Residents shaken after violent night in city
Police did not release ID’s of the four victims, two of whom were fatally shot
When she finished work on Sunday, Kay Chambers couldn’t get back to the Mattapan home where she has lived for 50 years. Police had closed Wildwood Street while they investigated a double shooting that left one of her neighbors dead.
“It’s awful,” Chambers said Monday. “It’s scary.”
One of the first warm weekends of this year ended in violence, with police officers scrambling to several different neighborhoods across the city over the course of a few hours on Sunday night as they responded to multiple shootings that left two people dead, two wounded, and communities shaken.
One man was killed and another suffered life-threatening wounds in the double shooting on Wildwood Street around 8:30 p.m. Right around the same time, a man showed up at a Boston hospital with gunshot wounds he suffered on Centre Street in Dorchester; he later died, according to police, who said they don’t believe the shootings to be related.
Another man was shot downtown on Kingston Street shortly before 10 p.m. and is expected to survive, after he also went to a local hospital for treatment, police said.
Half an hour after that shooting, gunshots rang out on Normandy Street, bringing police officers to the corner of Intervale Street. No one was struck by what one neighbor described as multiple shots fired in rapid succession. Officers responding to the scene arrested three men on weapons charges there.
Police did not release the names of any of the shooting victims.
On Wildwood, a woman who lived nearby said she’d been close childhood friends with the dead man. They’d grown apart, she said, but reconnected now that they lived nearby. Just this weekend she saw him and they talked about their children, who
‘We had a pretty violent night in the city. We do ask for the public’s help. It’s really important.’
BOSTON POLICE COMMISSIONER MICHAEL COX, at the shooting scene in Mattapan on Sunday night
are around the same age.
“He was a good person — he didn’t get into fights,” she said. “He’s just a normal guy.”
On Sunday night, she’d heard sirens and yelling, but she never imagined the activity could have something to do with her friend.
“This is why I just stay in the house,” she said, smiling bitterly. “It sucks that it has to be like this.”
Police continued to investigate the double shooting, which sent another man to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.
Little information was available about the other fatal shooting, which police on Monday said they believe happened in the 300 block of Centre Street in Dorchester. The area was quiet on Monday morning, and multiple neighbors said they don’t know what happened.
“Tonight we had a pretty violent night in the city,” Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said at the shooting scene in Mattapan on Sunday night. “We do ask for the public’s help. It’s really important.”
These killings are the 16th and 17 th of the year in Boston, police said.
City Councilor Michael Flaherty, the public safety chair, said “we need a plan” as the city heads into the summer, when warmer weather can bring increases in street violence.
“Visibility and community policing are crucial if we want to be able to stem the violence,” Flaherty, an at-large councilor from South Boston, told the Globe.
A spokesman for Mayor Michelle Wu said the shootings are “unacceptable and impact our city’s residents and families across neighborhoods.”
The city said “senior officials” were on scene investigating the incidents and connecting residents with the Neighborhood Trauma Team.
“The City is working closely alongside our public safety officials and neighborhood partners to support residents and families, target interventions and get guns off the street,” the Wu spokesman said in a statement, adding that the Boston Police Department is looking to build trust with communities and use data for violence-intervention programs.
“As we head into summer, we will continue to dedicate the full weight of all city departments across all neighborhoods to keep our residents safe and healthy,” the spokesman said. Wu’s office said Isaac Yablo, her adviser on community safety, will continue to go to scenes of major acts of violence.
At the Mattapan scene where two men were shot outside a three-decker, neighbors said they heard four or five gunshots. About an hour later, one neighbor, who declined to be named, heard a woman crying loudly, she said.
“It’s sad. You get kind of immune to it because it does happen quite a bit,” she said. “But not around here.”
Another neighbor said her children heard the shots ring out.
“They were scared,” she said. “Mostly older people live here — things like that don’t happen.”
The shooting on Wildwood Street comes nearly four years after another fatal shooting there. On July 19, 2020, K’Shaun Webster, 17, and Dante Carlor, 16, were shot while inside an apartment at 46 Wildwood St. No arrests have been made.
Police said they made multiple gun arrests over the weekend, including on Johnson Street in Dorchester, near the JFK/UMass MBTA stop in Columbia Point, and on Norfolk Street in Dorchester.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @cotterreporter. Kate Armanini can be reached at kate.armanini@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @KateArmanini.John R. Ellement of the Globe staff and Globe correspondent Nick Stoico contributed to this report.