Deadly Silence

Silent streets: Part 3

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

By Maureen Boyle, Enterprise staff writer
   BROCKTON — Mourners filled the Russell & Pica Funeral Home on Belmont Street to pay respects to a 19-year-old girl who had died in a Boston hospital of a heart problem.
   From across the room, Maria Marcelino spotted a face. She nudged her husband. Is that him? she asked. Isn’t that the person they talked about?
   There, across the room among the mourners was the young man whispered to be “the shooter,” the person who had shot Shaian Colon to death and left Marcelino’s son paralyzed.
   He was there to pay his respects, one of many from the tightly knit and often inter-related Cape Verdean community at the funeral home.
    Marcelino would later say she was surprised to see the teen at the wake, to see what he looked like.
   “I worry when I go to the store, ‘Is that him?’ I didn’t know what he looked like,” she said. Now, she feels she does.

A life cut short
    Maritza Rodriguez smiled at her 4-month-old granddaughter in the windowless living room of the second-floor apartment.
   The light from the television — tuned to a cartoon show — danced across the room, across the bookcase to the memorial for Maritza Rodriguez’s son, the baby’s father.
   Nestled between the candles are the photos of 17-year-old Shaian Colon. There’s his certificate of achievement from the B.B. Russell Alternative School. There’s the photo of his stillborn son, delivered prematurely months before Shaian was killed. There are white, ceramic angels, and delicate chimes that sound as she passes.
   It is here, in the darkened room, that Rodriguez will gaze into the playful face of her granddaughter, also named Shaian.
   “I think of him when I see her,” Rodriguez said, folding the blanket closer around the infant.
   The baby looks like Shaian as a child: the smile, the twinkling, large eyes, she said. The baby gives Rodriguez comfort and hope for the future.
   Rodriguez watches the baby during the day while her son’s girlfriend, Larissa, finishes high school. Born seven months after Shaian was killed, the baby keeps Rodriguez focused. The baby maintains her faith. “He always wanted a girl,” she said.
   Throughout the apartment are memories of Rodriguez’ son and of the dangers of the streets.
   Her daughter Kiara taped clippings of news stories about other shootings, other deaths, to her bedroom door. “Stop the Violence,” she wrote across one.
   In another son’s bedroom is a photo of Shaian, his sister and one of his brothers as children. They are smiling to the camera, standing in the driveway of the Green Street house they called home then.
   They are standing as children in the same spot where Shaian would later be fatally shot.

Carlos Colon, Shaian’s father, doing a stint at the Bristol County jail for drug dealing, reflects on his son’s death. (Craig Murray/The Enterprise)

‘I’ll deal with it’

   Carlos Colon scrutinizes the faces of men who come into the jail in Dartmouth and wonders.
   Is that him?
   Colon believes he knows the voice of the teen who, according to those on the street, killed his 17-year-old son. He spoke with him once on the phone and kept the number listed as “shooter” on his cell phone. He has the suspect’s name, a name bantered on the street within hours of the shooting.
   But he does not know the boy – Colon calls the suspected killer a boy, even though the shooter is now legally an adult. And if the killer strides through the door of the jail Colon now calls home, he still does not know what he will do.
   “I’ll deal with it when they get him. It’s all I can do.”
   It is 11 months after Shaian’s death and Colon is back behind bars. It is a familiar place for Colon. He has been locked up for much of the past two decades – mostly for drug dealing.
   Now, he is back in jail for a year after he was found in his car, unconscious at an Easton intersection. Police found heroin, cocaine and other drugs — drugs, Colon said, he had been using to numb the pain of his son’s death.
   Things are clearer now. His body is clean of drugs – he underwent withdrawal while in jail – and he is now in the jailhouse routine.
   He is housed in 2 East, the unit where new prisoners pass.
   Colon spent the first anniversary of his son’s slaying sharing a dormitory-style cell with five other inmates.
   Colon still presses, behind bars, for police to find his son’s killer. He talks with other inmates. He asks his family on the outside to keep asking questions. But he knows those who know, those who saw, those still on the street, will not talk.
   “Nobody’s going to say anything,” Colon says.
   Colon the father is angry at the silence. Colon the prisoner, the man who once ran on the streets, understands.
   “I would probably do the same thing,” he said. “It is a rule you don’t break if you want to survive in a place like this.”

Larissa Rodrigues, girlfriend of murder victim Shaian Colon, holds their baby, Shaian, as she talks about her childhood sweetheart in her mother's Brockton home. (Craig Murray/The Enterprise)

‘What do I tell her?’
   Along the walls of her second-floor bedroom and on the dresser top, is the history of Larissa Rodrigues and Shaian Colon.
   There is their second-grade class photo on the south wall. She is in the front row, third from the left, wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt. He is in the back row, second from the left, wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt. On the dresser are photos of the couple.
   In the months after Shaian Colon’s death, Rodrigues still struggles with the questions. Who shot him? Why is no one coming forward? Why Shaian?
   “I’m dreading the day when she grows up and asks what happened,” Larissa said of their daughter. “I don’t know what to say...What do I tell her? The person is still out there? No one wants to say?”
   Larissa said people know who killed Shaian. She is convinced there are witnesses to the shooting, witnesses to the suspect fleeing, witnesses who may have heard the gunman talk about the killing.
   No one, however, is coming forward to tell police.
   The name of a suspect spread through the streets the night of the shooting and the days after. More than a year later, thatsame name is mentioned when talk turns to who killed Shaian.
   It is a name she heard when she answered the phone one day, months after Shaian was killed.
   The person on the other end of the phone identified himself as the teen and laughed. Then he hung up.
   “I don’t understand why he called me,” Larissa said.
   She graduated from Brockton High School this year and, with the support of her mother, attends Massasoit Community College.
   As she plans for the future, Larissa is pulled to the past. Each night, she lays her daughter into the pink crib and atop the brown T-shirt lightly scented with the cologne, Dolce and Gabbana.
   It is the shirt the child’s father — her namesake — wore the day before he died, a shirt Larissa found crumpled on the bedroom floor days after the shooting.
   ”I want her to know her father’s smell,” Rodrigues said. “I want her to have something.”

Life continues
   Carlos Colon went straight to his son’s grave when he was finally released from jail, two days after the second anniversary of his son’s death.
   Behind bars for nearly 16 months, he gained 50 pounds, sobriety and the growing fear that his son’s killing may never be solved.
   He has heard the boy he calls the “shooter” has been busy on the street. There are stories he has shot and wounded someone else, that he is now emboldened after getting away with murder.
   The whispers on the street still continue that there are witnesses. But no one is talking.
   “If they haven’t said anything after two years, they’re never going to say anything,” he said.

Silent streets, silent tombs
   Maritza Rodriguez placed four roses in the Green Street driveway, then bowed her head. Four teardrops fell onto her memorial T-shirt, dropping onto the face of her dead son.
   The two dozen family, friends and acquaintances fell silent as the mother prayed over the spot where her son died.
   “Two years, nothing,” she cried. “I know you are with God. I know he is going to do justice. I know. I know.”
   She turned and walked to the 22-year-old man, standing five feet away. He lives in the Green Street house, knew her son and was home the night he was killed. “My heart is broken,” she said.
   She held his hands, staring into his eyes. “I forgive the person who did this to my son. I do not want anything to happen to him. I just want justice. I want justice for my son, for my family.”
   She turned, in her hands the placard bearing her son’s portrait that once graced his casket, to join the small gathering that would slowly walk, under police escort, the two miles from Green Street to Calvary Cemetery to mark the second anniversary of Shaian’s death.
   At the cemetery, her granddaughter — Shaian’s daughter — would kiss the gravestone photograph of the slain teen. Her own daughter would wipe away tears. The man shot with Shaian, Rosando Marcelino, who underwent yet another surgery to remove another bullet from that attack, would sit to one side in a wheelchair, head down.
   The silence at the graveside would be broken by one of Shaian’s brothers.
   Aneudi Rodriguez surveyed the faces of those gathered around the tombstone, his eyes settling on a select few.
   “Two years, no justice,” he said. “A daughter still wants to know where her daddy is. My mother still suffers. I don’t appreciate people who are saying they’re his boys and say nothing,”
   He placed a small wishing well at the grave, a small sign “Justice for Shaian” on it, then walked away.