Still waiting for the truth
Dorothy Bowen is skeptical of official promises of a swift and open investigation into the fatal shooting of Victoria Snelgrove by Boston police. That's because she is still waiting for answers four months after Boston police shot and killed her estranged husband.
Mayor Thomas M. Menino did not stop by to express his condolences last June after police killed Bert W. Bowen. Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole did not attend his wake. And District Attorney Daniel F. Conley did not deliver on his pledge to issue a report in 30 days that would reconcile conflicting accounts of the shooting. Officers said they shouted warnings and opened fire when Bowen threatened them with a gun after a predawn traffic stop and a scuffle; witnesses said they heard no warnings and that Bowen was unarmed and fleeing on foot when police shot him.
''There is nothing more important to the public trust than the investigation of a police shooting," Conley said at the time. Yesterday, he said he is still reviewing the police investigation into Bowen's death. He also said he has not received the police report on another fatal shooting by Boston officers that occurred less than a week later. Police killed Luis Gonzalez, 58, in his South End apartment after the mentally disturbed man allegedly threatened them with a knife. ''I'm not insensitive to the fact that families want answers quickly, but the most important thing is to take the time and get it right," Conley said.
The officers involved in both shootings, briefly placed on administrative leave, are back on the street, according to Beverly Ford, a spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department.
The internal investigation might move more expeditiously for Snelgrove's family, Bowen's widow predicted yesterday. All lives are not necessarily equal, she said.
Bowen's husband was a 40-year-old black man on parole for armed robbery, living in a halfway house for drug abusers. Gonzalez was a 58-year-old alcoholic whose erratic and dangerous behavior relatives and neighbors attributed to mental illness. The Snelgroves' daughter was a promising 21-year-old white college student, an innocent bystander in a raucous crowd celebrating a Boston Red Sox pennant win.
''May all the dead rest in peace, but I don't really think they see my husband and this girl the same way," said Dorothy Bowen, acknowledging that her husband's long and violent rap sheet makes him a less sympathetic victim to the public, as well. ''He was still a human being and I'd like some answers, too," she said.
Whatever the resums of the dead, the only relevant questions about the shootings of Snelgrove, Bowen, and Gonzalez concern what happened immediately preceding, during, and after police opened fire. The Firearms Discharge Investigations Team of the Boston Police Department conducts those inquiries, and Conley reviews them.
He sees no conflict of interest in having police investigate their own. ''The police do the investigation, but I have faith in their impartiality," Conley said. ''If I don't agree with a conclusion, I'm not going to just accept it. I'm going to follow the facts and the law."
The more than 1,000-page report that is on Conley's desk might hold the answers that Bowen's widow is after. Did investigators trace the handgun and the crack that police said they found at the scene? Why were many of her husband's wounds in his back if he was pointing a gun at the officers in pursuit? Were the witnesses who contradicted police accounts lying?
Dorothy Bowen concedes she might not like what she hears. All she wants, she said yesterday, is the same thing that the families of Luis Gonzalez and Victoria Snelgrove want: an honest answer to what went wrong when a loved one crossed paths with the Boston police.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.
