Massacre described in detail
By Laurel J. Sweet | Wednesday, November 24, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage
‘EMBRACE EACH OTHER’: The Rev. William Dickerson, center, prays with friends and family of the 4 people gunned down in the Mattapan massacre, including Patricia Washum-Bennett, mother of Levaughn Washum-Garrison, and her husband, James Benne
Photo by Mark Garfinkel
The massacre that rocked the city this fall was a cold-blooded execution over a drug robbery, prosecutors said yesterday, detailing for the first time the chilling sequence of events that left a toddler and three other bodies strewn in a Mattapan street.
“We promised not to rest until all the facts were known. With these charges, we’re significantly closer to that goal. But whatever satisfaction we may take in that knowledge pales in comparison to the pain etched on so many faces in Dorchester District Court,” Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley said in a statement after 33-year-old Dwayne Moore was ordered held without bail by Judge James Coffey.
The unemployed Moore — who did not show his face in court — is charged with four counts of murder for the shooting deaths of his former roommate Simba Martin, 21, Martin’s girlfriend, Eyanna Louise Flonory, 21, her 2-year-old son, Amanihoteph Smith, and Levaughn Washum-Garrison, 22, shortly after 1:15 a.m. Sept. 28.
Public defender John Amabile entered not guilty pleas on Moore’s behalf.
On the fateful night, Moore and a con he befriended in state prison, Kimani Washington, went to Martin’s home armed “for the purpose of robbing him,” prosecutor Edmond Zabin said. Moore, he said, had shared the place over the summer and “knew the apartment intimately and that drugs and cash could be found there.”
Moore tried to bring Martin outside when Marcus Hurd, 32, drove up and Martin came out to meet him. Then, Zabin said, the defendants forced both victims inside at gunpoint and stripped them naked in the apartment — where they found Washum-Garrison, Flonory and her son.
After robbing the home of a safe, cash and drugs, Moore and Washington marched the five victims up to Woolson Street, where all of them were shot multiple times, Zabin said. Hurd survived but remains in critical condition.
Washington has been held on $1 million bail since his October arraignment on gun and drug charges.
Moore was tracked down by cops after a grand jury witness testified to seeing a gun in his hand during the robbery. He was arrested Monday night at the Morton Street apartment — opposite the District B-3 police station — where he’d been living since the shootings.
After his arrest, Moore cowered in the corner of a police interview room and whimpered to detectives, “I can’t do this, I can’t go back to jail. You’re going to have to kill me,” according to court documents.
Moore is classified in court records as a “career criminal” with arrests dating to 1991 for armed robbery, armed carjacking and assault and battery.
He was convicted in 1996 of stabbing and plunging a knife through the neck of 17-year-old Keema Braxton of Milton on Aug. 11, 1995, to settle an argument outside a Mattapan party. Moore was charged with first-degree murder, but convicted by a jury of manslaughter.
He served out his 15-year sentence and according to the Department of Correction, was released from prison April 13 — just five months before the murders.
Yesterday in Dorchester District Court, family and friends of the massacre victims wore buttons and T-shirts honoring their dead.
“Let them, Lord God, be able to embrace each other and celebrate the lives they left behind,” said the Rev. William Dickerson as he gathered the families around him in the courthouse lobby for a Thanksgiving prayer.
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