There are two Bostons, and most of the time we’re fortunate enough to live in the safe one.
There’s the Boston Northeastern is in, where most of the time we’re safe and secure, and we only run into trouble when we’re looking for it.
Then there’s the Boston we don’t usually see. The Boston where close to 50 people, many of them younger than me, have been murdered so far this year. The Boston where, just this weekend, three boys – ages 10, 11 and 12 – were shot at the Academy Home housing development in Roxbury, Boston Police reported.
That is the Boston where violent crimes are more common. Where hearses don’t just hold the old and the sick, but the young and bullet-ridden.
For most of my time at Northeastern, we as students have been able to brush off the violence. That sort of thing doesn’t happen to Us, it happens to Them, we as students think.
My freshman year, in 2005, three separate shootings hit the Ruggles T station, The News reported. One of my roommates, Marc, actually deemed the T stop Struggles. But again, it wasn’t Us, so We didn’t care. Those Orange Line tracks are, for many students, a literal wall. It’s a different world on the other side of it, a world we largely ignore.
Everything changed last May, when 22-year-old Rebecca Payne, a senior athletic training student, was found brutally murdered in her Parker Hill Avenue apartment. It was an event that, more than anything that has happened in my time at Northeastern, shook the campus to its core.
Everyone I know seemed to get a call from his or her parents that night or in the days that followed. We expected answers, but instead we got more questions.
As the news was breaking, I called my parents and told them what I knew. I assured them I’d be even more conscious of my safety and that I would avoid walking alone at night. They didn’t have to worry, I told them.
“But Matthew,” my mother said over the phone, “I really wish you were doing all that already.”
Before that day, I didn’t question my safety in Boston. After, though, I wasn’t so sure.
On Aug. 19, the Boston Police Department announced a $25,000 reward for information leading to the murderer, funded by the Payne family, Northeastern and Becca’s former employer, Legal Seafoods.
“We know that there are people who have valuable information, so we ask individuals to look deep into their hearts and help us bring the person responsible for this horrible and senseless act to justice,” Rebecca’s father, Nicholas Payne, said in a statement released by the Boston Police Department.
We’re all looking for answers about that night. We’re looking to be reassured. We’re looking for solace. But it seems most of us aren’t getting that.
This summer, I talked to a mother who accompanied her daughter to a session about safety on campus. She told me she was concerned for her daughter’s safety in Boston, just a few months after a girl a few years older than her was shot and killed. I wasn’t sure I could say anything to reassure her.
I told her the same thing I told my mother, the same thing I’ve told myself: The murder of Becca Payne was out of the ordinary, an anomaly. Things like that don’t really happen here.
I don’t know if she believed me. And I don’t think I believe me either.
A month later, a 7-year-old boy was shot and injured in his front yard on Parker Street. Police reported the shooter was aiming for his cousin, who was also shot. I pass that front yard every day, as I travel from my Mission Hill apartment to campus. Was the violence getting closer, or was I just noticing it more often?
When I woke up yesterday morning, I got an instant message from a fellow News staff member. She said a man, who police on the scene told her was a Northeastern student, was stabbed outside her Westland Avenue apartment earlier that morning. Yesterday, Boston Police released a statement saying the victim was stabbed and suffered from injuries that were not life-threatening.
I know one thing now: It isn’t Us and Them anymore. We’re all Us now.
– Matt Collette can be reached at [email protected].
