From early Friday morning till midnight, police fanned out across Dorchester and Brockton and apprehended five young men in the May 2007 ambush killing of 16-year-old Terrence Jacobs, who had been expecting a "fair one-on-one fight," authorities said yesterday.
"What's particularly shocking here is it wasn't some late-night attack, nor was it an attack with spontaneity," Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in a phone interview yesterday. "It was a planned attack . . . in broad daylight at a time when there was heavy traffic on Blue Hill Avenue. The victim's friend is standing by during the course of this stabbing and essentially led Jacobs into this madness."
Charged with murder are Admilson Vizcaino, 16; Terrance Pabon, 18; and Paul Goode, 25, all of Dorchester; and Markeese Mitchell, 16, of Brockton. Police are looking for 28-year-old Pedro Ortiz of Dorchester, who is wanted on murder charges.
Twenty-year-old Richard Allen of Dorchester was arrested and charged as an accessory before the fact of murder.
The five suspects arrested Friday are scheduled to be arraigned in Dorchester District Court tomorrow. The juvenile suspects will be charged as adults, according to a spokesman for the Suffolk district attorney's office.
Jacobs's aunt, reached at her home in Dorchester last night, declined to comment on the arrests.
Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis said yesterday that the slaying may have been a retaliatory attack on Jacobs, a Dorchester resident, who authorities said had been engaged in a "simmering dispute" with the suspects. Davis declined to describe a specific motive.
On May 22, said Conley, a group of young men living in the neighborhood of Havelock and Wilcock streets asked a group of Jacobs's friends, including Allen, to bring the teen to the area. Conley declined to describe the group as a gang, but said more details would emerge at the arraignment.
The defendants are accused of chasing Jacobs onto busy Blue Hill Avenue early that evening and throwing him onto the ground. He was stabbed multiple times.
"Jacobs came back with Allen thinking he was going to get into a fair, one-on-one fight with a member of the Havelock-Wilcock group," Conley said. "Instead, when he got there, it was nothing of the sort."
A special Suffolk County grand jury pieced together testimony from more than a dozen witnesses over several months, said Conley.
Davis said it was unusual to see a group of defendants ranging in age from teenagers to nearly 30.
"What's troubling is that older individuals, instead of stopping this type of activity or reporting whatever conflict that they had to the authorities, decided instead to inflict this kind of violence on a young kid," Davis said. "If these people are allowed to stay in the community, their reputation and their propensity for violence creates a snowball effect in the neighborhood, bringing more violence. So this was an extremely important case for us."
Jacobs's death was one of 66 homicides in Boston last year. There have been 11 so far this year.
"To have an individual attacked by six people and murdered in such a violent way on our streets was clearly a case that needed to be resolved," Davis said. "And I'm just very happy we could bring the individuals to justice, especially with such a young victim."
John Drake can be reached at jdrake@globe.com.
