Thursday, 4:30 PM
Family laments loss of young life
By Brian R. Ballou, Globe Staff
Seconds after stepping off a train at the Jackson Square MBTA Station, Luis Gerena called his stepmother from his new cellphone and told her he was just five minutes from home.
When the boy did not show up 20 minutes later, his father, who has the same name, tried calling him, using the walkie-talkie feature on the phone. The call went through, but there was no answer. He tried again seconds later, but the phone had been turned off. A short while later, he was driving through the neighborhood and noticed flashing lights and yellow police tape at the T station. His heart sank.
"When I saw the tape, I got a feeling they killed my son," the elder Gerena said Tuesday. He hurried home, grabbed a picture of his son, and headed to a nearby police precinct, where his feeling was confirmed.
"There was no reason, no reason to kill him," the father said. "Why would anyone shoot a 13-year-old boy?"
Moments after the sixth-grader made that call to his stepmother, he was shot in the chest several times on Horan Way inside the Bromley-Heath housing development in Jamaica Plain, next to the T station. Police say he then ran back toward the station and fell to the ground, blood flowing from his chest.
Luis Gerena, who was seven months shy of his 14th birthday, is the youngest victim of homicide on Boston streets in at least two years. His death follows the separate homicides of two other boys, both 14, in the past three weeks. No arrests have been made in any of the cases. Police have not determined whether he was targeted or a victim of a random attack or robbery, but his father said his son’s Nextel Boost Mobile phone, which he bought for him for $300, was missing when police found his body.
Tuesday, the teen’s relatives and friends gathered in the living room of the small, second-story apartment in Mission Hill where he lived with his grandmother. They described him as a quiet boy who would sit in front of the computer in the living room after returning from school and spend hours chatting on-line with friends. "He didn’t hang out in the streets, he wasn’t into that," his father said.
He was into Hip-Hop fashion, and often sported baseball caps, oversized hooded sweaters, earrings and the latest athletic shoes, his relatives said. Two columns of Nike shoe boxes were neatly stacked beside his bed, and his closet was full of athletic wear and baggy jeans. Taped on his closet door was a sheet of paper with the word 'Science' written across the top. On the paper, he made notes about the digestive system and other health topics, a primer, apparently for an upcoming school test, that he came face to face with every time he got dressed.
The boy also kept a calendar book. His last entry was on Friday, just as he was preparing to leave class. He wrote in the space for that date "Have a safe weekend."
Hours after school got out, after visiting a girlfriend in Charlestown, he was riding the train home. But instead of stopping at the Roxbury Crossing T Station, as he always did after dark, he continued to the Jackson Square stop. "I don’t know what made my son get off at the Jackson Square stop," his father said. "He never got off there after dark because it wasn’t safe." The walk home from the Jackson Square station was about 15 minutes quicker than from the Roxbury stop, but Luis didn’t mind the longer walk, his father said.
Claudio Martinez, the executive director of the Hyde Square Task Force, an anti-violence, anti-drug program, said he often hears from teens about how they avoid the Jackson Square station, sometimes adding as much as an hour to their commute. "After living here and being involved in this issue for 20 years, it continues to be very hard to take. I’ve lost plenty of friends to senseless violence, and the rhetoric about stopping teen violence needs to be matched with resources," he said.
Gerena and Emmanuel Saintil, one of the other victims, were classmates at the Clarence R. Edwards Elementary School. But Gerena had been a student there for only four months, after transferring from the Jackson/Mann Elementary School in Allston, the school he attended since first grade. Tuesday, crisis counselors met with students at Jackson/Mann.
"He was a lovely little boy, he had beautiful olive skin and the longest lashes of any kid I ever saw," said Joanne Collins Russell, the principal of Jackson/Mann, sitting in her office. She said the sixth grader came back to visit her several days before Christmas. "I was quite surprised to see him because when he left in June, he said he was never going to come back. But now he was asking me if he could come back."
Collins Russell recalled a heated argument her former student had with another boy at the school. Gerena had swapped his MP3 with the student for a cell phone, which later stopped working. Gerena wanted his player back, but the student had sold it. Collins Russell called their parents in. The elder Gerena told his son he had made a mistake in trading something so valuable for something he wasn’t sure was working properly and would have to learn from it. ‘‘That was powerful,’’ Collins Russell said.
Tuesday, his father, sitting in the living room, opened a box of athletic shoes and held one of the shoes up in the palm of his hand.
"These are the ones that he wanted," the father said. "He’ll be buried with these."
