''If people think someone was killed because they were a witness,'' Mayor Joseph P. Many officials agree that the system failed the young mother and her son, and some fear the potential consequences. ''All they're interested in is getting the bad guys - they don't think about the good guys,'' she said. Garcia, 22, says she believes that the police and the courts let the city down by not protecting B. Her daughters' bedroom is in the front of the house, so they sleep with her, and their room is used to store toys and clothes. Bridgeport, Connecticut's largest city with 140,000 residents, has undergone a broad makeover since emerging from the brink of bankruptcy in 1992, but it has long been a pocket of blight in wealthy Fairfield County.Īnnette Garcia, a single mother of three who lives opposite an elementary school in Bridgeport, says she hears gunshots three or four nights a week. was killed because of what he had seen has produced anguish and outrage in a city that has never quite recovered from the crack epidemic of the 1980's, which turned whole sections into war zones. Peeler - signed in a careful, manly cursive script, with boyish practice signatures in the margins - was in a public court file for all to see. and his mother, but they stopped after she decided it made them even more conspicuous. The police briefly provided protection for B.J. Peeler had been seen outside the duplex where B. In a further sign of the boy's possible vulnerability, detectives had reports that Mr. Mastronardi, has said that he did not give his client the information and that Mr. The disclosure was protested by the prosecutors, who said in court papers that ''there have been threats made against several of the state's witnesses.'' But the information was required by a three-year-old change in state court procedure that was intended to help defendants prepare their cases. On a judge's order, prosecutors had turned B.J.'s name and address over to Mr. In hindsight, his death can be cast as frighteningly foreseeable. Mother and son are to be buried in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where she has family. He was in the third grade at the Read School here. Brown was two months shy of his ninth birthday. The police believe that the intruder or intruders, hiding in the house, confronted them after the mother and son closed the front door, and chased them upstairs. They had just come back from grocery shopping. Clarke had been shot in the back, in her bedroom. was found shot to death at the top of the stairs inside the duplex his mother had bought in July - her first home of her own. Clarke, was in tears the next time she took him to the Boys Club, and begged B. One witness to the earlier shooting was gone, leaving B. Peeler was charged with murder, but was still able to make bail. As he fell to the floor, dying, he screamed, ''It was Russell, yo!'' according to police documents. Snead was shot seven times as he watched television in a barbershop. Peeler began taunting the mother's fiance, Rudolph Snead Jr., 28, on the street, saying he was going to ''get'' him. While free on bond, according to court papers, Mr. J.'s help, the police charged Russell Peeler, 27, of Bridgeport, with attempted murder. His sense of foreboding was well founded. She told him to be good and to hold his head up, and he told her that he believed that God would help him.īut as the weeks passed, B. ''His head was down and he was crying,'' she recalled. On B.J.'s first day back at the club after the first shooting, in September 1997, Gladys Marquez, a Boys Club counselor, knew she was dealing with an entirely different boy. He had flashbacks, and feared the consequences of helping the law. The decision to help the police had haunted the boy, a rambunctious jokester, his teachers and counselors said, making him brooding and paranoid. The police and terrified residents fear that the two were murdered because of what B. and his mother are dead, shot two Fridays ago at their home in a safe, working-class neighborhood here. He got a good look at the gunman, and when the police asked him who he thought had done it, the boy did something that few adults would have dared to do: he told. From a foot away, according to the police, a man in the Lumina fired three rounds from a Smith & Wesson pistol, wounding the fiance in the forehead, piercing his car door and shattering a passenger-side window. was riding with his mother's fiance, whom he called Dad. Then one summer evening, a Chevrolet Lumina pulled up beside the car in which B. He was only 7, but had the poise to ask a girl in his class if they could go on a date when he turned 10. Brown was one of the most reliable and joyful leaders, always jumping up to take attendance or pass out craft supplies. At the Boys and Girls Club of Bridgeport, B.
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