Deadly Silence

Silent streets: Part 2

The search for a killer; a family's search for justice

By Maureen Boyle, Enterprise staff writer
   BROCKTON — Detective George Almeida was in full investigative mode as he checked the scene on Green Street for evidence and tried to find witnesses.
   He and two other detectives — Nazaire Paul and Samuel Carde — had rushed to the neighborhood minutes earlier when a call came in for shots fired. It was about 1 a.m. on Oct. 11, 2006.
   Two people in a van were critically wounded and emergency rescue workers were trying to save them.
   Now, the ambulances were gone but the number of people on the street was growing with every minute and every cell-phone call.
   “People were coming out of everywhere,” Almeida said.
   Almeida and the other detectives cordoned off the area, secured the scene and searched for evidence. State troopers assigned to the Plymouth County district attorney’s office arrived. So did crime scene technicians and specialists.
   Almeida was surveying the area when the officer, just back from the hospital, walked up to him. “Do you have the names of the victims?” Almeida asked.
   “Shaian Colon and Rosando Marcelino,” the officer answered. Almeida’s heart sank. Shaian Colon was his wife’s nephew.

‘They shot Shaian’
   Maritza Rodriguez answered the phone, expecting to hear her son Shaian’s voice.
   Instead, it was one of his friends. “They shot Shaian,” he said.
   Panicked, she rushed to Green Street, the troubled neighborhood she once called home, the neighborhood she had fled years earlier but which drew her son back.
   She saw the police cruisers, the officers, the yellow tape. She saw people on the street. Some were crying. One came up to her. But no one would tell her what happened.
   In another part of the city, Larissa Rodrigues, Colon’s pregnant girlfriend, heard her cell phone ring through the haze of sleep and answered it.
   Larissa, 16, dropped to the floor and began to wail.
   Throughout the city, other phones rang. Each message was the same. Shaian Colon and Rosando Marcelino were shot on Green Street.
   And, as the hours passed, phone calls carried another message: the name of the shooter.
   One by one, Shaian’s family would step into the ICU at the Boston hospital.
   There, they would see him hooked to machines to keep him alive. There, his mother could feel her heart pounding. “I had hope. I had hope he would live,” she said.
   She sat talking and gently touching her youngest son, praying her voice would be the miracle that would revive him.
   “See ‘Shaia,’ this is why Mommy was bitchin’ all the time. This is why I didn’t want you on Green Street. I didn’t want this to happen to you.”
   His eyes misted, she recalled. “He cried. I know he did. I know he was listening to me.”

‘I was so afraid’
   Maria Marcelino and her husband hoped for the best and feared the worst when they rushed through the Brockton Hospital emergency room doors.
   Rosando, their 20-year-old son, had been shot in the side and the stomach, they were told.
   How much damage was done remained unclear. But it looked bad.
   “I was so afraid,” she said. “I was so afraid he would die.”
   He would be transferred to a Boston hospital, where doctors eventually broke the news. He would live.
   But test after test at Boston Medical Center confirmed what doctors had feared from the start.
   The bullet struck his spinal cord. Rosando would live, but would be left paralyzed from the chest down.
   The news was worse at Boston Medical Center. With each hour, the swelling in Shaian Colon’s brain worsened. More tests were done.
   “That is when they came up and called me in the room,” his mother said. “They were telling me how the brain was dead. There wasn’t much for them to do.”
   It was time, the family was told, to remove life support.
   Slowly, members of Shaian’s family stepped into his room to say goodbye.
   “That was the hardest thing: to watch him lying there, dying, and you can’t do anything about it,” his girlfriend, Larissa, said.
   About five hours after Shaian Colon was shot in the head, he was declared dead.
   His organs were donated. One person got his heart, another his liver, a third his kidney. In his own violent death, Colon saved lives.
   “I know there is a piece of him everywhere in this world,” his mother said.

Larissa Rodrigues, girlfriend of shooting victim Shaian Colon, poses with daughter Shaian in her mother’s Brockton home. (Craig Murray/The Enterprise)


A new life begins
   The pains started in WalMart by the photo center on May 15, 2007.
   Larissa Rodrigues’ due date was nearly two weeks away when doctors were to deliver her and Colon’s daughter by C-section.
   It had not been an easy pregnancy. She was diagnosed with Factor V Leiden, a genetic blood disorder where the blood has an increased tendency to clot.
   Doctors were keeping a close watch on Larissa.
   The next day, May 16, she went to Brockton Hospital.
   Larissa was prepped for a C-section, then joined in the delivery room around 6:30 p.m. by her mother.
   Tears streamed down Larissa’s face as she thought about Colon.
   At 7:36 p.m., Larissa Rodrigues gave birth to an 18 inch-long, 5-pound, 15-ounce baby girl.
   Outside the delivery room, in the waiting room, Shaian Colon’s family gathered. Larissa’s mother walked in to give the good news.

Crime goes unsolved
   On the white board tacked to the wall on the second floor of the state police detective office at the Middleboro barracks, the name Shaian Colon and the date of his death is printed.
   He is one of nine killed in 2006. His slaying is one of three still unsolved that year.
   State Trooper Anna Brooks and Brockton detective George Almeida were the investigators assigned the case. But a handful of others, from both departments, gave them whatever whispers they heard on the street.
   But whispers — even the name of the suspect — are not evidence and, as the days, weeks, and months pass, investigators are still not close to making an arrest.
   Friends and relatives of Shaian passed along information to authorities. Some received phone calls from a man they suspect was the killer. One talked with a man he suspects is the gunman.
   But no one has come forward to say they can positively identify the killer, who can say they saw him open fire, or can identify who was the voice on the other end of the phone. That is what is needed, authorities say, to convict.

Dad seeks justice
   In the months after his son’s death, Carlos Colon had been determined to find a way to bring his son’s killer to justice.
   Shaian’s mother forced the family to make a promise: no retribution, no violence. “I don’t want another mother to go through what I am,” she told them.
   But Carlos made a series of calls to try to find where the teen who everyone claimed had shot his son was hiding, still unsure what he will do when he knows.
   What he found out is the suspect’s phone number. Carlos dialed it.
   A young man answered. Who is calling? he asked.
   “I didn’t say who it was. I said, ‘You know what the phone call is about,’ and he got nervous.”
   In the next five minutes, the young man keeps asking who the caller is.
   “I never told him who I was. He mentioned ‘Shaia.’ He said he was going to do the same thing to me, he would see me in the same funeral home.”
   Then the voice gave Colon the closest he would get to an explanation for why his son died.
   “He said that he didn’t mean it, it wasn’t meant for him (Shaian). I said, ‘That makes a difference.’ That really makes a difference, that it wasn’t meant for him.”
   The number is still in Colon’s cell phone as he sits in the living room of his girlfriend’s Mansfield condo.
   “Here,” he says, showing the display. “Shooter.”