Stories

The Boston Globe

May 14, 2006

By Keith O'Brien
Globe Correspondent

Before he started crying, before he went to jail, before he appeared in court, and long before he was convicted of first-degree murder, Kentel Weaver sat in his home on the Roxbury-Dorchester line listening to his mother go on and on about salvation.

Iris Weaver was upset and bone-tired. The night before, she had barely slept. She couldn't stop thinking about the Boston police officers who had visited her house for hours and the implication that her son, Kentel, then 16, may have been involved in a murder.

A boy was dead. Just 15. Iris Weaver demanded that her son tell her everything he knew. She pounded her fist on the kitchen table. She prayed, and then she asked her son: Had he been in the neighborhood when Germaine Rucker was killed two weeks earlier, on Aug. 10, 2003, and did he or someone he know murder him?

Kentel Weaver, tall and thin, looked at his mother. "Yes," he answered. He had been in the neighborhood at about 9 p.m. when Rucker was shot twice on Wendover Street in Dorchester. But when it came to the second question - did he or someone he know fire the shots - Kentel put his head down and said nothing.

This is when it happened. This is when Iris Weaver, a 42-year-old assistant manager of a fast-food restaurant in Dorchester, first got the idea that would change their lives forever. Her son, she determined, would confess to the slaying. That's all he would say. Then he would get an attorney. Then he would be OK, legally and morally.

"Shot Germaine Rucker," Kentel Weaver told a detective hours later, after weeping in a prayer circle outside the police station in the dark.

His soul, his mother believed, was saved.

But legally he was doomed.

At times it is better to keep your mouth shut and let people wonder if you're a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.

Years ago, Iris Weaver taped this adage and a few others next to the mirror in her upstairs bathroom. The sayings, liberally rephrased from biblical passages, are constant reminders of her faith. As if she needs them. She knows the passages by heart. She goes to church every Sunday the only day of the week that she doesn't work selling french fries and God is never far from her mind at any other time.

"Oh, Jesus" she pleads, just climbing the stairs. "Oh, Lord."

She tried, she says, to instill similar faith in her children: Cassim, the oldest by a year;Treyana, 19; Kentel; and the 10-year-old niece she's also raising, Aiysha.

It didn't always work. The boys Cassim, outgoing, and Kentel, quiet had their troubles with the law. Police had arrested Kentel on drug charges just two weeks before the Rucker murder. They knew him and the blue Detroit Tigers cap he often wore, the one found not far from the scene of the slaying.

Still, his mother says, she was not accustomed to visits from detectives. That may happen all the time at other homes in her neighborhood. But not hers, she liked to believe.

Iris Weaver came up hard in Roxbury housing developments. She was raised by relatives after the deaths of her parents and, as she wrote last year in an unsent letter to Oprah Winfrey, she avoided the traps that snared others along the way: drugs, crime, and AIDS.

This was not luck, she says. Luck runs out. These were blessings, and blessings keep coming, she believes. But they weren't free, either. Iris Weaver worked hard to raise children on her own, holding down a steady job and reporting to work almost every day at 4 a.m.

And her drive to do right by her children and right by God was obvious to others. Weaver immediately impressed Kentel's defense attorney, Willie Davis, as a "plain, everyday, God-fearing, hard-working woman."

But Davis says she was also misguided. She not only believes that confessing to murder will save her son's soul, she says she also believed it was the only way Kentel could get a lawyer.

A plan unfolded in the living room as night fell: Kentel, despite his initial objections, would go to the police station, confess, and then say nothing more until he had an attorney.

"We planned the whole thing here on the couch," Iris says recently inside her home, where the police once paid a visit. "I planned it on the couch. This was not a proud moment. But yes, I did plan it."

Kentel Weaver, now being held at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, could not be reached for comment. But as his mother tells the story, ridicule quickly followed his confession. Iris Weaver became "the crazy lady," she says, a "stupid" woman who asked her son to confess to a crime she now says she's not even sure he committed. And it was about to get worse.

Ten months later in June 2004, Kente's brother Cassim, then 19, was dead, gunned down on the street in Dorchester, not unlike Rucker. Candles burned in his memory outside Weaver's home. Meantime, Davis, Kentel's attorney, was preparing to make an argument that seemed to fly in the face of Iris Weaver's beliefs.

He asked the court to toss out Kentel's confession on the basis that it had been coerced by the police and his mother.

People may doubt what you say. But they always believe what you do.

"Her motives were pure," Davis recalls recently, "no question about that." Iris Weaver wanted her son to do the right thing by confessing. But there were other ways to get an attorney, he points out. And what may have been right morally sank Kentel legally. Davis made his arguments before Suffolk Superior Court Judge Geraldine S. Hines on two occasions in the summer of 2004, and Hines denied his request.

She determined that his mother did indeed play a "major role" in getting Kentel to say he had shot Rucker, noting in her 23-page decision how Iris Weaver peppered her son with relentless questioning for two days, demanding the truth while invoking God's name.

But Kentel made an "independent decision" to confess, Hines concluded, and investigating officers had done nothing wrong.

The decision, handed down in September 2005, still does not sit well with Iris Weaver.

Yes, she believes she did the right thing, asking her son to go to police. And yes, for the most part, she would do it all over again.

"It was," she says, "the godly thing to do."

But she wonders if she should have consulted friends first, maybe talked things over with people down at the Salvation Army Jubilee House in Codman Square where she goes to church on Sundays.

She feels manipulated by the police officers who visited her home and asked her to have a "heart-to-heart talk" with her son, and she didn't like how the Suffolk district attorney's office celebrated with handshakes when Kentel was convicted of first- degree murder on April 26.

"You don't glorify this," she thought.

In an interview later that day, District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said Weaver's case was just another example of "senseless violence" and he urged other youths to take note of the verdict, which carried with it a mandatory life sentence.

The Rucker murder no longer stood on its own; it was now part of something bigger, part of a crime wave. Homicides in Boston reached a 10-year high in 2005 and are on a slightly higher pace this year, while the number of nonfatal shootings has more than doubled.

Iris Weaver's son "the little frail one," she calls him was now not merely another convicted murderer. He appeared to Susan Dunigan of the Salvation Army to be a symbol, a young man burdened with "the weight of every vicious homicide in Boston." And, in the end, everyone lost, says the Rev. William Dickerson, a Dorchester minister and Rucker's uncle.

Her son bound for prison, Iris Weaver went home.

The first rule of holes: When you're in one, stop digging.

There are beef ribs cooking in the oven. They are for a friend's wedding. Iris Weaver is a fine cook. She gets up and checks on the simmering ribs, then returns to the kitchen table awash in late afternoon sunlight.

It was here that police officers once talked with her son. It was here that she pounded her fists and gritted her teeth. Here, where nearly three years ago she made demands and asked questions, praying and crying, and carrying on.

Now she just sits.

"I try not to think about `what if?' And `how come?' And `who did?' And `why should?' I try not to think about those things," Weaver says, "because it will keep going. You start with one thing and you keep going. And I don't want to keep going."

She wants to set her mind at ease. She reminds herself that God doesn't make mistakes and prepares herself for the next murder trial, the trial of Rakeem Young, charged with murdering her other son, Cassim.

It's set to begin next month, and prosecutors plan to make an all-too-familiar argument to explain the bloodshed.

The motive: a beef between men.

Got a subject to suggest for Heart of the City? E-mail Keith O'Brien at kobrien@globe.com