E-Mail This Article to a Friend HOMICIDE Did the BPD let the streets kill Carey Ried? BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Carey Ried’s family waited and waited, but even after the 18-year-old died early last Sunday morning, some 33 hours after he was shot on Westwood Street in Dorchester, the police never came to Boston Medical Center to ask them any questions.

This lack of interest in who shot Ried was strangely appropriate, since authorities seem to have been equally blasé for the past 16 months about the possibility that Ried was being hunted by people seeking revenge for a death they held him responsible for — a murder Ried may have committed, according to court documents, in self-defense against a gang that was hunting him two years ago.

In June 2003, Carey Ried, 16 years old at the time, allegedly killed 14-year-old Eon Hoskins. According to the state’s own version of the case, Hoskins and at least a half-dozen others chased Ried, trying to fight with him. Hoskins ultimately chased Ried into an alley, where Ried allegedly stabbed him once. Suffolk County district attorney Dan Conley’s office charged Ried with second-degree murder.

If Suffolk County brought murder cases to trial with any reasonable speed, perhaps Ried would be alive today — questions could have been answered, a verdict reached, and a reasonable sentence imposed. But Ried was not due for trial until May 2006, assuming no further delays. He had no violent history or prior convictions, he was working diligently toward his GED, and he had local family to support him. So, after Ried spent a year in Department of Youth Services detention, a judge awarded him restricted freedom rather than transferring him to an adult jail when he turned 17. His family scraped together the $5000 cash to put up his bail in June 2004.

Ried was out for all of one day before shots were fired at the Dorchester house where he was living with his grandmother, smashing a window and injuring a family friend. Police declined to investigate, the family claims, insisting that the shooting was unrelated to Ried. The Boston Police Department (BPD) has no record of a reported incident at the address at that time, a spokesperson says. Having Hoskins’s alleged killer walking free for at least two years infuriated Hoskins’s family and friends, as a Hoskins relative told the Phoenix this summer.

In July 2004, Ried’s father wrote an impassioned letter to both Conley and Kathleen O’Toole, commissioner of the BPD, [Editor's Note: the letter to Dan Conley, while provided to the Phoenix from the family, was actually never sent] copies of which were provided this week to the Phoenix (read the letter). "I depend on you to protect my family," Colin Ried wrote at the time. "But you don’t." Neither office responded, says Rosemary Scapicchio, the Boston attorney who was defending Ried.

Trapped in Boston by the terms of his release and the electronic monitoring bracelet he had to wear, Ried nonetheless managed to get his GED and hold a full-time job. Last Friday, around 5 pm, he was walking from work to a family member’s house when he was shot three times.