What is there to blame?
Devonte Dalvin-Franklin was the city's last homicide victim of 2008. If he and the kid who stabbed him had gotten on the bus three hours later, the 16-year-old Dalvin-Franklin would have been the first victim of the New Year.
That's the cruel logic along Blue Hill Avenue, where Devonte Dalvin-Franklin's blood congealed in the aisle of the 28 bus.
It has become common in the wake of yet another dead African-American teenager to look for something to blame. Dalvin-Franklin's family thinks he would be alive today if the bus that became his coffin had been equipped with a video camera.
Marcus Wesley doesn't agree.
"A camera doesn't stop kids from doing what kids do," he was saying yesterday, standing at the corner of Blue Hill Avenue and Harvard Street, where Devonte Dalvin-Franklin took his last breath.
The idea that Dalvin-Franklin's killer might have been deterred by the presence of a video camera doesn't stand up to Marcus Wesley's years of experience riding the 28 bus. It doesn't stand up to the evidence the cops have come up with so far, either.
The kid who plunged a knife into Devonte Dalvin-Franklin's neck was wearing one of those black Neoprene ski masks that cover everything but your eyes. Meaning the kid who killed Dalvin-Franklin on the 28 bus might have assumed there would be a camera on board, as there usually is on that route.
Maybe he was more concerned about concealing his identity from the other passengers who averted their eyes during the initial confrontation but couldn't ignore the river of blood that ran down the aisle as Dalvin-Franklin's killer ran off the bus.
Or maybe, just maybe, the kid who stabbed Dalvin-Franklin didn't give a damn about cameras or witnesses or anything else. If the delusion that kids who kill kids are deterred by cameras is comforting to some, the reality that a lot of them are deterred by nothing should be disturbing to many.
Marcus Wesley is 25 years old, which is five fewer than the number of times he figures he's been robbed over the years.
"I lost count, actually," he said. "Sometimes they take my bag. Usually they just want money, a watch, a cellphone. Whatever."
Marcus Wesley lives on Columbia Road in Dorchester and rides the 28 bus all the time, down Blue Hill Avenue toward Mattapan. He gets off at the bus stop in front of Jubilee Christian Church, the same church Devonte Dalvin-Franklin used to go to when he was a kid. Then he walks to his job, at Crest Liquor Mart, on Cummins Highway.
"I get the 28 every day," Marcus Wesley was saying. "You're always looking. You take notice. You see what you should stay away from. But sometimes you can't stay away from it, because it's right there."
Marcus Wesley was surprised to hear that some professors at Northeastern University had spent a considerable amount of time determining that young black men in the city of Boston are becoming an endangered species. He thought that was common knowledge.
And he has been around long enough to know that if what happened to Devonte Dalvin-Franklin on the 28 bus in Dorchester had happened to some white kid on the 59 bus in Newton there would be a different response. He knows that if kids were dying in Newton or Andover or Cohasset like they are dying in Dorchester and Roxbury and Mattapan there would be hell to pay.
"There'd be cops everywhere," he said. "They'd call out the National Guard. There'd be checkpoints everywhere."
Marcus Wesley had been waiting for more than 15 minutes when two 28 buses pulled up at the same time. The two buses were idling, the first one close to the curb, the second a little farther up, in the right lane of Blue Hill Avenue. He looked them over, back and forth, and then he got on the first one.
Like everything else in this life, it was a crapshoot.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com 