Both lawyer and advocate
That first year, the fund-raiser was in Debbie and Sonny Eappen's living room, the appetizers competing for space on the buffet table with their sons' plastic toys and their daughter's teething ring.
For the next few years, Jordan's Furniture hosted the gathering in its Natick store until the annual silent auction to raise funds to combat shaken baby syndrome found a home at the Boston Children's Museum.
Gerry Leone has been there every year, in a corner talking quietly with other supporters of the Matty Eappen Foundation, or in the middle of the action, chasing his own two children through the happy chaos that memorializes the life of a baby lost to child abuse.
Matthew Eappen's name will be forever linked to Louise Woodward, the British au pair convicted in 1997 in the shaking death of the 8-month-old Newton boy. But it is linked, too, to Leone and to Martha Coakley, the Middlesex prosecutors who kept level heads in the middle of the storm that swirled around that case.
It is still hard, nine years later, to understand the near-hysteria that crested when jurors convicted Woodward of second-degree murder and crashed when the judge reduced that verdict to involuntary manslaughter and set her free. Leone shut it all out during a closing argument that brought tears to the eyes of many in the Cambridge courtroom that day.
That is why it is only half the story to call Leone, who formally announced his candidacy for Middlesex district attorney the other night, a tough prosecutor. He is also a passionate victims' advocate.
Leone is one of two Democrats left standing in the race to succeed Coakley as district attorney in the largest county in Massachusetts. There is no Republican in the race. Leone's opponent, Senator Jarrett Barrios of Cambridge, has tried with little success to position himself as the more progressive candidate in this campaign, but such labels as ''left" and ''right" are more useful in the State House than in the courthouse.
Both Leone and Barrios support gay marriage and oppose the death penalty, but those positions are likely to be of less consequence to voters than the fact that Leone is a career prosecutor with experience in the county, state, and federal arenas, and Barrios has never prosecuted a case. That's why Representative Michael E. Festa of Melrose endorsed Leone after deciding to drop out of the race to run for reelection. It is why he has Coakley's support, too.
It is too simplistic to characterize one man as a politician and the other as a prosecutor. Neither has a one-dimensional approach to crime prevention or to punishment. Barrios, chairman of the Legislature's Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee, deserves a solid share of the credit as lead sponsor of a bill passed earlier this month to create a witness protection program to thwart the intimidation tactics of street thugs. Leone established his credentials in crime prevention in Middlesex with a model program in high schools designed to identify at-risk kids.
The differences between Leone and Barrios are less about emphasis than experience. Both are devoted fathers who want safe streets for their children. Both understand the role in crime played by drugs, poverty, and family dysfunction. But the district attorney's office also is about the administration of justice, and a man who has managed a Massachusetts Senate staff is in an unfair fight with a man who has run a statewide Criminal Bureau in the attorney general's office and an office of more than 100 lawyers as the first assistant US attorney in Massachusetts.
Leone is a tough-enough prosecutor to have won a conviction of Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber of an American Airlines plane carrying 180 passengers. But he also is a lawyer who never has forgotten whom he represents when he steps into the well of a courtroom. That's why he will be in the crowd at the Children's Museum again next month, remembering Matty Eappen.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
