On Monday night, around 50 Somerville residents gathered outside the Davis Square T station on Holland Street to mourn the death of Steven McCluskey, a 40-year-old man from South Boston who died in March after falling on an escalator descending into the station.
As the sun set and rush hour slowed, attendees could still hear MBTA announcements from inside the station as they lit candles, sang songs, and placed flowers at the feet of a poster commemorating a man who spent one of his final moments lying one level below them.
“It’s nice to touch base with other people and remind ourselves that we know each other and that we need to stand forward when it’s somebody we know and somebody we don’t,” said Davis Square resident Jennifer Simon.
Simon had only recently learned of McCluskey’s death, via word-of-mouth.
On February 27, just before 5 a.m., McCluskey stepped onto an escalator descending into the Davis Square T station. A security camera recorded grainy footage of his uneasy steps before he fell at the base. While lying there, NBC10 Boston first reported, McCluskey’s clothes became caught in the moving staircase, and he remained stuck for 20 minutes while more than a dozen subway riders passed him by. By the time an MBTA employee pressed the stop button on the escalator and emergency workers arrived on the scene, NBC10 Boston reported McCluskey’s clothes were wrapped tight around his neck and that he had no pulse. He died 10 days later.
Video of McCluskey’s fall was not reported until three months later in May, which is when Kellian Pletcher first heard of McCluskey. Although she was initially shocked that no one stopped to help him, she began to see McCluskey’s death as a partial reflection of the Davis Square community she has been a part of for nearly 20 years.
“It was surprising, because I want to believe the best of myself and of everybody. But there was a feeling of inevitability about it,” she said. “[Not] that he deserved this, or we deserved this. But it did seem like the culmination of a path that we’ve been on for a long time.”
In an NBC10 report, McCluskey’s sister said McCluskey had been struggling with addiction. And Pletcher saw, in the bystanders who passed him, a “deep confusion” about how to navigate the situation.
“There are a lot of people that are dealing with trauma in different ways in our neighborhood,” said Pletcher, who lives in an apartment off Grove Street. “I think we don’t know what to do other than look away.”
Pletcher wanted to mourn McCluskey with others – to do “more than zero.” She works as a game designer and had never planned a public vigil before. But as she began to publicize a gathering, she found neighbors –previously strangers– who wanted to do the same. Someone knew a musician who could play a few songs. A florist wanted to donate flowers. And McCluskey’s family members, who were crushed by the lack of intervention for their son, wanted to attend.
News of the Monday night vigil outside the Davis Square T station spread on Facebook and via word of mouth. Initially, it seemed that TV reporters might outnumber attendees, but as local musician Jonathan Schores played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelulah” on guitar, a crowd of about 50 grew along Holland Street by the station’s entrance. The group sang “Amazing Grace” together, before McCluskey’s sister Shannon Flaherty read two poems written by McCluskey’s brother and sister-in-law.
“It can be really easy to hold onto anger, sadness, and pain, but that’s not what [my brother] would want me to do,” Flaherty said to the crowd afterwards.
Prayer, a call-and-response song, and an Irish blessing followed. A community member read McCluskey’s obituary, highlighting his knack for conversation and carpentry, and love for his two sons. During a moment of silence, mourners placed stemmed flowers near a poster of McCluskey’s photograph. “As a neighborhood and a community we mourn this loss of life,” it read.
“It’s really overwhelming,” McCluskey’s mother Mary Flaherty said, of being in Davis Square. “But the love that was here tonight was just unbelievable.”
“I did lose faith in humanity,” she said, remembering the video of McCluskey’s fall. “[This vigil] showed me that it’s really still there.”
A medical examiner has yet to rule on McCluskey’s cause and manner of death, as part of the Middlesex County District Attorney’s investigation. On Tuesday, the MBTA, which has described McCluskey’s death as “a terrible accident,” began broadcasting public service announcements highlighting escalator stop buttons for bystanders who see someone in danger. After failing to report McCluskey’s death to the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, NBC10 Boston reported that the MBTA has been directed to form a corrective action plan to “address gaps in the tracking and notification of injury events that later result in a fatality.”
At the end of Monday’s vigil, Pletcher led the crowd in a few swingy verses of “Lean On Me.”
“I think [McCluskey’s death] will be part of [what] people think about when they think of this community. But it isn’t everything, for good or for bad,” she said in an interview with Cambridge Day.
“Would another city have been able to have humans that know how to protect themselves without overlooking strangers in the [subway]? We don’t know. But [ignoring someone in need] is a learned skill, and it can be unlearned.”
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