Dear Governor Baker Part 1: DCF Admits Hundreds of DCF Kids May be Missing…

7-year old Jack Loiselle, whose family received DCF assistance for several months before authorities found Jack beaten and starved into a coma by his violent offender junkie dad.

When 40 children died last year while in State care, the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate released an annual report which played these deaths off as if they were just business as usual.  Maybe if we increase the budget for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families so they can hire more [badly supervised and trained] social workers, the problem will go away?

In response, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker allocated an additional $35.5 million to DCF, but he really didn’t lift the hood on the car to find out why the DCF vehicle is broken. That would have required an audit of DCF’s books to find out where their money actually goes, not just asking the same people who created the problem how much ransom they require to fix it.

To be fair, former Governor Deval Patrick left Governor Baker with a real shit sandwich over at DCF when he left office last year. Under Patrick’s leadership, the Department starved for several years, leaving a ballooning number of dead children in the wake of former DCF Commissioner Olga Roche’s embattled resignation.

When it comes to giving a hoot about Massachusetts’ most vulnerable kids, we only hear stories about these (mostly poor and not white) kids when they commit crimes and/or turn up dead.  The evidence tends to show the general public probably doesn’t have a clue how deadly the world is for American children who receive care from the State. That’s partly because the Juvenile Courts and the Department’s records not open to the public, but also because OCA, the State’s child welfare watchdog, appears to be asleep at the wheel.

The Governor and the Legislature have every reason to feel nervous (if in fact) they depend on OCA to give them a clear picture of child fatality and abuse stats for Massachusetts. The fact is that OCA itself might not actually know how many kids are in State care.

Perhaps no one is counting how many kids go missing.

The Office of the Child Advocate-Or DCF Advocate?

“Our mission is to improve the safety, health, and well-being of Massachusetts children by pro- moting positive change in public policy and practice. We further our mission by focusing on our core values: information, collaboration, and accountability.” -2015 OCA Annual Report

It’s a real problem that the FY 2015 OCA report doesn’t list up front the total number of kids on the State’s rolls receiving services from the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (which includes the Department of Children and Families, Dept. of Youth Services, etc.).  In fact, I had to turn to a recent report issued by Massachusetts State Auditor Suzanne Bump to discover that number.

From July 1, 2010 through September 30, 2012, Bump’s office found that:

“…there were an average of more than 7,000 children under the age of 18 in foster care across Massachusetts at any one time and a total of more than 40,000 children served by the department. During fiscal year 2012, DCF administered approximately $753 million, of which federal funds totaled approximately $16 million.”

According to OCA’s FY2015 annual report, “the child mortality rate measures deaths of children ages 0 – 17 per 100,000. Massachusetts’ infant mortality and child mortality rates are among the lowest in the nation.”

2011-12 Average Annual Child Mortality Rates provided by OCA:

Massachusetts:   33.8 per 100,000 persons

National:              51.2 per 100,000 persons

Wow, Massachusetts is really on fiyah (translation: fire) when you look at it that way, except for the fact that 2 important figures are missing from the OCA report; the total number of kids in State care as compared to how many of the children who died during that same period who were under State care at the time.

There were 38 deaths per 40,000 kids in the Department’s care during that time.

OUCH.

Put in perspective, the above-referenced stats show that kids receiving services from the State are more than twice as likely to die than those in the general public who do not.

But don’t thank OCA for that information because you won’t find it neatly spelled out in OCA’s report. Governor Baker and legislators can thank the New England Center for Investigative Reporting who spent several months and nearly $4,500 getting those figures from the Department.

In fact, no one really knows how bad things have gotten for the Department.

Bump’s office only conducted a very limited partial audit of DCF’s records, and she prefaced her report with the following disclaimer statement:

“The findings of our audit identified a lack of collaboration between agencies, weak policies and procedures, and unreliable or outdated data.”

Well that’s a real vote of confidence from Bump’s office that OCA and DCF can take to the bank.

Shameful considering that Judge Gail Grainger has been the head of OCA for the past seven years; before that Grainger sat on the bench in Juvenile Court for 13 years.  Grainger probably has a total of 45+ years of education, training, and experience leading up to the 2015 report she inked for the legislature.

If State Auditor Suzanne Bump Can Count DCF Kids, Why Can’t OCA and DCF?

According to OCA, accounting for the care of the State’s most vulnerable children is OCA’s primary mission:

“The OCA is responsible for reporting annually to the governor, legislative leaders, and the public on the activities of our office. In addition, Massachusetts has a duty under the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) to disclose to the public information about child abuse or neglect resulting in a child fatality or near fatality.”

If you read OCA’s reports, you get the impression there may be some snafus. 40% of kids in DCF care are on psychotropic drugs, and so it’s no wonder there were a few children who committed suicide or died under unsavory circumstances. So unfortunate, right?

On the other hand, DCF itself admits that hundreds of kids may be missing off the Department’s rolls, and there is good reason to believe that no one is actually looking for them.

In 2014, DCF Commissioner Olga Roche told WBUR in 2014 that 100 kids were missing from State care. Later in the interview, Roche’s Aide says 113 and corrects her. Then in the end Roche says the real number is “closer to 129” but she’ll get back to WBUR.

WHOA.

129 kids missing from DCF care? That’s nuts.

Can you, as a parent imagine what would happen if even ONE of your kids went missing and you failed to report it to the authorities? An Amber Alert would probably go out.  If the authorities did find your kid, DCF could have grounds to file a care and protection action against you in Juvenile Court and have you declared an unfit parent. You might never see that kid again.

So I bet OCA is all over that 129 missing kids figure, right?

Not really.

A year later, OCA’s annual report completely omitted any reference to specific statistics regarding kids missing from State care. Well, except for a brief mention on page 19 of which insinuates that less than 14 children ran away that  year. I don’t even know how Grainger’s office came up with that number of runaways and missing kids except to say she probably didn’t cross reference it with DCF leaders, reports to local police departments, or NCMEC. Also doesn’t seem like OCA bothered to ask the Judiciary how many CHINS warrants were issued for missing kids last year, as 129 seems like a pretty low statewide number for the general population (never mind the Department’s high risk rolls.)

But there were probably 129 Amber Alerts for missing foster kids last year, right?

Not so much.

Not only are OCA’s figures on missing kids probably complete horse shit according to DCF, but the way Roche was talking to WBUR, kids go missing all the time and it doesn’t get reported to authorities. All the children’s captors have to do to thwart the system is have their child victims call their social worker(s).

“They let them know that they’re OK, they are safe, they are with friends,” Roche told WBUR. “Sometimes they run away for a couple of weeks. Sometimes they run away for a couple of days. While we don’t know specifically the address, they let us know that they’re OK.”

No offense to the foster kid’s friends, but WHOA.

Is anyone besides me worried that these missing kids might be ripe for exploitation?How exactly does the Department imagine that a foster kid on the lam with no money, no parents, no education, no meaningful employment experience or training support themselves?

Here’s a parody of how I imagine that “check in call” between a missing child and DCF probably goes:

Missing kid borrows a phone (off their pimp or drug dealer?) to check in with DCF so DCF won’t call police, put out an Amber Alert.

DCF: Where are you?

KID: I’m not telling.

DCF: There’s a court date tomorrow, I’m going to have to tell the judge you are missing, and he might send you to DYS if they find you.

KID: OK, I’ll stop going to school and lay low on the street until I am 18.

DCF: That works for us. We’ll call if we need anything.

(Kid goes back to dealing drugs, exploitation, sex slavery…)

Dismissing the kids’ plight out of hand is a pretty radical position for a State agency to take with regards to missing and exploited children, most of whom come from high risk backgrounds. Roche also told WBUR that Massachusetts might not know which or how many foster kids are missing, but these kids are probably not worth chasing after:

“The majority, also, I wanted to say, these are 17-year-old kiddos,” Roche said. “Unfortunately we are not able to lock them up or restrain them or put them into facilities that are locked facilities, so sometimes when they are dealing with a trauma issue they just decide, ‘I can’t cope with this situation anymore,’ and they decide to run away from the facility.”

Let me get this straight.

The State removes children from their parents because their parents have abused and harmed them, then uses the harm complained of to indemnify the State when the State itself places kids in jeopardy? The State actually blames the kids for the sins of the adults who failed them?

Am I the only one who remembers that incident where a few weeks ago where an internal investigation found a “blatant lack of oversight by DCF” with regards to the licensure of a foster home where one toddler died of heat stroke covered in bruises while another was badly injured?

Or how about last year when the Suffolk County DA indicted eight youth workers for allegedly abusing kids in State custody? You think those youth workers might have something to hide if kids go missing from their care?

And this is not my imagination running wild here folks. This year authorities discovered  that the Department mislabeled at least one teenage girl a “runaway,” but that she was actually a sexually exploited child who was being sold out of a Raynham hotel by her homeless pimp. The Raychem Daily call reported that during the sting at the Quality Inn, police also found heroin, hallucinogenic mushrooms, needles and ammunition among the pimp’s possessions.

Raynam Police Chief James Donovan told the Raynham Call that what made it worse was that Fall River detectives told him that they were encountering cases in which victims were even younger, in their early teens, and that their parents were unaware of their activities.

It wasn’t the first time something like this happened. In 2007, Boston Magazine published a fantastic expose on how Massachusetts authorities dropped the ball on a Boston area under-age prostitution ring which also used kids in the Department’s care.

I assume that when the Detectives say “parents” they are including the Department? Because for this poor girl in Raynham, Lord only knows what tragic reasons the State had for deeming her parents unfit and placing her in the Department’s care. You can rest assured that the State’s cavalier towards missing and exploited kids does not extend to parents based on the fact that there are so damn many of them in State care.

Forgive me for saying so, and surely the FBI and Attorney General know best whether some of the billing practices outlined here  may constitutes criminal fraud, but does DCF’s business plan remind anyone else of a big old pump and dump, get it while you can, ponzi scheme funded by taxpayers?

Maybe if the AG treated foster homes that bill the State for the services they don’t provide the kids the same way she does inmates who collect unemployment from jail, things would be different.

(Part 2 to follow.)

Dear Governor Baker, Part 2: Sex Offenders and Foster Care? Let’s Audit DCF’s Business Records

In September 2015, Hardwick father Randall Lints was indicted by a Worcester County grand jury on two counts of assault and battery on a child causing substantial bodily injury, two counts of permitting substantial bodily injury to a child, and one count of reckless endangerment of a child in connection with the July 2015 torture, starvation, and beating that left his 7-year-old Jack Loiselle comatose.

The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families has become a dangerously lucrative hot mess. Olga Roche might be gone from the Department now, but the kids of Massachusetts might still be better off speaking for themselves in the media than relying OCA and DCF to honestly portray their plight.

The change of the guard also doesn’t change the fact that the Department assigns a “care team” to each case which is often staffed by literally dozens of State paid professionals who can’t keep track of these kids. In 2014, MA State Auditor Suzanne Bump actually had to inform DCF that 119 kids were living at the same addresses as registered sex offenders (to which DCF responded “but only one kid was found in porn.”)

If the last blog entry was not enough to convince you that Governor Baker should stop asking the same incompetent professionals who caused the problem for solutions that those same problematic providers want to get paid to solve, here are some more.

Are DCF “Care Teams” The Only Beneficiaries of Their Own Services?Remember 7-year-old Jack Loiselle from my last blog post?

Sadly, Jack has been in a coma since last July. Last month, Jack’s repeat offender dad Randall Lints was indicted for starving, torturing and beating him into that coma over a period of months. This all occurred despite the fact that the Department assigned a sickening gaggle of “support persons” to Jack’s case in the months leading up to that last horrific beating.

The review done by the State does not dispute that Lints had never even met his dad until the State came after him for child support last year, a move which probably forced the custody issue and provided a nice little carrot on a stick (State benefits in exchange for Jack’s mom paying Lints child support for a change). At the time, Jack was living with the Maternal Grandparents who raised him. The State report admits that before going for custody, Lints (who has a lengthy criminal record involving violence and drugs, as well as mental illness) told the State he did not feel fit to either pay child support or properly care for his son.

To be clear, Lints did not hide his mental illness or his violent criminal record from DCF at any point, but DCF just chalked it up to Lints needing some parenting lessons. Let’s get Jack in counseling, dad a parenting coach, and we’ll all get into the usual back patting circle positions with hands outstretched.

The State admits that subsequently DCF screened out no less than 9 reports of abuse and neglect concerning Jack in the months leading up to the day his dad put him in a coma.

One might ask why DCF decided to endlessly assess and prop up this criminal instead of just putting Jack back in the fit home that raised him? If DCF was going to be honest about their operations, why didn’t DCF just shut the phones off back at the DCF office after they dumped Jack with a violent mentally ill addict?

OK, first of all, does anyone really think DCF needed special training to understand that Jack’s dad, a violent offender junkie was never fit to parent?

Do Jack’s DCF workers have eyes and ears?

Perhaps the only person I could imagine believing Lints was fit would be another addict, but drug testing social workers and foster care providers is another blog post all together…

Anyways, DCF of course, has a right to tell their side of the story, and it of course paints a much kinder picture of what dozens of professionals were doing for several months while Jack wasted away in a violent manner. Here’s what an internal review of Jack’s case had to say about what went wrong:

DCF relies on partnerships with family members, service providers, schools, law enforcement, the courts and others to support child safety. An array of providers and systems were involved with Jack and his family. Rather than increasing child safety, however, this fact may actually have diffused responsibility and decision-making.

In other words, too many cooks in the kitchen, none of them interested in actually spending some time with the child who was supposedly the beneficiary of their services. In fact, the only beneficiary of the services may have been the providers billing off Jack’s horrifically abused life.

Seriously, just stop already. We have finally gotten to the point where the media is actually covering these stories as more than memorial tributes. The Governor shouldn’t be waiting around for some slick reporter to request copies of the invoices that tell the real story.

Auditor to DCF: Kids and Registered Sex Offenders Shouldn’t Mix

Perhaps one of the most courageous things that Massachusetts State Auditor Suzanne Bump did in 2014 was remind the Department of Children and Families that registered sex offenders and children don’t mix.

While the Office of the Child Advocate was fast asleep at the wheel, it was Bump’s 2014 audit  which informed DCF that the addresses of 119 foster homes matched those of sex offenders. After the Fells Acres daycare sex scandal in the 1980’s, you’d think the Department would be freiking out about such statistics because it’s the Department’s job to properly license daycares and foster homes—but no. DCF responded that this wasn’t such a big deal because the sex offenders didn’t actually live in the home with kids, and the only time a kid was harmed was when a sex offender neighbor made kiddie porn with a victim.

Well, again folks, I don’t know how DCF and OCA count their victims, but I remind you of the John Burbine case. Bourbon was a registered sex offender who Prosecutors allege filmed himself raping 13 children ranging from 8 days old to 3 1/2 years old at his wife’s home based unlicensed day care center between August 2010 and August 2012. Inasmuch the State Sex Offender Registry Board and BOP also failed MA kids by not visiting the home, it should be said the DCF knew there was a problem. Boston.com reported that from 2005-2009, DCF investigated several complaints about Burbine raping kids, which then Middlesex DA Gerry Leone said were not prosecutable.

DCF Pays Workers Who Can’t Take Out The Garbage Properly To Keep Track of Offenders and Kids

Bump’s report showed that the Department wasn’t running background checks on potential caregivers before foster kids were placed in the home. A random sample of 29 cases found that of the 63 background checks required, 43, nearly 80 percent, could not be located.  Some caseworkers were destroying paper background checks once completed “unless there was a problem.”

Define “problem.”

But get this.

DCF workers wouldn’t even take the time to shred those records or take the garbage out. This is a picture of the Department’s record storage and disposal system taken directly from page 23 of Bump’s report:

There may be vast amounts of tax dollars flowing through the Department to service providers engaged in fraud. These providers appear to billing the state for kids they don’t even know, never mind provide services to. It’s as if common sense goes out the window any time someone drops the word “children” into a sentence. The child welfare industry is just like any other business; it is not immune to idiots, crooks and con artists.

Just imagine for a second that Baker begins to view the Department like a private business that just misused a vast portion of it’s $752 million budget. Handing DCF $35.5 million would be preposterous. Yet for some reason, Massachusetts taxpayers continue to give the good, the bad, the stupid, the unethical, and the criminals who work for DCF  $752 million per year and more credit than they deserve—no real questions asked. And this game is deadly.

At what point do we admit that we are just feeding the beast?

When viewed this way, I’m appalled that Deval Patrick’s administration turned a blind eye to the children of Massachusetts. I don’t know if OCA’s reports were submitted under oath to the legislature, but I certainly think the issue warrants scrutiny. Really, the Department can’t find the kids in it’s care who are lost and dying; they can’t even properly taking out the garbage, so why are we giving DCF more money?

Some say it really doesn’t matter what Massachusetts Governor Baker does, kids will always die under the Department’s care because the very nature of these cases involve the State’s most vulnerable families. I whole heartedly disagree. Let’s at least audit the Department’s books and find out where DCF’s money went, stop the blood shed.

Maybe it’s just time to talk turkey.

Yes, I said turkey.

Numbers.

Moulah.

Dinero.

Statistics.

*And they need to add up.*

Audit DCF’s books.

That is, after all, what any decent business man would do when he discovers that his business is going belly up. It’s also a goal implicitly included in OCA’s mission statement that isn’t necessarily being met. Massachusetts kids are not lost causes, nor should they be treated as disposable people.

Boston Media’s Deal With the Devil

If you asked Boston journalists what the second and third most disturbing images they saw this month were, they might cite their own faux outrage over the video of CBS reporters Alison Parker and Adam Ward being gunned down on live television, or the photographs of the body of Aylan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian refugee, washing up on the beach in Turkey.

But perhaps nothing had Boston media in a lather quite like this courtroom sketch:

Sketch is by Jane Rosenberg.

Seriously folks.  No one minds when a courtroom sketch artist butchers the likeness of the Boston Marathon bomber or Whitey Bulger, but not our golden boy Tom Brady.

More importantly, there is a reason why there are no actual photographs of Tom Brady appearing in court for poor Jane Rosenberg to work off of. Judges don’t want the public to know what actually goes on in their courtrooms.

Yes, the media often complains about the erosion of our First Amendment rights or that there’s not enough pressure on States and the Feds to enforce or expand open records laws. But the truth is that most media outlets are being hypocrites when they complain about Federal courthouses that deprive them of their hypothetical right to broadcast proceedings.

Even when the media uses unsealed motions or exhibits in their stories, they maintain an “edge” by refusing to publish source documents that the public is otherwise unwilling or unable to afford to access to.  They are full of shit because even if Boston’s courtrooms were 100% accessible, most editors and producers won’t publish content that they consider too graphic or controversial for the public’s virgin eyes to see.

Oh the many levels of hypocrisy we weave.

Take for instance Alison and Adam’s televised murders, which were a disturbing and tragic nightmare to watch.  Most media outlets (including CBS) would not run the footage. The public saw the footage because gunman Bryce Williams filmed himself committing the crimes, then uploaded the movie to social media.

The film produced by the gunman himself proves that that Alison and Adam were gunned down in broad daylight by a mentally ill homicidal stalker. Bryce Williams cursed at his victims as they bled out alone on the sidewalk before their loved ones could say goodbye, then fled the scene like a coward.  It would be absolutely absurd, dishonest and outrageous to suggest that this was the look on Alison’s face when she died.

While Alison’s family feels the best way to honor her is to use her death as a platform to have Congress pass laws that protect future victims of gun violence, the media is busy honoring her legacy as a journalist with dishonest coverage of her murder.

To be clear, it was THE GUNMAN’S OWN video which served as a wake up call to middle class white America that no one is immune to gun violence. It has only been a week, yet the sanitized images used in the media’s sensational memorial coverage of Alison’s and Adam’s untimely death have made us forget that We the People could have done something to prevent them.

Let’s be honest with ourselves about why some media outlets wouldn’t run this video, and why those that did caused widespread calls for the stricter gun laws that might have saved Adam and Alison’s lives.

Murder and death are some of the most common images seen on television every day, and mainstream media is happy to glorify those images if it generates ratings.   Sure the media runs footage of murders all the time, but the victims are usually not white, and they are almost always from a social demographic that is unlikely to sue the media. The victim is almost never some upper middle class white person or the professional colleagues of the editors who approve these kinds of stories.

In other words, if you are an upper middle class white kindergartner from Connecticut who goes to the movies at the wrong time, the media will pretty much ensure your death is rendered meaningless just as quickly as the black kid who gets shot by a cop while playing cowboys and indians with an obviously plastic gun.

Guns are not toys, and it is not in the public’s best interests to have unrestricted access to unreasonably dangerous objects that end up harming more people than they save. But just like in Sandy Hook, the Aurora theater shootings, and other mass casualty shooting events, the smiling portraits of victims have gone up and the talk about gun control has died down.

Media outlets who choose not run graphic images are being 100% honest when they tell you that they are unwilling to provide the public with truthful coverage of important events and issues.

One reason to disbelieve the benevolent intentions of media outlets who didn’t run the graphic footage “out of respect for the victim’s families” is because those same media outlets were lying to America when they ran the partial truth instead. Another valid reason to call bullshit is that Alison’s father was all over the news calling for Congress to pass stricter gun laws. Yet I am not aware of any journalists who actually asked Alison’s father whether he wanted the footage of his daughter’s murder broadcast—if it convinced the public to pressure Congress to help him accomplish his goal?

Another popular excuse invoked by the media for refusing to run the video was that journalists said they didn’t want to “glorify” the graphic images or inspire copycats who get their rocks off trying to outdo the last mass murderer who became a paparazzi darling.

First of all, what kind of idiot believes that truthful media coverage is going to cause more Bostonians to quit their day jobs working for the State so that they can instead spend their days combing the news looking for innovative ways to make a name for themselves as mass murderers?

This argument also fails because CBS already made Bryce Williams a celebrity when they hired him as a news anchor.  In effect the media is just admitting that they would have made Adam and Alison’s murderer a worldwide celebrity had he lived to do a jailhouse interview and stand trial.

Really, who are these same hypocritical journalists who think that they are somehow fit to decide what lies best suit public viewers?  Or is it just the prospect of Boston rising up and demanding political reform that’s the problem?

That is why I’m calling bullshit.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

The decision about whether or not to publish a graphic image often has nothing to do with what’s in the best interests of the public. Here’s proof.

Nilüfer Demir, Doğan News Agency

From that angle, 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi looks like he could be any white person’s son. According to International Business Times, the worldwide publication of pictures documenting Aylan’s drowning death in Turkey this week caused an international call to action to help desperate Syrian refugees. Photo journalist Nilufer Demir tells IBT why she decided to publish a photograph of a child’s lifeless dead body:

“At that moment, when I saw the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, I was petrified,” she said. “[He] … was lying lifeless face down in the surf, in his red t-shirt and dark blue shorts folded to his waist. The only thing I could do was to make his outcry heard.”

But for some reason, I do not recall seeing this graphic image much in the Boston media this week. Instead, I saw a sanitized faceless version of the haunting photograph making the rounds where, if I didn’t know better, I would think that Aylan was taking a nap in a Turkish policeman’s arms. Then this photograph of Aylan playing with his older brother (who also drowned) became popular just before the media fervor over the Syrian refugee crisis died down.

Aylan Kurdi, 3, and his older brother, Galip who also drowned. Twitter.

Media might say they showed the second image more than the first because well, this is how some members of Aylan’s family would like everyone to remember the boys. But is this really just an excuse for helping bad journalists and leaders forget they stood by while these boys suffered a horrific death?

Let’s look at some examples of when gruesome images of violence benefitted Bostonians:

President Kennedy’s Assassination: On November 22, 1963, the nation watched as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on live television. As a result, the nation came together behind Boston and the Kennedy’s. To this day, the video gets replayed in slow motion by networks and conspiratards alike, and we debate the angle at which President Kennedy had his head blown off as if it matters more than the fact that a mentally unstable murderer had access to a gun in the first place.

Nonetheless, the video has it’s place in history for Boston.

BOSTON MARATHON: Who could forget these images which brought a nation together behind Boston?

Courtesy of the Boston Globe

#BlackLivesMatter: Once upon a time, many Americans foolishly believed that in this day and age, the police couldn’t get away with murdering unarmed black people for no good reason. That misnomer proliferated because our good friends in the media wouldn’t publish the footage of these events.

Thankfully, young activists carrying cell phone cameras were on hand to records these events, then upload them to social media for our enlightenment.

I give you Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen shot by #Ferguson police:

Around the same time the Feds declared a state of emergency to quell riots  in Ferguson (over local official’s refusal to hold Officer Darren Wilson accountable for Michael Brown’s death), the Washington Post discovered that the Feds could only ever count around 400 “justifiable homicides” carried out by police in a single year. This prompted the Guardian (a UK based newspaper) to start a database called The Counted to track police killings in every state.

According to The Counted, American police have killed 787 people in 2015, and 10 of them lived in Massachusetts. But the year’s not over yet.

I can’t say that these efforts have actually resulted in police to being held accountable more often, but it has certainly made the public aware of the fact that it may not be wise to call the police in certain situations if they value their own lives.

Usaama Rahim Police Ambush: Remember that time when [self interested] anonymous police sources insisted that the shooting of Usaama Rahim was justified because they had video footage of the 19-year-old “terror suspect” going all gang busters on the Joint Terrorism Task Force with a machete?

Not so much.

When the footage was finally released, the public was outraged to see that JTTF ambushed Rahim, then unnecessarily gunned him down on the street while a school bus [carrying disabled kids?] drove by. As it turns out, Rahim was not a crime suspect, and police did not have a warrant to arrest him, but the video shows that Rahim may or may not have been holding a hunting knife (that JTTF indirectly supplied him with.)

That situation raised some serious public safety questions about JTTF surveillance of private citizens and when it is ok for police to open fire in public.

My point here is that perhaps there is a greater threat to public safety when editors are allowed to cherry pick which truths are fit for public consumption. In fact, the dishonest white washed and watered down coverage of violent crime probably accounts for the lack of public support for gun control, not to mention a lack of empathy for victims of violent crimes.

It is therefore, entirely reasonable to argue that the Bryce Williams video is the poster child for why Human Resources reform is long over due in America’s most dogged newsrooms. Maybe those journalists who decided not to run the footage of Aylan, Alison, and Adam’s deaths should consider applying for jobs in a places like Russia or North Korea where media censorship and propaganda are valued. Back here in America, we need better journalists on the beat, and they need more honest editors and producers to support them.

The Luckiest Man in Boston

ON March 12, 2015, carjacking victim Dun Meng took the stand in Federal Court to testify against Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon bombing trial. The soft spoken 24-year-old Chinese national presented himself honestly, as a graduate student who was living the American dream on a terror filled night in April 2013 when he was carjacked at gunpoint in the suburbs of Boston. Meng’s carjacking nightmare ended when he called the police from a Cambridge gas station, a tip that would lead to the capture of the accused Marathon bombers. His testimony at trial would help convince the jury to convict Jahar on related charges, sentencing him to death in June 2015.

Meng is (for good reason) a very difficult man to reach these days. This reporter was unable to ascertain where Meng was on April 15, 2013 or in the days that followed because previous reporters do not appear to have asked him this question, and neither the prosecution nor the defense asked him to testify on the subject of his whereabouts while he was on the stand.  However, newly uncovered documents show that Meng and his business partner may have dodged several gruesome crime scenes left in the wake of the bombing, and were likely to cross paths with the Tsarnaev’s long before they carjacked Meng.

 FROM GRADUATE STUDENT TO BUDDING ENTREPRENEUR 

During opening statements at trial, defense attorneys for then 20-year-old Jahar Tsarnaev admitted that on April 15, 2013, Jahar helped his brother Tamerlan, 26, planted bombs at the Boston Marathon. The explosions on Boylston Street killed three and wounded up to 260 others. Jahar’s attorneys also admitted that three days later, their client and his brother participated in the murder of MIT police officer Sean Collier, then carjacked Dun Meng.

On April 19, 2013, Meng escaped with his life at a Cambridge gas station. Less than an hour later, Tamerlan would be killed in a shoot out with police on the densely populated suburban streets of Watertown. Jahar was captured alive, only to be sentenced to death by a jury of his peers in June 2015.

When it was Meng’s turn to take the stand at Jahar’s trial, the student entrepreneur told the jury through a thick and sometimes wavering Mandarin accent that he had come to Boston from China in 2009 to obtain his master’s degree in transportation and engineering from Northeastern University.  Meng testified that while he was in school, he and a business partner were working on developing and marketing a Chinese food delivery app, but that he didn’t have a the proper immigration documents which would allow him to legally work in the US.

These documents obtained from the Massachusetts Secretary of State shed new light on what Meng’s life and business plans entailed in the year leading up to the carjacking. In February 2012, Meng and his business partner Yinglin Yang registered a business called Pleashare, Inc. with the Massachusetts Secretary of State. Pleashare’s registration shows that in 2012-2013, Pleashare’s business address was located at 800 Boylston Street, and that Meng was living on Ocean Boulevard in Revere. Other documents filed with Secretary’s office during that same year show that Yang was also the proprietor of another business called Upgrade Journey, which had offices in Chelsea and Woburn. Upgrade Journey’s documents show that Yang’s apartment was located at 812 Memorial Drive in Cambridge.

According to U.S. Immigration authorities, Pleashare, Inc. is a “planning and transportation leader” founded at some time in or before 2011. Pleashare has sponsored one person’s visa, and that person’s salary was $75,000, but does not list what the source of Pleashare’s funding. Immigration authorities have also listed Pleashare’s address as being at 185 Squire Road in Revere.

During trial testimony, Meng said that in the early months of 2013, he returned to China while he waited for the U.S. government to grant him the H1B visa he needed work legally in the U.S.  Meng told jurors he obtained his visa in early spring and returned to Boston, but he didn’t have much income because his startup hadn’t yet launched.

Nonetheless, trial exhibit 754 shows that in March 2013, Meng put $17,000 in cash down on a the lease a new Mercedes SUV. The agreement with Mercedes-Benz of Boston required Meng to make additional monthly payments in the amount of $652.10, but does not state what the source of Meng’s payments were.

Dun Meng’s Mercedes SUV following the Tsarnaev’s shoot out with police in Watertown.

Another interesting fact about the car lease was that according to reporters present at the trial during Meng’s testimony, the lease document presented in court listed Meng’s address as 350 Third Street in Cambridge.  However, this information was redacted from the document released to the public on the DOJ’s website. According to documents filed with the Secretary of State in late June 2013, 350 Third Street was also the business address for Upgrade Journey, and by then one of Upgrade Journey’s business partners had moved to Houston, Texas.

The immigration information is interesting because Meng was here on a student visa when founded his company, but that visa did not allow Meng to work. Pleashare sponsored one U.S. visa application in 2011, listing that employee’s salary at $75,000. However, Pleashare was not registered to do business in the State of Massachusetts until 2012, and Meng did not receive an H1B visa until 2013. It is not known why Pleashare provided different business addresses to immigration authorities and the Massachusetts Secretary of State, or whether this would be significant to the sponsored employee’s immigration status.

Although the source of Pleashare’s funding and the $17,000 Meng used as a cash downpayment of his car lease remain unknown, his large car expenses may account for the fact that Meng only had $1,516.57 in his bank account on the night he was carjacked (see trial exhibit 768 and 769.) What became the bomber’s “burner car” might have been doomed to be repossessed if Meng could not continue making payments that spring, yet Meng’s lack of cash on the night of the carjacking begs the question of what Meng’s captors might have done if he had been able to give them more cash?

A DEADLY WEEK ENDS IN CARJACKING

On April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded on Boylston Street. At trial Jahar admitted he planted one of these bombs at 755 Boylston Street, about a block over and across the street from Pleashare’s 800 Boylston Street address.  8-year-old Martin Richard and Lingzhi Lu, 23, a Chinese graduate student at Boston University were killed  in the explosion. But the FBI says that they did know the identities of the bombers until Meng’s carjacking report helped locate the suspects.

According to news reports, Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, 21, a Saudi Arabian student was injured by the same bomb detonated across the street from Pleashare. The following day, the FBI raided Alharbi’s apartment in Revere, which was located in the building next to Meng’s apartment. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napalitano later said that although Alharbi was never a suspect in the bombings, authorities placed him briefly on the “no fly” list while they cleared his name.

There is no evidence to suggest that Alharbi was involved in the bombings or that he knew Meng, it is just another extraordinary coincidence that befell Meng that fateful week.

Meng told jurors that on April 18th, he was working late at his Kendall Square office in Cambridge, which is located on the MIT campus. At approximately 5:00 p.m. that evening, the FBI released photographs of two men matching the description of the Tsarnaev brothers who were wanted for questioning in the Marathon bombing case.

“After day of work, I — after like about 10:30 I finished the discussion with my partner. So I left my workplace,” Meng testified. “I feel a little tired, so I decided to drive with my car out to get a ride to relax.”

Although Meng said he was headed no place in particular, he noticed some unusual police activity as he left work that night.

“When I was on Memorial Drive near the MIT campus, I saw a lot of police cars with blue lights drive into the MIT campus. It’s about a five or six, maybe more than that, police cars.  So I thought that maybe something happened there, but I don’t know what happened.“

Meng may have just missed crossing paths with another disaster. At around the same time Meng was leaving work, the Cambridge Police received a call about shots fired on the MIT campus. At around 10:30 p.m., authorities discovered MIT police officer Sean Collier shot to death in his cruiser outside the Stata Center, just blocks from Meng’s Third Street office in Kendall Square.

This MDAO  press release explains what Cambridge Police believed happened to Meng next:

“A short time later, police received reports of an armed carjacking by two males in the area of Third Street in Cambridge.  The victim was carjacked at gunpoint by two males and was kept in the car with the suspects for approximately a half hour.  The victim was released at a gas station on Memorial Drive in Cambridge.  He was not injured.”

What the press release does not say is that Meng escaped from his own car [the front seat?] at the Shell station, then ran across the street and called police from a Mobil convenience store located at 812 Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Upgrade Journey’s documents show that at the time, Meng’s business partner may have lived in the same apartment building above the Mobile station where Jahar’s friends also resided.

Surveillance footage released by the DOJ:

Nonetheless, at trial, Meng offered up a different story that was much more terrifying than what the MDAO and even the FBI initially suggested. None of the timelines surrounding the car jacking seem to add up.

Meng testified that at some time prior to 11:00 p.m., Tamerlan carjacked him at gun point as he sat parked in his Mercedes at 60 Brighton Avenue in Allston (which is different than the Cambridge location given by MDAO.) Meng said that Tamerlan subsequently confessed to carrying out both the Marathon bombing and Officer Collier’s murder.

According to Meng, Jahar joined them later on, and that they spent 90 minutes driving around the unfamiliar streets of Cambridge, Waltham and Watertown trying to empty Meng’s bank accounts. Meng’s nightmare ended just after midnight on April 19, 2013 when he managed to escape after his captors became distracted at a Cambridge gas station.

“This was the most terrifying moment, the most difficult decision in my life,” Meng said. “I dashed onto the street. I could feel he was trying to grab me.”

Although Meng may have known that his business partner lived upstairs, he probably would have hidden somewhere else had he known that Stephen Silva, the man who supplied Jahar with the gun used to carjack him and kill Officer Collier also lived in the same building.

Other notable residents of 812 Memorial Drive at that time included Robel Philipos, a friend of Jahar’s who knew nothing about the bombings or the Tsarnaev’s crimes, but was nonetheless voraciously prosecuted by the DOJ for lying to investigators about the meaningless information he possessed before being made aware that he should seek counsel. In 2015, a jury found Philipos guilty on those charges, and he is currently appealing his conviction and three year sentence in the case.

After the Tsarnaev’s left the Memorial drive gas station, the Cambridge police were able to use information from Meng to track down the suspects :

“Police immediately began a search for the vehicle and were in pursuit of the vehicle into Watertown.  At that time, explosive devices were reportedly thrown from car by the suspects.  The suspects and police also exchanged gunfire in the area of Dexter and Laurel streets.  During this pursuit, an MBTA Police officer was seriously injured and transported to the hospital.

During the pursuit, one suspect [Tamerlan] was critically injured and transported to the hospital where he was pronounced deceased.  An extensive manhunt is ongoing in the Watertown area for the second suspect, who is believed to be armed and dangerous.”

COULD LAW ENFORCEMENT HAVE PREVENTED THESE TRAGEDIES?

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In the days that followed Jahar’s capture, the FBI issued a press release denying that it knew the identities of the Marathon Bombers until Tamerlan’s corpse was fingerprinted, but conceded that the Joint Terrorism Task Force swarmed the MIT campus “on an unrelated matter” in the hours leading up to Collier’s murder.

This was hardly the truth. Several members of the Tsarnaev family had been arrested by local police over the years for various misdomeanors. In fact, authorities say Tamerlan’s “radicalization” may have actually taken place in 2009-2010 while he while he was still on the pre-trial probation rolls of the Middlesex DA and facing charges for assaulting an ex-girlfriend. However, no one from the Middlesex probation office testified at trial, and none of the probation files made their way into court.

In addition, Tamerlan’s death certificate and his family’s testimony at trial revealed that his family was deeply tied to Russia. FBI Director Robert Mueller III later admitted to Congress that it was aware that Russia had been watching Tamerlan [on U.S. soil] since 2010, and that the FBI had a relationship with the Tsarnaev family dating back to at least 2011.  Mueller also told congress that both the FBI and CIA had placed Tamerlan on terror watch lists at the suggestion of Russian security forces in the years leading up to the bombings.

There is no evidence to suggest that Meng knew the Tsarnaev’s or Jahar’s friends who lived in the same building as Meng’s business partner. But the coincidences surrounding Meng’s choice of addresses continue to manifest.

According to the Secretary of State, Pleashare, Inc. recently moved its’ headquarters to a communal office space on the 14^th floor of One Broadway, another MIT building located just two blocks from where Officer Collier was murdered. According to their website, Meng’s office is home to dozens of other businesses, including several tech start ups and a surprising number of defense contractors. The 14^th Floors most notable tenants include Global Strategies, Inc., which employed Russian spy Andrey Bezrukov until he was arrest and deported in 2010.

Meng’s addresses are significant because he is a Chinese national with many addresses, and the only known witness who was not involved with the crimes but  who could have been present at so many national security terror events, such as the Boston Marathon bombing, the Revere search, the carjacking, and Watertown (before the police arrived.)

The fact that the trial failed to elicit testimony from Meng which would explain whether he was concerned that his addresses were located so close to the crime scenes suggests that prosecutors and defense attorneys either didn’t know or had deemed the information irrelevant. Alternatively, the information may have been suppressed in one of the 800 pleadings sealed at trial.

The exhibits and transcript from Dun Meng’s testimony in the Boston Marathon bombing case can be accessed here and here.

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