Thursday, 4:30 PM
City’s first murder victim of 2007 is 14
By Mac Daniel and Michael Levenson, Globe Staff
The New Year was not even six hours old when 14-year-old Jason Fernandes was shot dead outside his grandmother’s house in Dorchester on Monday.
The eighth-grader at South Junior High School in Brockton, Boston’s first homicide victim of the year, was one of five people shot in three separate attacks, all of which occurred within a few blocks of one another in the span of 20 minutes, police said.
Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis vowed Monday to flood the neighborhood, which has been scarred by gun violence, with extra police patrols. He expressed outrage at the lack of cooperation from witnesses.
"It really is astonishing to me that a 14-year-old has been murdered and individuals who can help identify the person responsible have been unwilling to provide us with information," Davis said at a press conference at police headquarters.
Davis said there had been no arrests in the attacks, which appeared to be unconnected.
He said Fernandes and an 18-year-old, identified by relatives as Fernandes’s cousin, "Baby" Rezendes, were gunned down just before 5:45 a.m. after a dispute erupted at a house party on Clarkson Street.
"He was a good kid," Elisa Fernandes said of her brother, in a telephone interview Monday. "He didn’t even want to come to Boston. I should have never brought him here ... All I know is he’s a quiet kid. He doesn’t like partying a lot, and even when I do little family things with myself, he just stays in his room."
The slaying, in a neighborhood that absorbed much of Boston’s violence last year, rocked residents who were just waking up to the New Year on Monday.
It came just after the conclusion of one of the city’s bloodiest years in a decade and a little more than 12 hours after the final homicide victim of 2006 was shot near South Station. The 74 slayings recorded in Boston last year were one shy of the total in 2005.
This year's violence began at 5:22 a.m., when two men were shot and wounded in a house on Glendale Street. The men, one in his 60s, the other in his 20s, were shot after a dispute erupted at a party at the house, police said. Both victims, whom police did not identify, were expected to survive.
At 5:43 a.m., a 19-year-old man walked into Boston Medical Center with a gunshot wound to his toe. The victim, whom police did not name, told authorities he had been walking on Quincy Street when an unknown assailant shot him and fled in a car on Bowdoin Street.
Two minutes later, police responded to the Clarkson Street shootings.
Jason Fernandes was the second 14-year-old to be fatally shot in Boston in recent weeks. Emmanuel B. Saintil of Mattapan was shot in the chest three days before Christmas on Cummins Highway in Roslindale. He was walking home with his 13-year-old friend, who also was shot but survived.
Davis vowed a "strong and coordinated response, in our ceaseless efforts to end gun violence in our neighborhoods."
Staff writers Maria Cramer and Donovan Slack contributed to this report. Daniel can be reached at mdaniel@globe.com, Levenson at mlevenson@globe.com.
