Town vs. Gown in Murder Trial

Seldom
has a situation so dramatically exposed the centuries old Town vs Gown
clash of cultures in Cambridge, Mass as the recently
concluded trial of Harvard grad student Alexander Pring-Wilson for the murder of Michael
Colono, an 18-year-old short order cook who lived in the area.

These two iconic individuals approached their fatal encounter
outside the Pizza Ring restaurant in Cambridgeport from opposite sides
of the track.  Pring-Wilson was finishing a Master’s Degree in Russian
and Slavic Languages, he spoke Greek, Russian, Portuguese, and Croatian,
was writing his master’s dissertation on the governments of the former
Yugoslavia. He played football and rugby in prep school and was decided
on a career in law. He had been accepted by several top law schools.

Colono was a high school drop-out with a three-year-old
son and a criminal record.  At the time of his death we was on parole
for a 2001 conviction for selling crack cocaine.

The facts of the case are interesting if not unusual. Colono
was sitting in a car with his girlfriend and a cousin, waiting for a
pizza. It
was after midnight, near closing time for the bars nearby when Pring-Wilson
came walking by on a wet April night last year.

Cambridgeport is a funky and somewhat seedy corner of Cambridge,
nestled in a bend in the Charles River near the BU Bridge, one of the
few areas of affordable housing left in the city, which is why it is
popular with students, working class families pizzerias and down-scale
bars.

Pring-Wilson was waltzing home, specifically, from a dark
dive called the Western Front, with which the Dowbrigade is intimately
familiar (more on that later). The Western Front, a Reggae Boyz dive
with ties to the local underworld, and neighborhood grease joint Pizza
Ring are within a few blocks of each other across Putnam Avenue.

The basic facts are uncontested. Pring-Wilson, according
to reports at the time, was wearing a shiny yellow rain slicker and flip-flops.
The homeboy yelled something from the backseat of the car in reference
to the grad student’s unusual garb. The student responded with some variation
of "You talkin’ to me?" A confrontation ensued.

The occupants of the car got out. Verbal abuse escalated
into physical conflict. Aided by his cousin, the eventual victim was
getting the better of the contest when the beleaguered grad student whipped
out a three-inch folding knife he carried in his right front pocket.
Colono was stabbed five time, once in the heart,

The victim might have lived had he been taken directly
to a hospital (there are at least 3 in Cambridge), but he died while
his friends drove him across the river and around in circles, lost in
the streets of Boston. Pring-Wilson called the police and reported he
had
witnessed
a fight,
but hadn’t been involved.

Public opinion on the case was as sharply divided as the
contrast between these two young men. Colono’s family and community lauded
him as a promising young man with a troubled past who was finally getting
it together.  They feared the system would naturally favor the scion
of wealth and privilege, to the point of letting him get away with murder.

Supporters of Pring-Wilson, including most of the Harvard
community, saw a clear cut case of self-defense. Many, in fact, said
privately that Pring-Wilson had done the community a service by removing
a dangerous
thug and drug dealer from the mean streets of Cambridge.

So it came as no surprise that both sides were outraged
at the verdict last week – guilty of manslaughter, 8 to 10 years in prison.
The townies say it was cold-blooded murder and the kid got off light
because of Harvard connections.  Pring-Wilson’s parents (both lawyers
and, one would suppose, one Pring and the other Wilson) vow to appeal
the verdict, although on what grounds is far from clear.

Now, despite its inherent drama and socio-cultural implications,
this story has a more personal significance to the Dowbrigade, as at
one point during our long-ago undergraduate career we live right across
the street from the Western Front, and around the corner from Pizza
Ring, which at that time was the Western Ave Laundromat.

Even then the Western Front was a shady crossroads of roots
rock reggae and underground distribution of all sorts of Caribbean products.  We
weren’t regulars, but would often stop by for a quiet drink at the bar,
if they were still open at the hour we returned to our apartment at 172
Putnam Ave. We were usually the only white folk in the place.

The laundromat on Western that is now Pizza Ring is actually
where we washed our clothes that long-ago season, until one warm summer
night when we were collecting our last dryer load shortly before 11 pm
closing time. Other than the Dowbrigade, the place was deserted. Just
as we were folding our psychedelic wood-grain corduroy pants, seven
large
and lively
local teenagers
burst
into the laundry.

Not being the quickest tick on the dog’s tail at the best
of times, the first inkling we had that these individuals were not there
to check their dryer sheets was when three of them grabbed me from each
side and forced me to the floor of the laundry. We felt frantic hands
going through our pockets and removing the $17 plus change we happened
to be carrying at the time.

Unlike Pring-Wilson thirty years later on virtually the
same spot, we knew enough not to fight back. Survival instinct combined
naturally with our innate cowardice and we almost smiled at our assailants
in an attempt to appear cooperative.

The whole thing was over in seconds. As we lay, stunned,
on the laundry floor and the gang headed out the door with their booty,
one of the youths noticed the plastic baggie that had half fallen from
our Hawaiian shirt’s breast pocket.

"Lookie, man! He got PEELS! He got LOTSA peels!"

"Shuddup, man, an’ get otta there!"

But he grabbed the blue-and-white capsules on his way out
the door, which if memory serves were something called "Soapers", a sort
of chemical martini-in-a-capsule, guaranteed to loosen up the inhibited
school marm
and chase the inhibitions away from the most paranoid compulsive.  We
gave them up later that same summer, after waking up and finding a set
of fishnet stockings and a dead kitten in our apartment, with no memory
of how either had gotten there.

Following the mugging, we gathered up our laundry, dumped
it on our bed, and borrowed ten bucks form Big Jim our roommate, and
headed across the street for a couple of shots of whiskey to calm the
nerves.
When the bartender asked about the torn brest pocket on our Hawaiian
shirt, we told him our pet chimpanzee had ripped it grabbing for a banana
life saver.

For a couple of weeks we kept a half-hearted eye on the
neighborhood street-dealing scene, half expecting the blue-and-white
capsules to show up, or for one of the punks to show the obvious effects
of powerful
muscle relaxant intoxication, but the way those kids staggered around
on a regular basis it was impossible to tell.

So what are the morals of this little vignette? First,
that for all of its intellectual veneer, Cambridge has always had a
tough, gritty underbelly that can eat up a grad student and spit out
pits so tiny no one will ever know what happened, and so one must be
aware at all times of exactly where one is. In addition, if attacked,
run away.  Should
this prove impossible, go limp, roll up into a ball, or piss your pants,
but DON’T
FIGHT BACK. Finally, if you are determined to go to a dangerous, hard-core
roots Reggae roadhouse, don’t dress like a dork.

article on the verdict from the Boston Globe

article about the case from the Harvard Crimson