Things have been tense in Boston lately. Back in June, the subject of a “terror investigation” was
shot and killed by police after he was said to have waved a knife at officers who confronted him. A couple weeks later, another man, with another knife,
was also shot and killed by police. And earlier this month, the son of a Boston Police captain
was arrested after his father tipped off the FBI that he’d been threatening to join ISIS. All of which, of course, comes in the continued psychological aftermath of the Tsarnaev trial, in which the Boston Marathon bomber was sentenced to death, and the larger national conversation about the horrific shootings in South Carolina. So, perhaps, you might possibly forgive riders on the city’s buses for being a little on edge, like they were last weekend, when a man wearing what appeared to be an arsenal of ammunition walked onto the bus. On the other hand, you might call them a pack of simpering, terror-addled babies who called the police over a guy in a punk rock costume.
That’s what happened to Kevin Young, a 26 year old resident of nearby Watertown on Friday, July 10 when he was trying to take the bus from Harvard Square to Allston—a bus route, as anyone who’s taken it before can tell you, that regularly ferries its fair share of punks, metalheads, and assorted members of the general Boston hipster diaspora.
Around 4:20 (nice) on Friday, according to the police report, officers responded to a call for a “person with a gun” at the intersection of Cambridge and Harvard Streets.
The bus driver, the report goes on, had “pulled the bus over and stopped due to the suspect [Young] who was inside of the bus walking towards the front of the bus wearing a gun tactical belt on his waist with what appeared to be military grade ammunition rounds wrapped around his waist area and ankles.” The driver informed officers that he had “caused a panic” in the bus, and immediately called 911.
Young, having sensed something was amiss, got off the bus stop, like so many punks before him have at this particular location just outside the rock club O’Briens and Stingray Tattoo, at which point a search for the potential shooter ensued.
Witnesses informed police that in addition to the ammunition, the suspect “was wearing all black clothing, black boots, black spiked fighter gloves, and black spiked bracelets,” which sounds like a shitty Rancid cover.
Once apprehended, although the police admittedly determined that the bullets were, in fact, replicas, and not dangerous, they arrested him anyway. The charges included “unlawful possession of ammunition,” “carrying a dangerous weapon unlawfully (spiked/studded gloves and arm bands),” and, for good measure, “disorderly conduct.”
At arraignment, Jake Wark, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office spokesmen told me “prosecutors moved to dismiss the charges primarily on the grounds that the ammunition could not be fired and wasn’t intended to be fired.”
Under Ch. 140, Sect. 121, of the Massachusetts General Laws, he clarified, “a person may be prosecuted for possessing ‘cartridges or cartridge cases… designed for use in any firearm, rifle, or shotgun,’ but we determined that our resources were best directed elsewhere.”
I tracked down Young, who was in the midst of completing 20 hours of community service that he agreed to on the conditions of the charges being dropped, to ask him what happened. Young, an engineer who works in computer networks, is a Boston native, who runs the punk record label
Serfs Up, and plays in a couple of bands, including the act
Hexxus. The label is getting set to release a
compilation cassette of punk acts from around the world to benefit the Baltimore Uprising.
