Boston's Alternative Source! image!
   
Feedback

New Bedford confidential
What defines the historic seaport? The gang rape at Big Dan’s and the teenage Columbine wanna-bes? Or the downtown arts revival and fast-paced job growth?

BY NEIL MILLER


NEW BEDFORD — Just after Thanksgiving, when New Bedford police revealed that a group of students at the 3250-pupil New Bedford High School — the second biggest in Massachusetts — planned a violent rampage that "would surpass the Columbine tragedy," the national media descended in droves upon this old whaling city 50 or so miles south of Boston. The mayor’s public-information officer found herself fielding 75 to 80 calls a day; media inquiries jammed phone lines at the police and school departments, creating near chaos. At a New Bedford District Court "dangerousness" hearing for the alleged ringleader, 17-year-old Eric McKeehan, representatives of national and regional media far outnumbered the locals.

The arrests of McKeehan and four other self-styled "freaks" — including McKeehan’s 15-year-old brother, Michael; their friend Stephen Jones, also 15; and 17-year-old Amylee Bowman, who told her favorite teacher about the plot — was hardly the sort of attention that New Bedford officials, who’ve been working overtime to resurrect their city, want to attract. They worried that the sudden notoriety would put another "black mark" on New Bedford, just as the hard-luck South Coast city, with its architecturally distinguished Greek Revival buildings and handsome downtown historic district, was reawakening.

The city of 100,000 has been at the top of the world — and at the bottom. In the mid 19th century it was the global whaling capital, a city so rich, wrote Herman Melville, that its men gave dowries of whales for their daughters and porpoises for their nieces. "Nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses, parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford," Melville wrote in Moby Dick (1851). In 1845, the city’s whaling fleet brought home 158,000 barrels of sperm oil, 272,000 barrels of whale oil, and three million pounds of whalebone. But the discovery of petroleum in the late 1850s doomed the whaling industry; although textile mills replaced whaling as the mainstay of the city’s economy, the mills literally went south in the 1920s and ’30s. Soon after, New Bedford fell into decline, its downtown largely shuttered and empty, one of its finest Greek Revival buildings turned into a filling station. Perhaps nothing symbolized New Bedford’s fall better than the infamous gang rape at Big Dan’s tavern, an incident that formed the basis of the 1988 movie The Accused, starring Jody Foster and Kelly McGillis.

The hard times brought about a culture of "defeat and negativity," according to Ken Hartnett, editor of the city’s daily Standard-Times (and a former Phoenix columnist). "In New Bedford there is a way of doing things without high expectations," he says.

In the last few years, however, New Bedford’s fortunes have gradually begun to reverse. Although unemployment remains high, job growth in the New Bedford metropolitan area outpaced the Massachusetts average during most of 2001; real-estate prices are up, after skidding or stagnating through much of the ’90s. The historic downtown area buzzes with activity, as streets are paved with cobblestones and abandoned banks are transformed into restaurants. As galleries open their doors, artists flee the high cost of Boston studio space for New Bedford’s cheap ocean views. Bumper stickers laud NEW BEDFORD — #1 FISHING PORT IN THE USA! This summer, 16 cruise ships, each bearing around 1000 passengers, will dock in the city’s harbor. If, as expected, a proposed rail link to Boston becomes a reality, the city’s economy could receive an additional boost.

"So many good things have happened here," says third-term mayor Frederick M. Kalisz Jr. "This is a new time."

This is the kind of message the city fathers wanted to get out. Suddenly, however, it wasn’t the up-and-coming New Bedford but the remnants of the down-at-the-heels, disenfranchised New Bedford grabbing the headlines.

ERIC McKEEHAN had his own ideas about getting some attention for New Bedford. "Just to see the publicity. See how big it would get," he explained in a November 24 tape-recorded interview with a police officer, later played in New Bedford District Court. "I wanted to see how New Bedford would be if they were on top, because it’s such a little P-town.... Just imagine another Columbine but at New Bedford High, you know what I mean." The New Bedford of defeat and disenfranchisement was very much on display in district court on December 3, when the Columbine wanna-be went before Judge Bernadette L. Sabra for a hearing to determine if he posed a threat to public safety.

In the corridor outside the courtroom, Isaac Hatchett, 18, a close friend of Stephen Jones, tried to cast doubt on the whole thing. "They wouldn’t have gone through with it," he insisted. "Nothing major was going on. Things look real bad. You’d have to know them to understand."

But two young women waiting to go into another courtroom as witnesses in a DUI trial had a different view. "New Bedford High on MTV — it must be big!" said Megan Sylvia, 18, a student at Bristol Community College. "I think it is real. There is wicked-big talk in New Bedford about this." According to Sylvia, the police devote too much time to harassing "gangster" kids on street corners. "They won’t touch the quiet kids planning nasty stuff," she said. To her friend, Kelly Fauteaux, a 21-year-old waitress, the whole affair just proved the old stereotype. "Nothing good ever comes out of New Bedford," she said.

In the intimate, wood-paneled courtroom, Eric McKeehan, dressed in a gray suit and looking old for his 17 years, sat facing Judge Sabra. His divorced parents sat together in the midst of the reporters — his father with a neatly clipped goatee, his mother dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. On the stand, Stephen A. Taylor, a New Bedford police officer assigned to the high school, was being grilled by McKeehan’s lawyer, Alan Zwirblis. Taylor read from Eric’s brother Michael’s notebook, which included excerpts from The Anarchist Cookbook (Barricade Books, 1971) detailing how to build such weapons as a tennis-ball bomb ("Throw it at a geek — he will have a blast") and a Hindenburg bomb ("Fill with helium, watch it go off").

"Not exactly Osama bin Laden stuff," observed defense attorney Zwirblis tartly.

But the earnest, blue-eyed police officer was undeterred. "These bomb-making directions are not complicated, but they are dangerous," he insisted.

"Maybe by a chemistry major," interjected the defense lawyer. "But you knew you weren’t dealing with chemistry majors!"

The defense attempted to paint the whole affair as a fantasy of confused and frustrated adolescents. To do so, Zwirblis relied heavily on ridicule. He put Taylor in the pupil’s chair, asking him to define the goth look favored by the New Bedford High freaks. "Painted fingers, black," he faltered. "A lot of blackness to it." When Taylor noted that the initials FTW (presumably for "fuck the world") and TCM (for "Trench Coat Mafia") were found on an otherwise blank piece of paper in Stephen Jones’s room, Zwirblis scoffed, "TCM: known to the rest of us as Turner Classic Movies." Taylor remarked that he had never heard of the popular cable channel, and it wasn’t clear whether Zwirblis actually wanted to convince the judge that Jones was a fan of Citizen Kane and Casablanca, or was merely trying to be funny.

The highlight of the day involved the playing of McKeehan’s 29-minute audiotape. In the courtroom, the tape was played at such a high volume as to make it virtually impossible to discern much of what was said. However, the transcribed version — published in full in the next day’s Standard-Times — has McKeehan saying, "I didn’t give a shit if it was a teacher, cop, mother, whoever. You’re in my way, you’re getting a bullet.... Whoever’s going with me is going with me."

Despite comments like these, it was hard to determine from the vocal intonation on the tape, much less the published transcript, whether McKeehan was just boasting — as everyone who knew him claimed he was prone to do — or whether he was serious about taking out anyone who stood in his way. After a break for lunch, attorney Zwirblis cross-examined Detective John Ribeiro III, the police officer who had interviewed McKeehan, suggesting that by focusing his questions on the early stages of the plot, the detective ignored evidence that McKeehan wasn’t going to go through with it at all. That, Zwirblis implied, made the whole thing sound far worse than it actually was. Zwirblis quoted from McKeehan’s words on the audiotape to buttress his argument: "Then again, it’s like you think about the reality check and it’s like them brakes come on and you’re like no, because of the simple fact you have two choices, like I said before, spending life in jail or kill yourself and ruin your life."

Later that afternoon, the prosecutors hauled in 11 boxes and brown paper bags containing some vivid evidence, mostly culled from Michael McKeehan’s bedroom. Among his possessions: a black-handled knife, a brass-knuckle dagger, a hatchet, a meat cleaver, a gas mask, live ammunition, a photo of Hitler, and a doll hanging from a noose. It was a teenage boy’s life, New Bedford–style.

The following day, Judge Sabra found Eric McKeehan to be dangerous but allowed him to leave jail and stay under house arrest at his mother’s apartment until his trial. The next week, another judge ordered Michael and friend Stephen Jones to remain in jail until their trials.

page 1  page 2 

Issue Date: December 20 - 27, 2001

Back to the News and Features table of contents.






home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy


© 2002 Phoenix Media Communications Group