Dead mourned; hunt is launched

Police hunted last night for whoever carried out Boston's deadliest crime in a decade, as grief for four men killed in a amateur recording studio in Dorchester rippled through the local hip-hop community and reverberated as far away as Wakefield.

Police identified two victims of the shootings Tuesday night as Edwin Duncan, 21, of Dorchester, and Jihad Chankhour, 22, of Wakefield. A senior police official identified the other two as Jason Bachiller, 21, and Christopher Vieira, 19.

All four attended Wakefield High School, and at least three were members of a rap group called Graveside, whose music had become known in local hip-hop circles. The group's lyrics often focused on guns and violence, but friends and relatives said yesterday that the victims were ''good kids" who used harsh words as an outlet and didn't deserve to die violently.

The four men were found in a basement family room that had been fitted with recording equipment, according to a law enforcement official who described a ''very bloody" scene Tuesday night. One was inside the doorway, two others lay next to each other about five feet away, and the fourth was at the far end of the room, sitting near the equipment, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because no permission had been given to speak publicly. There were no obvious signs of struggle, nor visible signs that the victims tried to escape.

''It looks like [the killer] shot where he found them," the official said. ''It was very, very fast."

In their only public comments on the quadruple homicide, Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley expressed condolences yesterday to the victims' families while vowing to catch the killer or killers.

''This will not stand unanswered," Conley said. ''We answer violence with a painstaking and thorough investigation."

Police asked for help in finding a car driven by one of the victims before the shootings, a black 1998 Ford Escort with tinted windows. Deputy Superintendent Daniel Coleman, who heads the homicide unit, did not give a plate number, saying that the driver may have switched plates, but said that finding the car was important.

Coleman said a motive had not been established for the slayings, but stressed that preliminary information suggested the victims were not involved with gangs.

Duncan had spoken to his girlfriend about an hour before the shooting, his sister, Tia Duncan, said yesterday.

She said her brother and Bachiller were ''just hanging out playing music" and waiting for another member of Graveside to arrive.

Shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday, police were called to Bourneside Street, where they found three men dead and the fourth with multiple gunshot wounds. The fourth was later pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center.

The deaths pushed the number of homicides in the city this year to 71, the most in a single year since 1995, when there were 96. The rampage was the deadliest since November 1995, when four men were gunned down at a 99 Restaurant & Pub in Charlestown.

As a crush of media waited outside the three-story house in Dorchester where Edwin Duncan lived and Graveside died, friends and relatives gathered yesterday to console each other.

Duncan had longed to be a music producer, relatives said, and when he wasn't working the grill in Wendy's at Logan International Airport, the 6-foot-4-inch Wakefield High School graduate was in the basement, playing with different instruments in the studio his mother had built for him.

''He didn't deal in those type of circles for us to say, 'Oh, we knew something was going to happen' said his sister, Linette Duncan.

''He didn't live that type of life," Duncan said. ''This here is like walking to the store to get soda and getting hit by a car."

Duncan had been a student in METCO, the program that sends minority students from Boston to suburban schools.

He had made quick friends with Bachiller at Wakefield High, school officials said.

The two often visited Bridget Adams, METCO administrator at the school from 2002 to 2004, and talked about their music.

Adams said Graveside often opened for more established rap performers when they came to Boston.

''They were very proud of their work, and I believe they were well respected," Adams said.

One local radio host said the group had just begun to develop on the hip-hop scene. Pete Mazalewski, who broadcasts as Peter Parker on WBOT (97.7 FM), played host on Graveside's demo tape, which was recorded in Duncan's basement studio.

''It was good," Mazalewski said. ''Edwin's studio was hot."

Bachiller, who used to work at an audio production company, had ''all the potential in the world," Mazalewski said.

Vieira was a ''cool kid," and Duncan was a ''really passionate rapper and producer."

The lyrics on their demo feature ''nothing but gun talk, rhetoric, and violence," but Mazalewski said the lyrics are typical hip-hop fare and don't reflect the musicians' real personalities.

Chankhour had worked as a Comcast technician and liked to deejay as a hobby, family members said. In high school, he was the type to spin music at a dance instead of inviting a date, a cousin said

Vieira had gone to Chankhour's house to pick him up the evening of the shooting, and Chankhour's family worried when he didn't come back home. They were called yesterday afternoon to identify his body at the morgue.

''He comes from a good family," said his cousin, Iyman Wanis, a 31-year-old Wakefield resident. ''This is all a shock to us."

Early yesterday, before being officially notified of her son's death, Vieira's mother said she knew police were looking for her son's car.

''He was close to those kids who got shot," said Elizabeth Perez Barani, also a Wakefield resident. ''They were like his brothers."

Through relatives, she declined to comment on his death yesterday afternoon.

At Wakefield High School yesterday, officials assembled a crisis team of counselors, administrators, and teachers to help students deal with the deaths.

''It's a tragedy that we're all deeply saddened by," Assistant Superintendent Michael J. Malinowski said in an interview. ''We're grieving the loss of four students. Every comment I've heard is that they were great kids."

Malinowski, who lives in Boston, said the city has become a national ''teenage murder capital."

''And we add four, which is mind boggling," he said. ''We're all shaken by this."

Maria Cramer, John R. Ellement, Adrienne P. Samuels, and Lisa Wangsness of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents Matthew Burke and Franci R. Ellement contributed to this report. Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.