About 50 community members braved a downpour to attend a “Community Debrief” on the May 11 shooting on Memorial Drive, which made national news and left the perpetrator and two victims hospitalized. Those gathered in the steamy Cambridge Community Center gym, about a 10-minute walk from the incident’s site, listened to local leaders before grilling officials on their response and the state of the criminal justice system.
“Why aren’t we having an all-town, town-hall meeting at City Hall?” Cambridge resident Lawrence J. Adkins asked. He also said the meeting came “eight days too late.”
“You need to do the job,” he said. At the meeting were a mix of about 30 state officials, city officials, elected leaders, members of the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) and an emotional support black Labrador retriever named Bear. Also on hand were representatives of Riverside Trauma Center.
“There was a miss,” said Denise Haynes, another resident. “We’re looking to hear that, ‘yes, we messed up.’”
Yi-An Huang, Cambridge’s City Manager, called the critique that the city could have done more in the immediate aftermath to support the broader community “important feedback.”
“I recognize that you need to meet community members where they are, and I think in this case, maybe that would have meant being more responsive with an official response.”
Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui said that “we can always do more” and that her main priority has been the family members of victims, like Maimouna, who declined to give her last name, whose uncle is still hospitalized for his injuries.
Much of last Monday’s incident unfolded in front of The Rivermark, a large mixed income building at 808 and 812 Memorial Drive with 300 apartments, including a number of subsidized units.
State rep. Mike Connolly said he and Councillor Ayah Al-Zubi went door-to-door throughout Rivermark “just let people know that we’re thinking about them, [and that] they’re not alone.” In an email update, he called it “a pretty striking expereince [sic] today — some people we spoke with sheltered in place and feared for their lives last week.”
Connolly said they had shared resource information and flyers for this meeting and one coming this Thursday hosted by the Rivermark Tenant Association expressly for residents of the building to meet with Riverside Trauma Center staff and Cambridge police.
Frustration levels high
Tuesday’s event was the second for the community, after one on Friday night held at Riverside Pizza and Sea Food. That had limited turnout, but residents who did attend also were frustrated by the response, particularly when a representative of the Rivermark’s management company arrived. The community members in attendance were angry that management had not reached out.
Local leader and Rivermark resident Valerie Bonds, who attended the event on Friday, said in an email to city officials and residents and shared with Cambridge Day that residents of the Rivermark, including children, had “experienced various forms of trauma and triggers caused by the long-term effects of hovering helicopters, police, machine gun shots, and blood on the street in front of our housing complex.” And she asked why the 812 Community Room had not been used to gather residents and help them “connect, share, and begin healing.”
She did, however, call the Friday gathering “a meaningful first step in acknowledging the experiences of those living in Cambridgeport and throughout the Cambridge community.”
She also thanked the organizers, including state Rep. Marjorie Decker and Cambridge Public Health Department.
At Tuesday’s meeting, city councillor E. Denise Simmons said “I’ve always been a big proponent of ‘talk with me, not about me,’ and we’ve really got to get out of this habit of talking for people that we have not taken the time to know. This is an opportunity for us to recalibrate and look at what we need to do better.”
Speaking before the event, Nancy Rihan-Porter, Cambridge Public Health Department’s director of resilience and emergency preparedness, called the Memorial Drive events unprecedented. “We’ve never had this kind of randomized thing, not in my 10 years” in the department.
She asked residents to pay attention to their emotions. “People need to be aware of how they’re feeling. You’re going to have irrational reactions. One guy was saying he’s ducking while driving. That’s a normal human reaction to a completely abnormal thing.”
She encouraged residents to be open about their feelings with other, to make an effort to connect with people, especially neighbors who might be feeling the same way. “There’s nothing more healing than to be with each other,” she said.
New information on shooting
At Tuesday’s meeting, Siddiqui, Acting Police Commissioner Pauline Wells, and Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan gave updates on the status of shooter Tyler Brown’s case, provided a minute-by-minute timeline of events, and offered directions for mental health resources.
Ryan said investigators plan to bring the evidence against Brown before a grand jury. Brown was arraigned from his hospital bed on six felony charges, including two counts of armed assault with intent to murder, and two misdemeanors. Ryan said Brown will likely face additional charges.
Her office continues to investigate how Brown managed to get a firearm, since he had been convicted for a previous violent offense (shooting at a Boston police officer in 2020) and was on parole, conditions that disqualified for him to obtain a license to carry a firearm in Mass.
“Guns that are transferred to people who are not qualified to have them often come from a very circuitous route,” she said. “Guns don’t always come as a one-piece item, so it is often possible, especially for people who are not qualified to have a gun, to get different pieces of the gun and put a gun together.”
Wells mentioned a search that occurred on Saturday at 36 Kelly Road — a house that was “believed to be connected” to Brown. She said she could not offer many details, but “evidence was taken and will be processed.”
The Kelly Road address drew questions, including one from the notecards provided to allow residents to remain anonymous. Wells read a question asking whether anything was being done about the house, which the writer described as a “halfway house for [formerly] incarcerated people,” that has been “involved in previous criminal activity in the past.”
“We are well aware of issues … that the people in that area have been experiencing because of what’s going on in a particular location,” Wells said. She added that a deputy had been assigned to try to “resolve some of the issues” associated with the house.
Brown was sentenced to five to six years in prison for his previous shooting charge in 2020, serving three-and-a-half years before being released. He had been accepting mental health services offered to him as recently as six months ago, according to Huang.
“This individual was actually in a very high-quality reentry program, and then fell out of it. Even as recently as November 5th, he was on stage in a button-down shirt speaking about his journey reentering society and doing well in front of a room of people,” Huang said. “I think there are two questions for us as society … how we provide the support and services to keep people connected, and what we do when that’s not enough.”
Concerns about community safety
Some community members also aired their frustration over the broader criminal justice system that allowed Brown to be sentenced to half of the time recommended by prosecutors for his prior conviction.
“What can we do as a community to push for real, legislative change to make sure that judges actually have to provide real sentencing?” said a young male attendee. “I feel like judges shouldn’t have that opportunity when someone has so many violent, offenses in the past. There were so many opportunities to stop this guy.”
Ryan said that sentencing guidelines can sometimes be helpful but shouldn’t be the only factor in determining a sentence.
Imposing too many requirements “doesn’t leave a lot of room for what we ask judges to do, which is to use their own sense of what’s happening, to use their experience, and to come up with a sentence that is tailored to an individual,” she said.
Another community member wrote a question on an index card about proposed cuts to state-funded re-entry programs that help people who have been incarcerated.
“There’s been a lot of federal funding that’s gone. There is state funding that’s being used to make up those cuts, which leaves us with less money for some of these programs,” Ryan said. “We can’t be shortsighted, because that is money well spent, and I think that’s the ongoing budget debate right now, is how we make the money stretch.”
Decker discussed programs that the state was trying to save despite the cuts but was interrupted by a middle-aged man shouting from the back. He said the state “prevented law-abiding citizens from having firearms,” that could defend residents.
Decker replied that “Massachusetts has the strictest gun laws in the country … We also have a very high percentage of people who still get their guns approved, and Massachusetts has the lowest gun homicide rate in the country.” She added that guns could be coming over state lines: “We need other states to follow suit with what Massachusetts has done.”
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.