25 years later, the fallout from a Boston murder remains
They descended upon him with punches and kicks and nine thrusts of a knife, a blur of violence so vicious that the victim was propped up at one point so the beating could go on. The young men who attacked Dorchester musician Charleston Sarjeant on that drizzly Wednesday, April 22, 1992, left him in pooling blood on the floor of a fried chicken joint, and ran from the screams of a wife and mother becoming a widow.
Boston was much more violent then, 25 years ago, near the beginning of the crack epidemic. The city averaged 100 homicides annually from 1988 to 1995, about double the rate of the past eight years. But even in the blood-soaked early ’90s, Sarjeant’s murder stood out for its shocking pointlessness.
The attack rewrote the destinies of everyone involved, and it remains a powerful force even now, reaching out from the past to shape the present.
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