MOTHER OF SHOT CHILD SAYS ‘WALSH IS A LIAR’
Top cop stands by info dad was target
The mother of the 6-yearold boy who was wounded by gunfire in Roxbury lashed out at Mayor Martin J. Walsh last night, calling him a “liar” and insisting her son’s father was not the intended target of Sunday night’s shooting.
“Mayor Walsh is a liar,” the mother told the Herald during a brief phone conversation from Boston Medical Center, where her son is hospitalized. “He lied about my kid’s father that he said that he was a target, when he was not a target. We were innocent bystanders. He did not say that. He didn’t speak to him at all.”
The mother, who did not want her name used, said her son’s condition was “good.”
She then asked for privacy.
“I’m worried about my kid,” she said.
Police Commissioner William B. Evans last night repeated that the father was the one who told investigators at the Copeland Street crime scene that the bullets were meant for him.
“He’s the one who said himself he was the target. That’s what he told my officers up there,” Evans told the Herald last night. “He was combative ... and combative to the poor doctors.”
The Herald has learned the 32-year-old father was recently let out of prison after doing time for a gun conviction.
“We have a good sense the father knows who did it, and we are liable to face some retaliatory shootings here,” Evans said earlier yesterday on Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” show. He added the father is being uncooperative.
The child was shot in the lower back at 9:30 p.m. Sunday near Warren and Copeland streets, police said. His injuries were not considered life-threatening.
Police are looking for a silver vehicle with two men, aged 18 to 20, who fired multiple rounds from the intersection and hit the child as he was walking home from a dinner party with his dad.
Court records show the boy’s father has a lengthy criminal record, including pleading guilty to possession of a firearm without a license in 2003. That landed him in MCI-Cedar Junction in Walpole, records show. A knife assault added to that sentence, according to records.
In 2005, he was charged again with possession of a firearm without a license, but it was knocked down to
a first offense, and he was sent to Walpole again, according to his court file.
He was also charged with numerous probation violations in 2010. In 2012, he was charged with carrying a gun without a license for a third time as an armed career criminal, and was given a maximum of 4 1⁄ 2 years in Walpole in January 2013 and a minimum of four years, his file reads.
Evans said last night that police “are looking at the gang angle based on the target.”
The 6-year-old boy was the third child shot in Roxbury in the past five months. A 9-year-old girl was paralyzed from the waist down last October following a shooting at a birthday party at the Alice Heyward Taylor Apartments in Mission Hill. That month, a 2-yearold girl was wounded in her leg and hand while sitting in the backseat of her father’s car when a gunman opened fire on Winslow Street near Dudley Square and then took off on a scooter.