At park, hope turns to sadness

John Beresford and his partner decided to buy the quaint three-family house overlooking Dorchester's Ronan Park five years ago because they loved the sweeping views of Dorchester Bay. They did not love the drug deals and prostitute tricks that took place in a lower portion of the park, where thickets of brush offered shelter to thieves and muggers, so they set about changing it.

With a neighbor, Larysa Kulynych, they formed the Friends of Ronan Park. They cleared brush, orchestrated beautification projects, sports, and nighttime theatrical performances. They badgered City Hall for improvements to sagging fences and crumbling sidewalks. By many accounts, the once stately 11-acre field was on its way to a dramatic comeback.

But on the night before Mayor Thomas M. Menino was to visit the park to review the efforts, the 6-foot-1-inch Beresford was stabbed in the chest and killed after confronting two men believed to be muggers. Neighbors said Kulynych was the victim of the mugging.

The murder of the 40-year-old massage therapist has sparked rage and frustration in a city where crime appears to be on the rise once again. Yesterday, politicians including Menino and two of his challengers, Maura A. Hennigan and Gareth Saunders, crowded the park, along with neighborhood activists who demanded that something be done.

''I don't want John to be just another dead guy," the victim's partner, Adam Greenfield, 37, told the mayor yesterday. Police have made no arrests in the case and last night said there was no new information on suspects.

As the sun shone in a cloudless sky, friends and neighbors stopped by a makeshift memorial at the corner of Mount Ida and Bentham roads yesterday -- yellow tulips, a picture of Beresford, candles -- to pay their respects. A truck from the city's Parks and Recreation Department, which Beresford had come to know through his relentless activism, pulled up with a pot of flowers and plants.

Just about everyone seemed to know who Beresford was. He was the guy who was always out in the park, walking his bulldog, Quest, or picking up trash, or tending the small ornamental garden he helped create last year.

''It's really ironic," said Lucia Droby, executive director of the Community Outreach Group for Landscape Design, which has been working with the Friends of Ronan Park on developing a long-term plan for the park.

''For everyone who knows John, it's a personal tragedy," she said. ''But it's also very unfortunate this happened in the park, because it mattered so much to John to make the park as beautiful and safe as possible. John, and other neighbors there, saw the park as the centerpoint of the neighborhood, where people could come together -- regardless of ethnicity, economics, interests -- and be part of a neighborhood."

Menino had scheduled a visit to the park yesterday to tout improvements, including brush clearing and general cleanup, and to tour the area with Beresford, Greenfield, Kulynych, and other neighbors to talk about their work. Instead, the mayor mostly offered condolences, promising to return later to discuss the park. After a short walk around the park with Greenfield and Kulynych, he vowed during a well-attended press conference to make the city safer.

''These hoodlums are not going to take over our streets," he said.

In an election year, the mayor is already fighting a perception that the streets of Boston are getting more dangerous. Beresford's murder was the 20th this year, and crime in the section of Dorchester near the park is on the rise. Crime in that area was up 17 percent overall in the first three months of the year compared with the same period last year. The number of aggravated assaults jumped from 3 to 7; robbery and attempted robbery increased from 2 to 5; there were no murders in the first three months of 2004. There was one by March 31.

Hennigan sought to link Beresford's stabbing to police staffing levels, which Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole has said are down 200 to 300 officers from several years ago.

''It's not the fault of the police," she said. ''If you don't have the personnel and you don't have the staffing, no matter how hard you try to use smoke and mirrors, it's just not going to deal with the problem that's out there. The mayor, year after year, has not provided enough police classes in order to keep up with retirements."

The politically charged scene was just part of the surreal day for Beresford's loved ones, who gathered, stunned and grieving, at the cream-colored house to comfort one another.

Among them was Daniel Dowling, a friend for years, who had recruited Beresford to be his fellow Santa Claus at Boston's Enchanted Village for the last two years. He said children seemed to adore Beresford, a burly man of generous girth. Beresford embraced the role, once surprising a deaf child by speaking to her in fluent sign language.

Dowling also hired Beresford, an actor and singer who had performed in cabarets and a number of plays in the city over the years, to work part time in a small acting troupe at the Museum of Science, where his performance in a play about Einstein once made the museum's manager of public programs cry.

It was seven years ago that Greenfield, who is an administrator at Emerson College, first saw Beresford performing in a cabaret show. ''He was singing 'This is the Moment,' " he said. ''I know it sounds stupid, but he took my breath away. I just wanted to talk to him."

They were inseparable after that. A year later, the couple decided to shop around for a house to buy. They took their time, trying to find a neighborhood that seemed as though it was on the verge of turning around, affordable, but safe enough.

''This looked like one of them," Greenfield said, sitting on his porch yesterday afternoon. ''It looked like a good investment. It looked like a good chance to take."

The park, though, was a problem. ''It belonged to all the thugs," Greenfield said.

Ronan park has been the scene of several brutal crimes. In 1983, the body of Mary Ann Hanley, an 11-year-old who was raped and beaten to death, was found in a wooded area of the park. In 1990, 30-year-old George Georgeff was beaten to death, and the body of a woman in her early 20s was found in 1994.

Reasoning that neighborhood involvement was infectious, Beresford and Greenfield set to work. The first year, Greenfield said, the Friends tried to learn the basics of community activism: how to work with city agencies and how to rally neighbors to their cause.

The second year, they focused on safety and cleanup. Their main target was the overgrowth of small trees at the lower end of the park, a refuge for prostitutes, vagrants, and muggers. They pestered the city for help; when none arrived, they brandished chainsaws and went at it themselves. Once the city saw what they were doing, Greenfield said, it brought in a work crew to do the rest.

Next, they set about reclaiming Ronan Park as a neighborhood gathering place. ''We knew lots of people who said, 'I'd never let my child go into the park,' " Greenfield said.

So they set about giving people ''reasons for families to come back out into the park," he said, an a cappella singing show, a children's urban dance show.

The group began looking to the future, nurturing ties with other community groups and embarking on a long-term planning process for the park. Hundreds of people, Greenfield said, showed up to two meetings the Friends organized to ask people what they wanted the park to look like in the future. With help from Droby's group, the city's Parks and Recreation Department and the Boston Greenspace Alliance, the neighbors created an ornamental garden last year. Droby's group also helped recruit a team of students to imagine possibilities for the park; the students drew beautiful sketches of their ideas, Greenfield said. They had hoped to show them to the mayor yesterday.

Greenfield said he would stay in the house he and Beresford shared, overlooking the park they worked so hard to transform.

''I don't really have anywhere else to go right now," he said. ''This is my community. I don't know how I'll face the ghosts that haunt this place now. But right now, it's still my community."

Lisa Wangsness can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.