October 22, 2004
And The Tragedy Compounds
In a press conference yesterday, Boston Police took responsibility for the death of a college student who perished in the midst of a spontaneous celebration/riot in the area around Fenway Park in the aftermath of the Red Sox win over the Yankees early on Thursday morning.
Further, more details emerged specifically regarding the shooting of the victim, 21-year old Victoria Snelgrove of Emerson College:
Brett Schweinberg, an 18-year-old Emerson College freshman, said he was standing 20 feet from Snelgrove when, he said, she was shot on a Lansdowne Street sidewalk across the street from the Green Monster.
"I think [the officer] hit several people, but she got hit in the face," said Schweinberg, who said he, too, was struck by the pelletlike projectiles. "People started running away. She fell down. I moved in for a closer look. She was bleeding out of the nose."
He said the shooting started after someone in the Lansdowne Street crowd threw a bottle at police. It landed near a mounted officer and the crash startled the horse, he said. Another officer turned around, Schweinberg said. "He started shooting the crowd. He shot like a 6-foot area. I think he hit several people. But she got shot in the face. He opened fire in the area of the crowd where he felt the bottle came from."
Leif Anderson, 25, of East Boston, corroborated that account. From atop a nearby parking garage, he said he saw the same officer, from 20 feet away, fire at Snelgrove moments after the bottle crashed near the mounted officer.
"He turned around and immediately fired his gun leveled at head level," Anderson said. "He fired two rounds in extremely quick succession, and the girl immediately dropped. All her friends were around her. They were screaming. And people got very angry at that point."
Might we be looking at a situation where a crowd reacted violently to excessive use of force? It's hard to tell at this point, but somebody is going to have to answer some questions. Ones the parents of the slain girl are already asking:
At her home in East Bridgewater, Snelgrove's father, Richard, greeted reporters at his home yesterday by holding up a picture of his daughter. "I want you all to meet my daughter Victoria," he said. "She was out of the way, but she still got shot." Before he stepped back into his home with grieving relatives, the Brockton bus driver added: "This should not happen to any American citizen going to any type of game."
From the Boston Herald:
Theshot that killed Snelgrove followed a standoff between a cop on horseback and a young man wearing a gray knit hat. Standing by a bustling sausage cart, the man refused the officer's orders to move, prompting the officer to reach down and toss him to the ground. After getting up, the man hurled profanities at the cop and made several obscene gestures.
More bottles were thrown as at least one riot cop fired projectiles into the crowd, one of which apparently struck Snelgrove. The girl had been standing by the sausage cart with friends.
She immediately fell to the ground while her friends tended to her, rubbing her head as blood streamed from her face. Horrified onlookers shouted ``get an ambulance'' as the girl drifted in and out of consciousness. One of the riot cops checked on the girl briefly. Approximately five minutes after she collapsed, mounted police cleared a path for an ambulance and the girl was taken away.
As cops cleared the crowd, one young man who had been standing near Snelgrove shouted at police, ``Are you happy? Murderers!''
One officer was stunned at the ferocity of the violence. ``I saw the horses surrounded,'' he said. ``It was like a vacuum. They got sucked in. I saw guys holding small trees they had pulled out of the ground like warriors. They were holding steel sign posts they had bent over and broken. We had to fight to get control.''
More later.
UPDATE: Boston Dirt Dogs puts this all in the proper perspective:
All the disgraceful trash, punks and thugs posing as "college students" who shamed Boston and Red Sox Nation, and cost Victoria her life, must be punished and prosecuted. Use the TV footage. Use the photographs. Whatever it takes.
For a profile of Snelgrove, who was apparently a big Red Sox fan, click here. Click here for a piece on some of the restrictions Boston Mayor Tom Menino is considering in and around Fenway during the Series -- including banning liquor sales completely.
The Boston Globe created a map/timeline outlining exactly how things unfolded after the game.
I also kicked around Google, looking for articles about non-lethal weapons, and found this piece that describes a whole bunch of them, but comes with a particular warning that seems pertinent:
Ijames did not recommend using kinetic impact devices from short distances. One industry representative, whose company supplies non-lethal rounds to the Navy, noted that firing from distances shorter than 10 feet is considered unsafe.
"Even the best tools are useless without proper training in how to use them," said Bob Walsh, president and director of research and development at Technical Solutions Group, a non-lethal weapons contractor located in Charleston, S.C. "You can hurt yourself or other people."
While working for the Navy's science assistance program, Walsh helped assemble the "less-than-lethal," weapons package for U.S. forces in Somalia. Walsh said that the non-lethal capability sets and the concept of "force continuum" came out of this experience.
He explained that force continuum means that "you take control of the situation before it takes control of you," he said. Untrained troops tend to allow a crowd to mingle and assemble for too long before they act. "By then, it may be too late," he warned.
Again, more later. This is all so senseless.
UPDATE: The Boston Herald's front page carried a photo of Snelgrove lying on the pavement after she was shot. Click here to see it. And click here, for the angry reaction from the paper's readers.
I can understand why the paper ran the photo. It's appearance might have been the only way to communicate the tragic result when thousands of drunken rioters took to the streets to be confronted by a police force already smarting from the public beating it took in the wake of the Patriots' Super Bowl victory.
At the same time, to see the photo run directly under the paper's masthead with the appellation, "GO SOX," seems incredibly insensitive.
Thanks to reader Jim McCarthy for the pointer.
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OK, this is shaping up... yeah. Untrained troops, and that's the problem.
I think that if I were Menino, I wouldn't restrict drinking near Fenway. That's just going to push the problem somewhere else. What I would do is make it very clear, in cooperation with the bars, that the streets around Fenway are a clear zone after the games -- disperse the crowd before the problem begins.
Posted by:
at October 22, 2004 09:45 AM
Er, untrained troops and idiot crowds, I should say. It's the situation (which is bad) plus the fact that we don't have people in place who know how to handle such things.
Posted by:
at October 22, 2004 09:45 AM
I have wonder what's so different about the crowds and police in Calgary during the Flames' Cup run and the crowds and police in Boston. Calgary was relatively incident free with crowds as big as the ones in Boston.
Posted by:
at October 22, 2004 09:54 AM
It's the college students -- I'd guess literally three quarters of the crowd Tuesday night was college kids.
Posted by:
at October 22, 2004 10:03 AM
Apparently the Boston Herald ran a picture on the front page of the young woman who was killed. Readers are outraged. Here are some of the letters the paper is getting:
http://news.bostonherald.com/eLetters/
Posted by:
at October 22, 2004 12:28 PM
I think you've pretty well captured all angles here. Plenty of blame to go around, plenty of tough questions to ask.
Posted by:
at October 23, 2004 10:30 PM
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06:54 AM