Bartholomew Roberts
Moderator
From the Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/264/metro/This_is_the_gun+.shtml
"Over nine months, the journey of a single .380-caliber handgun from Roxbury through Dorchester and into a deadly encounter with the city's 21st homicide victim reflects a pattern in which police say young offenders lend and borrow guns like books from a library.
In another case investigators have focused on, a single 9mm handgun zig-zagging across Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan in the past 18 months has been tied to at least a dozen shooting crimes, including one homicide.
Police would not disclose details about that pistol, saying several cases linked to it were under investigation. But the gun - a lurking threat that continues to float through basements, in and out of backyards, and beyond the reach of police - suggests a challenge for law enforcement more thorny than the popular mantra to get guns - any guns - off the street.
As violent, gun-related crime creeps dangerously upward in Boston, ballistics experts say, common fears about a new influx of guns flooding streets are deeply misguided.
In fact, they say, a database of ballistics evidence built up over the past five years in Boston shows that a limited number of guns is fueling a large number of violent crimes.
The clustering of crimes around a few highly active guns has raised the stakes of finding the most deadly ones, not only to halt the firearm's path inside a community but to maximize the number of arrests and prosecutions of offenders who might strike again.
''We've had six, seven, eight different cases that one gun is linked to,'' said Sergeant Detective Mark W. Vickers, commander of the ballistics unit. ''What the data shows us is that a couple of guns are being passed around through neighborhoods or various groups. It flies in the face of what most people would think, that so few guns are responsible for so much of what comes through here.''
Though he would not discuss details of the 9mm gun investigators have linked to a dozen crimes, Vickers described the case as astonishing.
''Very rarely would you see one gun attached to so many crimes,'' he said.
Most of the guns linked to a cluster of crimes are rotating in a small geographical area, sometimes as tight as a few neighborhood blocks, but often crossing boundaries through Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and the South End.
Some guns are loaned for cash, others for drugs, and still others passed to friends as a favor, Vickers said.
And by and large, police say, these are not the coveted ''clean'' guns, fresh from the box with no history of spilled blood. The firearms fueling the surge in violent crime are ones that see heavy traffic but that, nonetheless, stubbornly elude law enforcement.
''If you have a gun that's already got a body on it, it's already linked to something, that becomes the throwaway gun you pass around to the other kids, and that gun becomes very cheap,'' said one police source. ''The thing is, no one is ever going to have possession of it. It will always be in a basement or something for whoever needs it. But it won't be the gun you carry.''
Starting in 1995, a cutting-edge ballistics identification system radically changed crime-fighting, pulling clear patterns out of thousands of bullet fragments from seemingly unrelated cases.
With a gigantic microscope that magnifies bullets 500 times and shell casings 100 times, the technology scans an image of unique marks engraved on a bullet when it leaves the gun's chamber.
The engravings, officials say, are as unique to a gun as a fingerprint to a human hand, signatures that can be matched to evidence already in the database or any future evidence.
Since all guns recovered by police are fired and compared against information in the database, even the youngest gun toters know not to carry ''hot guns'' on them.
The database, known as the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, in turn is connected to similar databases in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washingon, as well as other countries from Israel to South Africa to the Netherlands.
Prior to IBIS, police rarely compared bullet fragments from different cases unless other evidence offered a compelling reason to analyze them manually under a microscope. Minor incidents like shots fired randomly were ignored outright, the spent shell casings from them virtually useless to officers.
Now, science has shortened to seconds a matching process that, if done manually, would have ground investigations to a halt in the past.
And a report of shots fired that seems inconsequential could hold the missing link that leads police to a suspect, a gun, or both.
''You never know what that shell casing could yield,'' Vickers said. ''Even if you don't have the actual gun, when you put all the dots together, you might see, OK, this guy hangs here, this is his mother's house, this is where his girlfriend lives. You start to make connections.''
With enough connections, police might have been able to hunt down the .380 semi-automatic handgun involved in two Dorchester shootings and a pair of shots-fired incidents over nine months.
But the shootings weren't solved and, instead, the gun was used to hunt down 17-year-old Pedro Sajous, leaving him bloodied and crawling toward a fire box in the last minutes of his life.
The gun first surfaced in September, when it was fired randomly on Reading Street in Roxbury. Six week later, in November, ballistics evidence showed someone opened fire with the same gun on Draper Street, shooting Brima Wurie, 21, in the back, in daylight, as he walked down the street.
Then in May, Joao Gonsalves was walking the same streets when three suspects on bikes stopped at a driveway, pulled out the chrome gun, and fired at him and two teenage friends.
From there, the gun moved just a few short blocks to Church Street, where Sajous was walking, also with a friend, when he was killed.
When the Dorchester teen's life ended on August 14, so did the life of the gun that killed him. It was recovered inside a rented U-Haul van police say five teenagers rode in up Meetinghouse Hill, chasing Sajous.
One among them, age 16, allegedly emptied bullets into Sajous' stomach.
''It's extremely frustrating,'' said a police source, referring to the murder. ''You know the gun is out there, but you don't know who's got it.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 9/20/2000. "
"Over nine months, the journey of a single .380-caliber handgun from Roxbury through Dorchester and into a deadly encounter with the city's 21st homicide victim reflects a pattern in which police say young offenders lend and borrow guns like books from a library.
In another case investigators have focused on, a single 9mm handgun zig-zagging across Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan in the past 18 months has been tied to at least a dozen shooting crimes, including one homicide.
Police would not disclose details about that pistol, saying several cases linked to it were under investigation. But the gun - a lurking threat that continues to float through basements, in and out of backyards, and beyond the reach of police - suggests a challenge for law enforcement more thorny than the popular mantra to get guns - any guns - off the street.
As violent, gun-related crime creeps dangerously upward in Boston, ballistics experts say, common fears about a new influx of guns flooding streets are deeply misguided.
In fact, they say, a database of ballistics evidence built up over the past five years in Boston shows that a limited number of guns is fueling a large number of violent crimes.
The clustering of crimes around a few highly active guns has raised the stakes of finding the most deadly ones, not only to halt the firearm's path inside a community but to maximize the number of arrests and prosecutions of offenders who might strike again.
''We've had six, seven, eight different cases that one gun is linked to,'' said Sergeant Detective Mark W. Vickers, commander of the ballistics unit. ''What the data shows us is that a couple of guns are being passed around through neighborhoods or various groups. It flies in the face of what most people would think, that so few guns are responsible for so much of what comes through here.''
Though he would not discuss details of the 9mm gun investigators have linked to a dozen crimes, Vickers described the case as astonishing.
''Very rarely would you see one gun attached to so many crimes,'' he said.
Most of the guns linked to a cluster of crimes are rotating in a small geographical area, sometimes as tight as a few neighborhood blocks, but often crossing boundaries through Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, and the South End.
Some guns are loaned for cash, others for drugs, and still others passed to friends as a favor, Vickers said.
And by and large, police say, these are not the coveted ''clean'' guns, fresh from the box with no history of spilled blood. The firearms fueling the surge in violent crime are ones that see heavy traffic but that, nonetheless, stubbornly elude law enforcement.
''If you have a gun that's already got a body on it, it's already linked to something, that becomes the throwaway gun you pass around to the other kids, and that gun becomes very cheap,'' said one police source. ''The thing is, no one is ever going to have possession of it. It will always be in a basement or something for whoever needs it. But it won't be the gun you carry.''
Starting in 1995, a cutting-edge ballistics identification system radically changed crime-fighting, pulling clear patterns out of thousands of bullet fragments from seemingly unrelated cases.
With a gigantic microscope that magnifies bullets 500 times and shell casings 100 times, the technology scans an image of unique marks engraved on a bullet when it leaves the gun's chamber.
The engravings, officials say, are as unique to a gun as a fingerprint to a human hand, signatures that can be matched to evidence already in the database or any future evidence.
Since all guns recovered by police are fired and compared against information in the database, even the youngest gun toters know not to carry ''hot guns'' on them.
The database, known as the Integrated Ballistics Identification System, in turn is connected to similar databases in cities including New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washingon, as well as other countries from Israel to South Africa to the Netherlands.
Prior to IBIS, police rarely compared bullet fragments from different cases unless other evidence offered a compelling reason to analyze them manually under a microscope. Minor incidents like shots fired randomly were ignored outright, the spent shell casings from them virtually useless to officers.
Now, science has shortened to seconds a matching process that, if done manually, would have ground investigations to a halt in the past.
And a report of shots fired that seems inconsequential could hold the missing link that leads police to a suspect, a gun, or both.
''You never know what that shell casing could yield,'' Vickers said. ''Even if you don't have the actual gun, when you put all the dots together, you might see, OK, this guy hangs here, this is his mother's house, this is where his girlfriend lives. You start to make connections.''
With enough connections, police might have been able to hunt down the .380 semi-automatic handgun involved in two Dorchester shootings and a pair of shots-fired incidents over nine months.
But the shootings weren't solved and, instead, the gun was used to hunt down 17-year-old Pedro Sajous, leaving him bloodied and crawling toward a fire box in the last minutes of his life.
The gun first surfaced in September, when it was fired randomly on Reading Street in Roxbury. Six week later, in November, ballistics evidence showed someone opened fire with the same gun on Draper Street, shooting Brima Wurie, 21, in the back, in daylight, as he walked down the street.
Then in May, Joao Gonsalves was walking the same streets when three suspects on bikes stopped at a driveway, pulled out the chrome gun, and fired at him and two teenage friends.
From there, the gun moved just a few short blocks to Church Street, where Sajous was walking, also with a friend, when he was killed.
When the Dorchester teen's life ended on August 14, so did the life of the gun that killed him. It was recovered inside a rented U-Haul van police say five teenagers rode in up Meetinghouse Hill, chasing Sajous.
One among them, age 16, allegedly emptied bullets into Sajous' stomach.
''It's extremely frustrating,'' said a police source, referring to the murder. ''You know the gun is out there, but you don't know who's got it.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 9/20/2000. "