Slaying troubles Cape Verdeans
At the corner of Wendover and Humphreys streets, in the heart of Dorchester's Cape Verdean community, the friends of Bobby Mendes yesterday paid tribute to their fallen buddy by pouring beer around the spot where, 18 hours earlier, his blood had spilled when he was stabbed to death Tuesday night.
In words that have become a fatalistic mantra across the city, his friends say the 23-year-old Mendes was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
That evocation holds true not only for the friends and family of Mendes, Cape Verdeans say, but for the 20,000 members of their Boston community as well.
Mendes' sudden death came on the eve of yesterday's arrival in Greater Boston of Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro, the first freely-elected president of Cape Verde. With Tuesday's 8 p.m. stabbing, Mendes' killer not only cut the life out of the Dorchester man, but split the psyche of the quiet Cape Verdean community, which has been held together by folk customs and Catholic rituals since its people first came to America as whalers from their island off the coast of Africa.
"It's probably the worst thing the president will hear," said George Fidalgo, owner of the F and T/Davey's Market on Dudley Street.
Instead of welcoming the prestigious head of state, the Cape Verdean community must now also mourn the passing of a man who left behind a father and mother, two brothers and a sister, and a fiancee with a diamond ring on her finger.
"I miss him," said 21-year-old Christina Centeio, who was comforted by her sister and five close friends in the bleacher area of the neighborhood park on Norfolk Avenue, where she and Mendes shared one of their first kisses five years ago. "He'll always be a part of my heart."
Instead of feeling the anticipation of glimpsing Monteiro tomorrow as he visits St. Patrick's Church in Roxbury, the Cape Verdean community is now also anxious over the talk of revenge that Fidalgo and others say is reverberating through a tight-knit neighborhood tucked between Edward Everett Square and Uphams Corner.
Instead of focusing, through Monteiro's talks, on the political and economic future of their homeland, some are now questioning whether they want to spend the future in their adopted country.
And there is a growing concern in the neighborhood that Mendes' killer, who police said remained at large last night, is Cape Verdean, too.
On the street, friends of Mendes discounted the rumor that his death was gang-related.
But for members of the older generation, who grew up in a country where one makes the sign of the cross even before slaughtering a chicken, Mendes' slaying was a dramatic signal that their children were becoming victims of an Americanization fraught with gangs, guns and drugs. In August, 4-year-old Christopher DePina was injured by a stray bullet, allegedly fired by a member of the Columbia Road Falcons, a Dorchester gang that sources say has a Cape Verdean component.
"People are concerned," said Fidalgo, 39, who hosts a Saturday evening Cape Verdean radio show on AM 1150. "What's the future for our kids?"
Law enforcement sources said Mendes wasn't perfect. They said he was committed to DYS custody in 1987 after being charged as a juvenile with breaking and entering in the nighttime.
But Centeio, a service associate at Bank of Boston, said she knew him as her prince.
And as she walked through her neighborhood yesterday, she was offered hugs and honks of the horn to note his passing.
A candlelight vigil was held last night at the site of Mendes' killing.
Earlier, on Groom Street, where Centeio lived with her fiance and his family, members of the Cape Verdean community made sure that those Mendes left behind were nourished with homemade Cape Verdean dishes as mourners filled the porches and sidewalks in numbers that made it seem as if a president was being honored.
