Reilly assails critics of his call over crash
Says Healey hurt family of victims
Responding to a charge by Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey that he may have obstructed a criminal investigation, Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly accused Healey and Governor Mitt Romney yesterday of exploiting the grief of a Southborough family whose teenage girls were killed in a fatal crash last fall.
Reilly, who has been under fire from the governor and lieutenant governor for placing a call to the Worcester district attorney in the case, also said he had no regrets about making the call and would do it again. He said he has made other calls in the past for grieving families facing similar situations.
''Absolutely, I would do anything to protect the privacy of a family under these kind of circumstances," Reilly said.
Reilly acknowledged last week that he called Worcester District Attorney John J. Conte in mid-November, but he said it was to urge Conte not to release autopsy reports in the crash to the media. The police chief whose department investigated the crash considered Reilly's telephone call unusual and suggested to the media that Conte was hindering the department's investigation into whether alcohol was illegally furnished to the teenagers, Shauna M. Murphy, 17, and Meghan C. Murphy, 15, who died in the Oct. 13 accident.
Healey told a television interviewer Sunday that Reilly had ''managed to stifle and probably obstruct a criminal investigation into whether or not there was a violation of our social host law," which makes it a crime for someone to host a party at which minors consume alcohol. Last week, Romney had suggested that Reilly was trying to ''hush up" the investigation. Reilly, a Democrat and two-term attorney general, and Healey, a Republican, are both candidates for governor.
Yesterday, both Reilly and Conte disputed that Reilly's involvement had affected the investigation, which police closed last week. Jeffrey B. Goldstein, an assistant district attorney in Conte's office, said that long before learning of Reilly's telephone call, he had concluded that the charge of allowing a minor to consume alcohol should not be pursued.
''I learned about the attorney general's call to the DA when I read about it in the newspaper, well after I recommended no prosecution in this case," said Goldstein, who has headed the motor vehicle homicide unit for 10 years. ''Therefore, I can say with absolute certainty that the telephone call had no impact on how I handled the case."
Reilly told reporters at the State House that the attacks on him by Romney and Healey are causing ''tremendous harm" to the Murphy family by fanning publicity over the case. He called on Romney and Healey to apologize to the family.
''The lieutenant governor obviously didn't have the facts; the governor didn't have the facts," the usually mild-mannered Reilly said. ''They never should have stepped into this. They never should have exploited the family's grief.
''She does not understand what she and the governor have put the family through," Reilly said. ''It is horrible. . . . It tells you all you need to know about her, all you need to know."
Yesterday, Healey would not directly address Reilly's call for an apology to the Murphy family, telling reporters, ''I asked that questions be answered, and that's always appropriate for public officials."
Speaking after a State House press conference on antigang legislation that she attended with the attorney general, Healey also sought to distance herself from comments she made on Sunday on CBS4's ''Keller @ Large."
Pressed to explain what evidence she had that Reilly had managed to ''probably obstruct" the investigation, Healey told reporters yesterday, ''I just felt that there were a number of questions that needed to be answered." She quickly tried to redirect questions to the antigang bill, which she called ''the appropriate focus."
When a reporter asked Healey yesterday to elaborate on her charge that Reilly was ''obstructing justice," she said, ''Those were not my words" and walked away.
Healey's spokeswoman later pointed out that Healey, during her television appearance, did not say ''obstruct justice" but said ''probably obstruct a criminal investigation."
Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's director of communications, said the governor would not offer a response to Reilly.
The latest exchanges ratcheted up the bitter tone on Beacon Hill over a three-month-old car crash in Southborough and the subsequent investigation into the role that alcohol may have played.
The Murphy sisters died in a car crash after attending a party with 15 or 20 other young people.
Mark Leahy, the Northborough police chief, has said that his investigators had a case for what he described as ''allowing" a minor to consume alcohol. The police report identifies the host of the party as Nathaniel Berberian, 20, of Northborough. The law does not require the host to have served liquor; Berberian told police that Shauna Murphy brought vodka to the party and that she appeared intoxicated.
Yesterday, Goldstein said he recommended against prosecuting Berberian because all the witnesses from the party said he did not serve alcohol, because the Murphy sisters killed in the crash brought liquor into the premises, and because evidence suggested Shauna Murphy had used someone else's license to obtain alcohol.
Reilly's denunciation of the governor and lieutenant governor follows nearly a week of media scrutiny into the phone call that he made to Conte. Reilly said that in the call, he conveyed the Murphy family's concerns over reporters' attempts to win the public release of the autopsy reports. State law requires that the records be released only to the next of kin.
Romney and Healey have argued that while the family's privacy is important, a full public debate on the facts of the accident will help raise public awareness of drunken-driving issues.
Conte, responding yesterday to the initial Associated Press report on Reilly's phone call, denied he ever withheld autopsy reports from police, adding that the Northborough police investigators had received a verbal briefing on the girls' blood alcohol content The AP said it stands by its story.
Globe correspondent Franci R. Ellement contributed to this report. 