14-year-old is shot to death in Brockton

BROCKTON -- Edward Leate was home late Sunday afternoon when he heard three or four popping sounds outside. He thought they were firecrackers, but when his boxer, Leonardo, started barking ferociously, Leate decided to look out the window. On Macy Avenue, he saw a young boy lying on the street and another one in a red-hooded shirt pedaling away on a bicycle.

Leate called 911, then rushed to the fallen boy to ask him if he was all right. All that 14-year-old Marvin Constant could do, Leate said, was to raise his head slightly and gasp for air.

"Help is on the way, buddy," Leate, 62, recalled telling Constant. The boy, an eighth-grader who lived about a mile away, was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Brockton police Chief William Conlon said he could not remember another time when someone so young was killed in an episode that did not stem from a domestic dispute.

"In terms of youth violence, this is the youngest I recall ever," said Conlon, who has served as a police officer in Brockton for 21 years. "It's disturbing to say the least."

Conlon said police are interviewing a person of interest, but he declined to provide details. Leate said officers later brought a young boy to his house and asked him if he looked like the one he saw on the bike. Leate said he did not recognize him. There have been no arrests in the shooting, said Assistant District Attorney Bridget Norton Middleton.

Constant, who turned 14 last month, was known to police, Conlon said. He declined to be more specific, because Constant was a juvenile.

The boy attended B.B. Russell Alternative School, a school for troubled children who have had problems with the law or trouble fitting in at other city schools, according to a school district spokeswoman.

Constant's parents said yesterday that they did not recall their son having any enemies.

"None that I know of; we never heard anything," said Gesner Constant, his father, who sat next to the boy's mother, Maguy, in the lower floor of their tidy gray-blue house on Ferris Avenue.

Friends and relatives flocked to the house to comfort the couple, who said their boy was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.

"We wish we had talked to him," Gesner Constant said. "It's every parent's wish to have one last word with their child. We didn't have it."

They described him as a typical teenager who was too lazy to learn French, the language of his parents' native country, Haiti, but who adored sports, particularly football and basketball, and hanging out with his many friends.

Gesner Constant said he knows little about what led to his son's death.

"It doesn't matter; he's dead," he said, as Maguy Constant looked at the floor silently.

"All we have to do now is to bury him," Gesner Constant said. He walked into another room and began to wail his son's name as a friend rushed to his side to comfort him. The cries were so loud they could be heard from the street.

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.