Girl stabbed awaiting bus at T stop; boy arrested

Kelly Lee Johnson's family had given her a strict rule: Stay away from the Jackson Square MBTA station near her home at the Bromley Heath housing development in Jamaica Plain.

"We tell our kids over and over again not to go near Jackson Square; it's dangerous," said her uncle, C.L. Johnson, who is helping to raise Kelly. "There are too many kids hanging around there, for no reason but trouble."

Yesterday, Kelly, 14, was stabbed once in the abdomen at the Jackson Square stop while waiting for the bus to take her to the Timilty Middle School in Roxbury, where she is an eighth-grader. Kelly was rushed to the hospital where surgeons removed sections of her liver, her uncle said.

MBTA police said they have arrested a 15-year-old boy near the scene based on information they received from two T bus drivers and other witnesses. The teenager's name was not released, but his family member said the arrested youth was a seventh-grader who attends school in Mattapan.

T police said yesterday they were investigating what prompted the stabbing. Kelly was unable to speak with detectives, and the 15-year-old boy's mother refused to let him talk with police, said Deputy Police Chief Thomas McCarthy of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. A knife was found near the scene and was being tested to determine whether it was the weapon used in the stabbing.

The 15-year-old pleaded not guilty yesterday in Boston Juvenile Court to charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and armed assault with intent to murder, according to McCarthy and a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley. The boy is being held in the custody of the state Department of Youth Services on $50,000 cash bail. McCarthy said his department has never arrested the boy before.

Shortly after the boy was arrested, his grandmother, Josephine Banks, told the Globe in an interview at her Bromley Heath apartment that her grandson had academic problems. "He just wouldn't go to school," she said. Meanwhile, Johnson's friends and family members, who call her Lee, say it was the first time she had disobeyed her uncle by waiting for the bus at Jackson Square station, instead of a bus stop closer to home.

"I almost lost my baby today. Why was she there?" said C.L. Johnson, who is raising three of his sister's daughters and two sons with his wife, Katrina.

Another student told him that his niece broke the rules and went to Jackson Square station because she and her friends were looking to get change for a dollar. Children from the neighborhood also told Johnson that the boy suspected in the stabbing frequently hassled Kelly Johnson, but they didn't know why, he said.

A security guard at the development, C.L. Johnson grew up in Bromley Heath and knows about the peer pressure to misbehave. "I don't raise my kids to be thugs. I always tell them just because they live in the projects doesn't mean they have to act like it," he said. "I tell them, "You can't grow up and be somebody if you're dead.' "

A mother and daughter who live in Bromley Heath also identified the arrested teen, but insisted that he was not the assailant, but a "good citizen" trying to help a wounded teen.

The pair, who said they witnessed only a portion of the incident and not the stabbing, said they gave their names to police. They did not want the Globe to identify them out of concern for their safety, they said.

The mother and daughter said they know the boy and his family from the development where they were neighbors until the boy, his mother, and two sisters recently moved to Grove Hall in Roxbury.

The mother said she was in her bedroom in her third floor apartment when she heard a ruckus going on at the station. She looked out her window, and her daughter looked out from a bathroom window, and they said they saw Kelly running around the corner of an entrance to Jackson Square Station with the boy and at least two other boys following her.

" `I've been stabbed! I've been stabbed,' " the mother recalled Kelly shouting as the girl held the left side of her stomach. Fearing that the girl would bleed to death if she continued to run, the mother said she opened her bedroom window and shouted to the girl to stop running and ordered the boy to persuade her to stay still.

"He kept telling her, `Sit down, sit down,' " the mother said. " `They are going to call an ambulance!' "

She said she saw a knife in Kelly's hands and heard the boy coaxing her to give him the weapon. "She had the knife," the mother said. "She had given it to him, and he took it and threw it down the sewer."

McCarthy said police recovered the knife from the sewer.

The mother said Kelly repeatedly shouted she was going to get into trouble for being at Jackson Square Station because she had been ordered to stay away from there. "She was more worried about getting into trouble than she was about the stab wound," the mother said.

At the Timilty Middle School yesterday the hallways were buzzing with news of the stabbing.

Bernard Joseph, 13, of Roxbury, an eighth-grader at the school, said he found out about it when a girl ran into the school crying and screaming, "Kelly got stabbed!" He said that he had known Kelly for two years and that she had been friends with Shawn Adams, the 15-year-old who was fatally stabbed outside Dudley Station last month.

At Jackson Square Station yesterday afternoon, some students acknowledged that they tread warily in the area, walking with their heads down, avoiding eye contact with known troublemakers or cutting through the station itself.

"Sometimes people come up to you and ask you what projects you're from," said Mileyka Cooper, 17, a student from West Roxbury High. "If they don't like where you're from, they'll follow you. It's just everyday life, I'm used to it."

The Johnson family said the stabbing was a wake-up call for them to finally get out of Bromley Heath and Boston altogether.

"It's so strange, we were looking at real estate ads from Florida right before we heard Lee got stabbed," said her aunt, Katrina Johnson, an entertainer for a popular cruise line. "We could have been planning a funeral today. Looks like God is giving us a second chance."

Globe correspondent Jessica Bennett contributed to this report.