"Longtime fugitive charged in 2003 murder case" by Evan Allen Globe Staff July 10, 2015
After nearly 10 years as a fugitive, Carlos Silva bowed his head and walked into the Suffolk Superior courtroom Friday afternoon to face two charges of first-degree murder.
He did not look out into the audience, where the sister of one of his alleged victims sat clutching two photographs of her brother.
Silva was ordered held without bail Friday after pleading not guilty to charges that he acted as a getaway driver during the 2003 shooting that claimed the life of 22-year-old Jose DaVeiga, who died immediately after being shot, and Christopher Carvalho, who was paralyzed and died four years later of pneumonia.
Silva was arrested Thursday in Hyde Park. He had been on the run since 2006.
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On April 28, 2003, around 2:30 a.m., Silva and a group of men associated with a Cape Verdean gang allegedly spotted DaVeiga and Carvalho, who were part of a larger group leaving a club in Chinatown, heading to get some food, according to prosecutors.
Silva’s group believed that at least one of the men with DaVeiga and Carvalho had been involved in a shooting earlier in the month, and followed after them in two cars.
Silva allegedly drove the first car. When the car DaVeiga and Carvalho were in stopped at a traffic light at the intersection of East Berkeley and Albany streets, a man in the car Silva was allegedly driving opened fire, prosecutors said. As the shots struck the car, it crashed into a parked car, and two men in the pursuing vehicle opened the door and began shooting.
DaVeiga died; Carvalho was paralyzed from the neck down. He died of pneumonia in 2007 at the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain, where prosecutors said he was confined to a bed and relied upon a machine to breathe.
“He suffered four years after being shot,” said Carvalho’s sister. “He suffered.”
Within an hour of the killing, Boston Police stopped the minivan that Silva and others from the group were riding in, and found one of the guns allegedly used in the shooting.
In September 2003, prosecutors said, Silva agreed to testify about the slaying in exchange for being indicted as an accessory after the fact to murder for his role.
Silva admitted his role in the killing before a grand jury, prosecutors said. But on the eve of the trial, both Silva and another cooperating defendant, Danny Fernandes, went into hiding.
Prosecutors had to dismiss the murder indictments against two of the three charged shooters; the third was convicted.
Fernandes surrendered after the trial and is now in prison, according to a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F. Conley.
But Silva remained elusive, acquiring at least one fake identity and a Rhode Island driver’s license with a fake name, according to prosecutors.
He was arrested Thursday by a joint task force of United States Marshals and Boston Police detectives.
Prosecutors said Carvalho was the fifth cousin in one family to die from violent crime.
Marcellena Carvalho said her brother was a happy and hardworking man, and a loving father to his daughter, who is now a teenager.
“He’s missing from all our family functions,” she said. “It’s very sad. It’s torn us apart.”
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