Deadly Silence

Protecting witnesses will help cut crime

Despite recent laws, Cruz says more can be done.

By Maureen Boyle, Enterprise staff writer
   BROCKTON — The “code of silence” is not new and not just a city problem.
   In towns and cities throughout the state — ranging from tiny Berkley to mid-sized Randolph, and the larger communities of Brockton and Taunton and Charlestown — not cooperating with authorities can be a way of life for some.
   “We had a big problem in the middle school here,” Randolph Police Chief Paul Porter said.
    “There were robberies, street robberies and bullying. No one was coming forward,” Porter said. “We would have cases where the kid doesn’t want to say who it is because he’s afraid what will happen.”
   In Berkley, a town of just 6,433 residents, nestled between Taunton, Freetown and Lakeville — the 1980 slaying of 24-year-old Cheryle LeCornec is still unsolved, despite persistent whispers to this day about who did it.
   “It is a Mayberry, where everybody knows everybody and they’re afraid to tell,” her son, Torrey LeCornec of Easton, said. “I sat down with one woman who said, ‘I know somebody who knows somebody who is involved.’ Then she said she didn’t want to get involved.”
   In Carver, the charred body of 26-year-old Matthew Cote of Kingston was found in a truck set ablaze along power lines in 2003. Investigators suspect who may have killed him but no one is coming forward to talk.
   “I don’t think there is any community, large or small, immune,” Carver Police Chief Arthur A. Parker Jr. said. “Big cities are just small neighborhoods.”
   In Charlestown, the “no snitching” culture was so ingrained in the community for years that police found it difficult to solve crimes. Between 1975 and 1992, about 75 percent of the homicides were unsolved because witnesses refused to talk.
   In the mob underworld, cooperating with authorities can mean death. But even that is changing. In recent years, gangsters have testified for the state and then relocated into anonymity or penned books and walked into the national spotlight.