Troubling trends in Boston's '06 homicides

On a cold night in February in front of a dilapidated bodega, Eddie Brito was found facedown in a pool of blood. The 23-year-old father of one had been fatally shot less than a block from his apartment in a dangerous section of Dorchester.

Like many homicide victims in Boston, Brito had a troubled past.

He had a criminal record for gun crimes, he had been shot before, and, according to police, he associated with a Cape Verdean street gang.

His shooting was not random, but his killer left few clues before fleeing in a car, police said.

After a fatal shooting yesterday, Brito's slaying was one of 74 homicides in Boston in 2006 -- a total just shy of the 75 last year that marked a 10-year high. In 28 of those cases, police have identified or arrested a suspect -- a "clearance" rate of 38 percent that, while worse than the rates in many other big cities nationally, is about 10 points higher than Boston's rate last year.

In some ways, the Brito slaying appears typical of Boston's unsolved homicides. Guns, the weapon used in most killings, are easy to get and difficult to trace. Many victims have enemies who might want them dead.

Police officials would not discuss specific s of the Brito case, saying comments could compromise their efforts to solve the killing.

But Deputy Superintendent Daniel Coleman , who oversees the homicide unit, said the challenge is always getting information from the people who have it, especially in murders stemming from street violence.

"The shooting homicides that we have in this city are generally among people who are known to one another, who have associates or friends on either side who are known to one another," Coleman said in an interview. "The answer to who did it and why is right there within those small pockets of people . . . The challenge we have is how do we elicit that information knowing that there's a culture of resistance and intimidation."

Brito was killed about 9 p.m. Feb. 10 a few blocks off of Columbia Road in a bleak stretch of south Dorchester where he lived with his mother.

Police found him at Magnolia and Quincy streets near their apartment, a single spent shell casing nearby.

His mother, Maria Figueroa , 50, arrived home a short time later from her job cleaning buildings downtown. As she walked to the apartment, she saw police tape closing the intersection to traffic, but was unaware of what had happened minutes earlier.

Soon after Figueroa closed her door, detectives knocked and told her about the killing.

"I was always on him not to go out," she said in a recent interview in her living room, where a photo collage of her son sits between two candles and snapshots of him decorate a mirror. "I had three sons and now I have two."

Brito, who had recently ended jobs as a Hess gas station attendant and a Comcast cable technician, dreamed of becoming a rap star and recorded lyrics at a friend's studio.

The Dorchester High School graduate loved cars and fashion, taking care to match his favorite bandanas with his outfits, according to a tribute from his friends posted on myspace.com. He ate french fries and chicken wings no matter what time of day.

His friends called him "Lil E" because he was 5-foot-4. In family photos, he had a huge grin that took over his face.

After he stopped working in the weeks before his death, Brito usually stayed at his girlfriend's place or inside his mother's apartment writing rap lyrics, trying to distance himself from his violent past, said Dina Goncalves , his long time girlfriend and mother of his daughter.

The day he died, Brito went to the CambridgeSide Galleria to buy gold earrings as Valentine's Day gifts for his 2-year-old daughter and Goncalves, 20, who said that he took her sister with him to make sure he bought the right style. "He had a hard time trying to get them," Goncalves said.

Brito had been shot at before. In March 2000, he was sitting with friends in a car outside a sweet-16 party in Quincy. Three men who were never identified walked in front of the car. Another man, who was later arrested, walked behind it, then started shooting. Brito was wounded, but fired back, according to court documents and Quincy police.

Brito told investigators that he had been getting shot at for weeks. He blamed enemies of an old friend, saying they might be after him because his friend was on the run for murder and the victim's associates might want revenge, according to Quincy police. Boston police will not say if the man who was arrested in the Quincy shooting is a suspect in Brito's slaying.

By the time he was shot in Quincy, Brito was well known to Boston-area police. He had been arrested on gun and armed robbery charges as a juvenile, leading to a 1998 stint in Department of Youth Services custody, according to criminal records.

By the spring of 2003, he had amassed 21 adult and juvenile criminal charges in Massachusetts, including two more gun arrests. One resulted in a conviction and one-year sentence, criminal records show, and the other ended in an acquittal, according to the Salem Superior Court clerk's office. The disposition of the nearly 20 other, less serious charges included acquittals, dismissals, and convictions.

But since March 2003, around the time Goncalves became pregnant with his daughter, Brito had not been charged with anything other than four motor vehicle violations, according to court records.

"Everybody sees him as a thug," Goncalves said. "I see him as someone with a good heart."

Their daughter, Denise, was born in June 2004, and Brito was thrilled, Goncalves said. "When she was born, everything changed," she said.

Figueroa said her son was not a gang member, but she acknowledged there were things she did not know about his life or problems he may have had. "He never said anything to me," she said. "He didn't want to worry me."

While Coleman declined to say why investigators believe Brito was slain, he did say such homicides are difficult to solve because witnesses are almost always people with their own connections to street crime.

"Typically what we see is that people who have that kind of information, even if they have sympathy for the victim, may have their own issues on the street," Coleman said. "You typically don't have these crimes occurring in front of or around people who aren't associated with some level of crime on the street, whether it's dabbling in street-level drug dealing or dabbling in some weapons-related crimes."

Brito's slaying was one of five shootings, including another homicide, on the same night, prompting then-Police Commissioner Kathleen M. O'Toole to appeal for the public's help in tracking down violent criminals.

Coleman said Boston's 38 percent clearance rate is an unfair measurement of the homicide unit's success because it does not count cases from prior years that were solved this year, or cases that will be solved . It also does not reflect the strength of the cleared cases, which is crucial to successful prosecutions.

Homicide investigations are extremely complex and often time-consuming, especially when jurors expect strong forensic and other evidence, Coleman said. Detectives spend many months or even years investigating one murder to ensure they have enough evidence to secure a conviction, he said.

"The idea of just going out and making an arrest on a homicide, those days are gone," Coleman said. "An investigation is like driving on a highway and you have to get off every single exit, every single rest stop, and you have to explore it -- whether it makes sense or doesn't make sense."

In the Brito slaying, there were some apparent leads, according to police reports provided to the Globe. Five days after the killing, one report says, police searched a vehicle whose driver was shot at five minutes after and a mile away from where Brito was shot. Three days after Brito's slaying, police also searched another vehicle as part of the investigation into that shooting and the homicide, another report says.

Officers also seized two cell phones, and "extracted stored electronic data from both," a police report said.

For those who loved Brito, such developments seem minor, especially since many months have passed with no apparent progress.

Goncalves said she plays Brito's rap recordings for their daughter so she knows his voice. "People ask her, 'Who is that?' " Goncalves said. "She says, 'That's my dadda.' "

Brito's mother continues to mourn her son, who is buried at the Fairview Cemetery in Hyde Park, not far from her home. Pictures of him are all over her apartment. She keeps funeral programs featuring photos of him as a little boy and later as a father scattered throughout the house. A life-sized, color portrait of his daughter stands against a living room wall.

"I want to know the people who killed my son, and I want them to pay for what they did," Figueroa said.

Suzanne Smalley can be reached at ssmalley@globe.com., and Maria Cramer at mcramer@globe.com.