Man charged with murder in fatal stabbing of Mass. high schooler in March
A Chelsea man has been charged with murder in the fatal stabbing of a Chelsea 17-year-old that took place in the city in March, the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office announced.
Brayan Alfredo Lopez-Padilla, 26, is set to be arraigned on the charge — which stems from the death of Juan Carlos Lemus — in Suffolk County Superior Court on Thursday, the district attorney's office said. He is also facing charges of assault with intent to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in connection with the incident.
Read more: Juan Carlos Lemus identified as teen boy killed in Chelsea double stabbing
Chelsea and State Police responded to the double stabbing on Eastern Avenue around 8:45 p.m. on March 8, the district attorney's office said previously. A 15-year-old boy was also stabbed during the incident, but he survived.
A different Chelsea 17-year-old — who authorities have not named due to their age — is also charged with one count of accessory after the fact in connection with the stabbings, the district attorney's office said. The teen will be arraigned in juvenile court.
Read more: Chelsea teen killed in stabbing loved hip-hop, wanted to read the Bible
Lemus's friends and family remember the Chelsea High School student as a 'cherished young soul' who loved hip-hop, video games and Burger King. He was a member of Ministerio Monte De Sion Church in Chelsea and aspired to read the Bible cover to cover.
No further information about the double stabbing — including the relationship between Lopez-Padilla and Lemus or a motive — has been released.
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Malcolm Graham says that his sister's body was still in the morgue when he noticed that people were rallying around the importance of forgiving her killer. A librarian who loved her community, Cynthia Graham Hurd was one of the nine Black worshippers who were fatally shot on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. She and other church members were in the middle of a Bible study session when the gunman walked into Mother Emanuel, sat with them for 45 minutes, and then opened fire. Malcolm Graham, who moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, for college, was getting ready for bed when he saw a news report about a shooting at the church that's been a haven for his family for more than half a century. After he learned that his sister had attended Bible study at Mother Emanuel that night and couldn't be found, he began preparing for the worst. 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He added that 'we need to ask tough questions' about discrimination and hatred — for instance, examine the radicalization that continues to occur through fringe online platforms — even if we have to sit with the discomfort of the answers. But that hasn't really happened, he said, 'because people want to race to forgiveness.' The other victims of the 2015 shooting were the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Susie Jackson, the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney (who also was a state senator), Ethel Lance, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel Simmons, and the Rev. Myra Thompson. Busts memorializing the victims — who are known as the Emanuel Nine — were recently unveiled at Allen University, a historically Black school in Columbia, South Carolina, where many of them had connections. The university's Boeing Institute on Civility, which sponsored the project, said in a statement that the occasion 'represents both an act of tribute and a renewed commitment to confronting hate with hope.' This is a mission that the Emanuel Nine Memorial also embraces. Like Graham, Pinckney's wife is adamant about grappling with difficult conversations. Jennifer Pinckney and the couple's younger daughter, Malana, who was 6 years old at the time, survived the shooting by hiding under a desk in a church office while the gunman slaughtered the worshippers. In the years since, Pinckney, who has said that she has struggled with forgiveness, has been in the vanguard of a push to hold social media companies liable for how racism is incubated and spread online. 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Alana Grant — Simmons' granddaughter — also is frustrated with the attention that forgiveness receives in the conversation around Mother Emanuel when political action in response to the shooting has lagged. It was a powerful move of the Holy Spirit, Grant told Capital B, for Nadine Collier to forgive the gunman mere days after he killed her mother, Ethel Lance. Lance was a church sexton, and just after the shooting, the cloud of despair hanging over Charleston was still as thick — and as oppressive — as the city's humidity during the summer. 'However, I believe that we have to stop weaponizing forgiveness and trying to use it as a tool to circumvent accountability,' Grant said. 'The Lord asks us to forgive, but he also asks us to take responsibility for our actions. 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While progress on the state level has been glacial, Richland County this month became the first county in South Carolina to pass a hate crime ordinance. This makes it illegal for someone to cause fear, intimidation, harm, or damage to a person or their property because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity characteristics. In the decade since the tragedy, Mother Emanuel has become a point of pilgrimage, a destination for people who visit Charleston. 'The church is a very special and tragic location,' Bernard Powers, a professor emeritus of history at the College of Charleston, told Capital B. 'When people visit friends or relatives who live in Charleston, those residents will frequently take them to the site if they haven't been there. If you're showing people around, this is one of the places you don't want them to miss.' He added that the church has become a site of activist meetings, particularly those intended to promote hate crime legislation and stricter gun-control legislation. 'What we didn't appreciate — and what we couldn't appreciate — at that point [in 2015] was that similar events were in the offing,' Powers said, noting the racist killings at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019; and a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. 'There's a murderous trajectory that we've been on.' It's this deeper appreciation of the wider environment of hate that Graham, the Charlotte city councilman, hopes the country will embrace. 'Martin Luther King Jr. said when he gave a eulogy after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing to pay less attention to the killer and more attention to the system that produced the killer,' Graham explained. He added, 'What system failures let this young guy become filled with so much hate — and then get the opportunity to act on that hate? My sister would have said, 'I know that I bore the brunt of what happened that night, but this attack was against all of us.'' The post Some Mother Emanuel Families Say the Focus on Forgiveness Has Cost Them Justice appeared first on Capital B News.
