Slay suspect is described as menace in Dudley

DUDLEY -- Once a booming mill town, it is now a rural outpost of 10,000, strewn with tenements and boarded-up houses colonized by drug dealers, noisy parties, and fistfights. Even in the town's most dangerous corners, Christian Muller was known as a menace.

Roaming the streets with his pit bull, he intimidated people and assaulted those not wise enough to get out of his way. Most weekends, he could be found behind a grim row of time-worn apartment buildings.

"If you watched the movie 'Fight Club.' that's pretty much what it is on an everyday basis," said Shane Curtis, 23, a disc jockey who said he often saw Muller fighting in the neighborhood. "You turn around, and every weekend there's something going. There's always fighting. There's always drugs going on around every single day."

Muller, 26, was charged yesterday in a shooting that killed two and left a third seriously injured.

Police said Muller opened fire shortly after midnight inside a third-floor apartment above a bargain goods store on West Main Street, less than a mile from where he was arrested near his usual hangout over the border on Granite Street in Webster. Authorities said the slain, a man and woman, were in their 30s. The third victim, a woman in her 20s, had been shot in the head and is expected to survive. Officials did not release the names of the victims.

Authorities declined to discuss a motive, but said Muller was known to police.

Neighbors knew him, too.

Granite Street resident Dawn Ceppetelli, 41, said Muller once fired a gun at her daughter as she drove on Main Street, cracking her windshield. She said Muller later said he had only fired a BB gun.

"He was always out on the street, stumbling around and acting messed up," Cepetelli said.

Kenny Rodriguez, 40, a welder who was bringing clothes to Muller at the Dudley police station yesterday identified himself as the suspect's stepfather. Rodriguez said he partially blamed the court system for not committing Muller to a mental institution. He said Muller has been seeing a psychiatrist since adolescence for what Rodriguez described as a history of mental problems.

"The kid's got problems," Rodriguez. "He was born like that."

He added, "I feel sorry for him and the family."

Louis Paradis, 34, a broadcasting student who lives in the neighborhood, said Muller often walked his pit bull through the streets and was often kicked out of bars for fighting. He said Muller had been an instigator among a group of young men who fought behind a Granite Street apartment building and who once left a man lying unconscious on the street.

"Even when I was in the military, I didn't ever see fights this bad," said Curtis, who said he is a former member of the Coast Guard in Massachusetts.

"These guys fight all the time, but it's not for sport," he said. "They've got a gang of them together, and they'd beat the hell out of people, not only themselves but anybody they don't like, anybody that comes on 'their block.' "

"It's so bad I won't even go to the store alone anymore," said Ceppetelli's aunt, Dot Franek, 71, who has lived on Granite Street for 42 years.

Another neighbor, Orlando Diaz, 25, painted a similar portrait. "There's always partying; there's always fighting," Diaz said. "It's a really rough neighborhood."

Neighbors on West Main Street said a steady stream of strangers came and went. A police report says the 21-year-old woman who rents the apartment was charged with drug possession June 29.

Muller is to be arraigned in Dudley District Court today.

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in Tuesday's City & Region section about a double homicide in Dudley incorrectly reported that a neighborhood known for drug dealing, loud parties, and fighting is in Dudley. The neighborhood where that activity took place is in the town of Webster, about a mile from where the shootings occurred.)