that, police say, is how a 17-year-old student found bleeding from a bullet fired into the back of his head identified the man who shot him Tuesday.
“Rev,” police and prosecutors say, was leading a double life.
Arraigned in Roxbury District Court on Thursday, Harrison, 55, is accused of attempting to execute a student he had been mentoring at English, but was also allegedly selling marijuana as part of the pastor’s drug operation.
The reverend who organized gun buybacks and preached nonviolence, officials allege, was also running drugs and hiding gang tattoos below his clerical collar. He is charged with armed assault with intent to murder, aggravated assault and battery, and unlawful possession of a firearm.
Through an attorney, Harrison denied the charges.
In court, Suffolk Assistant District Attorney David Bradley described the alleged attack as an “execution-style shooting” of a teen who survived despite being shot behind the ear.
After arranging a meeting with the unidentified student by text message, Bradley said, Harrison met him at a gas station.
“He had told the victim that they were going to a house to get marijuana and meet up with some girls for the victim,” Bradley said.
Surveillance video that prosecutors allege captured the shooting shows a man on a cellphone raise his hand toward the head of a person walking in front of him then fleeing.
Bradley said in court that the student then stumbled into traffic, where he hailed a passing car for help.
The student was taken to Boston Medical Center, where doctors removed a bullet lodged in the boy’s cheek. On Wednesday, he told police that he had been selling marijuana for Harrison for the past several months, Bradley said.
The student identified Harrison, and video showed the alleged shooter returning to an apartment on Pompeii Street that belongs to Harrison, he said.
Inside the apartment, the student told police, Harrison had a mural depicting members of the Latin Kings gang, Bradley said.
Harrison, dressed in a gray suit, shook his head in apparent disagreement during the arraignment. Judge David Poole set bail at $250,000 cash.
Three other men were arraigned at the same time on Thursday. Dante Lara, 24, Wilson Peguero, 23, and Oscar Pena, 19, were arrested after police saw them leave the Pompeii Street apartment in an alleged attempt to remove evidence. Their connection to Harrison and the alleged drug operation are under investigation, but two of the men bore tattoos similar to one of Harrison’s, said Bradley. All three face drug charges. Lara and Pena are also accused of firearms offenses.
Harrison, who has worked for the Boston public schools since 2010, started working at English High on Jan. 5, school department spokeswoman Denise Snyder said in an e-mail. At English High, Harrison was recognized as dean of students, though his official title was coordinator, Snyder said.
Defense attorney Kernahan Buck said Harrison ran anger management classes and a substance abuse program at English High. He said Harrison has a “strong record of accomplisment in the field of human services” and raised eight children in Boston. “I believe he’s not guilty,” Buck said after court.
Before joining the staff at English High, Harrison worked as a paraprofessional at the now-closed Odyssey High School in South Boston, a position he held until August 2011 when he moved to Boston Green Academy in South Boston for a job as a “community field coordinator,’’ according to a summary of his work history provided by the Boston public schools.
According to Snyder, Harrison’s role at English High was as a “community or family outreach coordinator role, charged with coordinating services for students and families.”
In a statement released Thursday, interim school Superintendent John McDonough said Harrison was fired Thursday morning.
If acquitted this will cost them.
Formerly a pastor at Charles Street A.M.E. Church, Harrison left in 2012, according to the Rev. Opal Adams, an associate pastor at the Roxbury church.
Adams said she was shocked to hear the allegations against Harrison, who she said she remembered him for his antiviolence work with area youths. “It doesn’t sound like our Shaun,” Adams said. “It’s not the character of the man we knew.”
She said she believed Harrison had left for another church nearby, but could not recall its name.
Harrison’s sister, Susan, defended her brother in an interview with the Globe.
“My brother is a good man, and I don’t know how this happened,” said Susan Harrison. “It was a setup.”
Shaun Harrison had been involved in several antiviolence and youth outreach programs around Boston over the last decade, and ran — unsuccessfully and largely unnoticed — for City Council in 2009.
Harrison also founded Operation Project Gang Out, an anticrime initiative that encouraged youths to give their illegal guns directly to him, no questions asked.
He worked briefly with Nancy Robinson of Citizens for Safety, who said she was shocked to learn of the allegations against him.
Their paths diverged, she said, when Citizens for Safety focused its crime-prevention efforts on women.
“This is totally unexpected. I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” said Robinson, who called the circumstances of Harrison’s arrest “pretty ironic.”
“Everything we do, and we work on, is to prevent this kind of incident,” Robinson said.
Harrison had also been the overseeing director of Operation Homefront, an antiviolence clergy group, though his involvement was scrubbed from the group’s Facebook page. None of the clergy involved with the program returned calls Thursday.
Though police at times turned to Harrison for assistance in building ties to the Roxbury and Dorchester communities, the efficacy of his antiviolence efforts was unclear.
“He wasn’t a heavy hitter in our eyes in terms of working for the rehabilitation of young people,’’ said a former high-ranking state probation official, who asked not to be identified by name. “We wouldn’t summarily dismiss him, but he wasn’t someone you would give a lot of credence to in terms of what he was saying.’’
The official said that Harrison never provided information about a facility or program that probation officials could assess for its effectiveness. “It was all very nebulous,’’ he said.
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I wonder if this helped lead to him:
"Police arrest 8 in South Station drug operation" by Laura Crimaldi, Globe Staff March 03, 2015
Transit police officers, who had seen an increase in drug activity at South Station, arrested eight suspected dealers during a two-week operation targeting people selling heroin and crack cocaine throughout Boston’s hub for commuter rail, subway, and bus service, an official said.
Lieutenant Detective Richard Sullivan said officers noticed a rise in drug activity at South Station over a two-to-three-month period as Boston police cracked down on drugs in nearby Chinatown and the historically snowy weather pushed dealers into the transit terminus.
Those factors, Sullivan said, created “the highest drug activity that I’ve seen in the past several years,” as users consumed drugs in the men’s bathroom and dealers sought clients in the food court, mezzanine, and exit to Track One along Atlantic Avenue on the commuter rail side of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority station.
Transit police set up a surveillance operation and dispatched plainclothes officers to make undercover drug buys between Feb. 13 and Feb. 27, Sullivan said. Aside from the eight arrests, Transit police are seeking the public’s help in identifying a man believed to have sold crack cocaine in the station, he said.
“They were getting pretty blatant,” Sullivan said. “It’s not going to be tolerated.”
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Sullivan said authorities got a sense of the problem’s scope on the first day of the operation, when police arrested a woman who approached an undercover officer after she allegedly was seen participating in hand-to-hand drug transactions. “That’s how bad it was,” he said.
The woman, Nicole Bither, 32, was charged with distributing heroin and Suboxone, Transit police said. She was ordered held on $500 bail and is due back in court March 13, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley.
Two men arrested for distributing crack cocaine also were wanted on unrelated charges, Sullivan said. Steven Davis, 35, was being sought on a warrant from Missouri charging him with forgery, police said.
Derrick Odoms, 43, was accused of not registering as a sex offender. Wark said Odoms pleaded guilty to the crack cocaine and sex offender charges Feb. 25 in the Boston Municipal Court and was sentenced to serve one year of a two-year jail sentence.
The operation focused on drug dealers, not buyers, Sullivan said. During the operation, officers encountered “a couple dozen” drug users, who were referred to treatment services by police, he said. “This drug issue that we’re experiencing . . . is something that we’re not going to arrest our way out of,” Sullivan said. “We like to take a holistic approach.”
Officers helped two people who overdosed, Sullivan said. Both survived, including one man who had heroin on him. He will not face charges under the state’s “911 Good Samaritan” law, Sullivan said.
Transit police plan to continue to use plainclothes officers to control drug activity and keep drug dealers in line, he said.
“They’ll never know when they’re there, when we’re not there, and who they’re dealing with,” Sullivan said.
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Related: New MBTA chief takes charge of agency
That should fix the MBTA and its trains. Just avoid the buses.
"Alleged heroin ring leads to arrests" by Rebecca Fiore, Globe Correspondent March 03, 2015
Three men pleaded not guilty Monday to a variety of charges, including illegal possession of weapons and ammunition, and drug trafficking, connected to what police said was a heroin ring in Dorchester.
Jose Santiago, 35, of Mattapan, was charged in Dorchester Municipal Court with conspiracy to violate drug laws. Angel Santiago, 32, of Mattapan, was charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm and one count each of unlawful possession of ammunition, heroin trafficking, and cocaine trafficking, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in a statement. It was unclear if the Santiagos are related.
Roberto Baez, 54, of Dorchester, was charged with heroin trafficking and possession with intent to distribute a Class B substance, prosecutors said. All three were arrested Friday. Baez allegedly possessed heroin and cocaine when he was arrested.
The arrests were part of an investigation into drug activity at an Esmond Street residence in Dorchester, prosecutors said. A search there uncovered heroin, cocaine, Percocet pills, steroids, two loaded pistols, more than 200 rounds of ammunition, and cash, prosecutors said.
Three other people at the Esmond Street residence also face charges, police said.
Judge Serge Georges set bail at $25,000 for Angel Santiago and ordered him to wear a GPS monitoring device and to home confinement in the event he is released on bail. Bail for Jose Santiago and Baez was set at $1,000.
The three are scheduled to return to court March 27.
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