INVISIBLE BOY: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PATRICK MURPHY

Drugs Claim a Neighborhood, and a Family

NEW BEDFORD -- No one much noticed when Patrick Murphy was killed.
There was no obituary or photograph of him in the local newspaper.
Although his family was stricken, there was no outpouring of grief in
the neighborhood to which he had recently moved. At the school he
attended, barely a word has been spoken of the empty seat there.

Even when he screamed for help in the sour-smelling hallway of a crack
house on the night he died, the door did not open until it was too
late. It was as though the despair that darkens this weary city had
swallowed him whole. And in a way it had.

Patrick Murphy was 14 years old. He was stabbed to death on a hot
August morning during what police believe might have been his first
attempt to sell cocaine. A tall and handsome African-American boy
known as 'Yang-Yang' to an expansive clan rooted in the parched fields
of Alabama, he was the son of a Pentecostal minister. He was not a
perfect boy, but he took pride in his neatly plaited hair and was
noted for his good manners and clever sense of humor.

Just how Patrick wound up bleeding to death alone in a litter of
bloodied bills and packets of cocaine is an old story about the
seductive power of drugs.

But it is more than that. It is a story about Massachusetts, which,
according to one national study, has the highest rate of illegal drug
dependence among young people in the nation.

It is a story about a neighborhood in which a playground -- a benign
array of basketball courts and swings -- had become a lethal
intersection of children and drug dealers.

And it is story about a family, one that loved this boy, with his
broad smile and driving sense of fairness as hard as it could, but
which found in the end that love was not enough to save him.

Like many his age, Patrick tried to earn pocket money. He begged for a
paper route, but his mother thought it unsafe. When he and his family
arrived in New Bedford last year, the towering teenager -- over 6 feet
tall in the 8th grade -- astonished neighbors with his initiative,
hawking fresh fish from a shopping cart he wheeled down the streets
after school. But in a neighborhood where powder-blue packets used for
heroin are strewn in parking lot corners, and where a young man can be
seen playfully pointing a gun at pedestrians on a fall afternoon,
Patrick soon found other interests.

"There isn't, like, much to do in this city," said Hector Hilerio, 15,
a friend of Murphy's who was with him on the night he was killed. "We
were bored. So it's, like, drugs. Or else you play ball."

Early Struggles

Sharon Murphy is a robust woman with a preacher's lilting voice, the
kind that presses doubt right into the corner. If her adopted city
seemed barely to flutter at her boy's death, Murphy has been
devastated by the loss. Patrick was the third of her four sons, the
one who had her same rounded features, the one who pounded the drums
in their church. Murphy says she has not spoken much since her son
died.

"I don't do much talking anymore," said Murphy, who ministers
occasionally at the Holy Tabernacle Church, a Pentecostal church in
Dorchester. "And when I do talk, it makes my heart start to hurt."

Murphy has struggled on behalf of her two youngest sons, both of whom
had bouts of disruptive behavior. She has strode into countless
meetings with school officials. She has lobbied hard so that her boys
would get the help she thought they needed. When Patrick one day
showed up in school wearing clothes that were not his, she drove
promptly to the home of the boy school officials suspected he had been
shoplifting with and confronted him, according to someone familiar
with the family.

Every summer she took her boys to her small hometown in rural Alabama
for long vacations with their cousins, partly to remove them from the
whirl of the street, but also because she hoped to start her own
ministry there. Always, she urged her boys to pray.

Now, instead of sitting in the principal's office, she passes some
afternoons on the hard benches in New Bedford Superior Court and
stares into the face of Lydell Pina, the man the Bristol County
district attorney has charged with first degree murder in Patrick's
death. Pina, 28, a short man with a long criminal record, according to
prosecutors, is well known in the neighborhood where Patrick was
killed, as is his extended family. The nephew of New Bedford City
Councilor Joseph Fortes and a cook in several local restaurants, Pina
is currently being held at the Bristol County House of Correction.
Although they lived within a short distance of each other and were
both known at the battered yellow triple-decker in which Patrick would
die, the two had apparently never met, according to several people who
knew them, before that August night.

Murphy does not know the two boys who were with Patrick on the night
of his death, nor many of the people he associated with in their newly
adopted city. She and her boys had lived in New Bedford only since
last January. It was the latest stop in a decadelong odyssey that has
taken Murphy, who does not live with Patrick's father, from shelter to
apartment to motel and back home to the small town of Coy, Ala., time
and again.

Along the way, Murphy has become well known to the state Department of
Social Services. At times she sought the agency's help in dealing with
her sometimes unruly brood. Other times she turned to her church. When
Patrick was killed shortly after 5 a.m. on Aug. 10, his mother was
attending a weeklong meeting in the weathered stone church tucked
between Burger King and the Jeremiah Burke school in Dorchester.
Patrick, she says, was supposed to spend that night at her sister's in
New Bedford. Or at home with his brother. She is not sure which.

"Patrick would call me every night on the phone," said Murphy. "He
would say, 'Ma, ma. Are you almost here?' I was going home to New
Bedford every night, and then I left early the next morning. If he
didn't come home that night, I assumed he was at my sister's."

He wasn't. On the night that he died, Patrick had not seen his mother
for four days, according to one law enforcement source. Youth
counselors who work the New Bedford streets wondered if he might be a
runaway, so often did they see him out on his own.

"Patrick had a rough, short life," said Denise Monteiro, DSS
spokeswoman.

Help from DSS

It began a long way from Boston. Although born here, Patrick spent
much of his early childhood in Alabama, among among a vast network of
cousins and other relatives. In the early 1990s Sharon Murphy's mother
fell ill, and Murphy and her boys headed to Brockton to care for her,
following the trail taken by many family members who fled the economic
hardships of the South over a generation ago.

Patrick was, from the start, a determined child. As soon as he could
crawl, according to the funeral program handed out at his service, he
would open kitchen drawers and pull himself up to look inside. A
talented artist, he could look at a picture and then create "a perfect
replica of any subject he wanted to capture." Even as a toddler he had
the muscular physique that would define him as a young man. And by the
time he was a teen-ager, he stood "over 6 feet tall with a smile that
would melt your heart." With his honey-cured southern accent, he was
sometimes called "Bama." Patrick, for sure, was the charmer of the
four boys. Although quiet at times, he had a forthright manner and
mischievous sense of humor that won him friends easily. Tall beyond
his years, he had begun to catch the eye of the girls. He liked that.

"Patrick was a flirt," said Shauna Gilbert, 18, a neighbor. "When I
met him I thought he was 17. I was, like, you are 14!"

He and one of his brothers would stand on the porch of their tired
beige house and eye the girls passing by. The girls, in turn, watched
him and his younger brother Demetrius, known to both his family and in
the neighborhood as "Wee-Wee," on the basketball courts across the
street, where they were regulars. For a time, at least, Patrick shared
his mother's religious passion and, according to the funeral program,
"gave his life to Christ" at the age of 7.

"Patrick was very unpretentious, and so he was very popular," said
Barbara Flores, a Brockton neighbor. "He had a real shyness to him,
and so he would sit back and take it all in."

He was also smart. At the afterschool program at the Old Colony YMCA
in Brockton, which he attended in 1999 with Demetrius, staff members
knew him as a quick learner, one whose sketches of planets they still
recall. Fond of young children, he helped many with their artwork and
assumed a protective role.

He did much the same thing at the Downey Elementary School in
Brockton, often intervening in disputes among other students to defend
those he felt had been wronged, according to former Downey principal
Patricia Keith. Maybe it was the teachings of his church. Maybe it was
the rough justice learned as the third in a lineup of four boys.
Either way, Keith remembers that Patrick, then around 9, was focused
on fairness. "He was very insightful. He could understand other points
of view, which is not necessarily a strong point of many children."

But for Murphy, caring for her children, however insightful their
teachers might find them, could be difficult. She sometimes found
herself pushed to the limit. When Patrick was 6, DSS, alerted by an
anonymous caller, determined that the children were getting inadequate
care and offered some parenting assistance. Murphy accepted the help
and, tired of the crowding in her parents' home, moved shortly
afterward into a shelter, a sprawling white housing complex known as
the David Jon Louison Child Center, which serves homeless families.

In 1999, after two additional complaints, DSS stepped in again, this
time with concerns that Patrick was being punished with a belt. Over
the next year, Murphy took a host of steps that DSS recommended, such
as getting therapy for herself and her sons, and attending parenting
and stress management classes, which Monteiro said vastly improved
Murphy's ability to care for, and thoughtfully disclipline, her boys.

"We just watched her evolve," recalled Monteiro. "She wanted the
services and was actually asking that the case stay open, which is
weird. Usually parents are like, 'When is my case going to close?'
"

Murphy, who stopped talking to the Globe after an initial interview,
declined to discuss the interventions by DSS.

A Place of Their Own

By the spring of 2000, things seemed to be coming together for Murphy.
With the help of a Section 8 subsidy, she and her boys had gotten
their own place in Brockton, about a mile from her parents' house. It
was the first floor of a battered gray triple-decker across the street
from a parking lot strewn with empty truck containers. But it was theirs.

Murphy kept a close eye on her boys as they played in the
neighborhood, which had long been plagued by drugs and crime. Patrick
spent afternoons trading Pokemon cards and writing songs with the boys
who lived upstairs. He liked rap and rock. "And slow music," said
Hector Hilerio. But what Patrick really wanted was a job. Not just
chores at home. Something that earned real money. Like a paper route.

"My son had such big dreams," Murphy recalled. "All he wanted to do
was get a job. But I didn't want him to get him a paper route because
it wasn't safe. There is a lot of drug trafficking out there. I tried
my best to shield them from that. And I was successful until I got to
New Bedford."

Murphy herself held a number of jobs. She says she worked as a
substitute teacher in Boston and Alabama. She traveled regularly to
Boston to minister at her church and raised her voice in praise of God
on the street as frequently as she did in the shower, according to
several friends. But mostly she stayed at home for her boys, because,
she declared, "My life is about ministry, but mostly it is about
stability for them."

Flores, the neighbor whose sons played with Murphy's younger boys, and
herself the mother of eight children, was so taken by Murphy's
spiritual fervor that she was baptized at Murphy's church. And she
watched with empathy as Murphy grappled with the challenge of raising
her sons on her own.

"I seen her suffer with her children," sighed Flores. "Teenage boys,
you know. They want to be popular. But Sharon, she kicked their butt
if they needed it. She was very big on discipline. She did not let
those boys run free. She really amazed me." But Patrick, already
substantially larger than many of his classmates by age 10, was
beginnng to flex the clout of his size. And as he cycled through a
series of schools and homes, the early sweetness of his disposition
seemed to sour. Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, or ADHD, he was a frequent visitor to the Downey School's
guidance department.

After several clashes with other students, Patrick was transferred in the
fifth grade to the Phoenix Alternative Program for troubled youth in
Brockton. Keith, the Downey School principal, declined to specify what the
fights were about, but said of Patrick: "At his best he was very sweet and
concerned about the children, but he did get angry when he felt things were
not fair. He did act out physically in ways that were not appropriate."
Murphy says her son wasn't bullying; he was just trying to stop others from
doing so.

"Patrick was so misunderstood because he was taller than the kids in
his class," Murphy said. "One thing he did not like was people
bullying other children. So he would take up for them, and then he was
cast as the troublemaker. My children were raised up in the church to
stand up for what was right and not to back down, and that is what
they did."

Things didn't improve at his new school. Staff members watched
uneasily as Patrick, by now an imposing figure, strode down the
hallway. At first it was little things. Scuffles with other students.
Some marijuana use. Some shoes and jewelry that appeared to be stolen.
A knife found in his pocket that he claimed was placed there by
someone else. In his first year at Phoenix, Patrick could be curbed by
some strong words from the staff and a swift visit by his mother. But
staff members worried that Patrick seemed drawn to the hardest
characters at the school.

And then he was gone. In the spring of 2001, Murphy told her boys to
'Then he stopped breathing'

On the night Patrick was killed, the charred vehicle was still in the
driveway. Five days after paramedics removed Patrick's bleeding body
from the hallway, New Bedford's mayor, Frederick Kalisz Jr., in a
public relations flourish dubbed Operation Make Safe, took the
building's owner and five other property owners to court and asked
that their properties be declared a public nuisance. The initiative,
announced on the stoop of the Purchase Street house, received almost
as much media attention as Patrick's murder.

Patrick had spent a lot of time at the house, playing video games and
watching television with Kyle Fortes. His friend Hector Hilerio says
Patrick was introduced to drugs there. Hector himself acknowledges
that he used to sell drugs but says he no longer does so. Patrick, he
says, did not use drugs, but had apparently sold them for someone else.

Said one police investigator, who asked not to be identified: "Our
understanding is that this may have been a first-time thing. And so it
would be likely that he was selling for someone else."

Hector Hilerio said he has no idea whom that person might be. "I would
see him over there, but he never really talked a lot about it," Hector
said. "I think he thought it wasn't cool. He just wanted some money."

On the final night of his life, a Saturday, Patrick headed to a party
with some friends. Brian Rudolph -- who rushed to the scene and talked
to Kyle Fortes, whose shirt was stained with Patrick's blood, and
Hector Hilerio minutes after Patrick's body was taken away -- said
that the boys told him that the group had first gone to a bar known as
the Portugese Sports Club. The trio then headed to Purchase Street
shortly after 1 a.m.

An informal party was under way there. A small group was smoking crack
as others milled in and out of the apartment next door. "There were
other boys doing their business on the front porch, and Patrick said
he was going to hang out there while the others went inside," Rudolph
said.

Shortly afterward, Pina stopped by and bought some cocaine from
Patrick, according to investigators. The older man left, and the party
began to die down. But Pina returned several hours later and banged on
the apartment door looking for more drugs. Patrick met him at the door
and asked Pina to show his money. But Pina refused. As the two began
to raise their voices, the argument moved into the hallway, and the
door slammed shut.

Inside the apartment, witnesses later told police, they could hear
Pina demanding that Patrick give him "all his stuff." As the two
struggled, Patrick was stabbed three times, once fatally in the chest.
As Pina lept over the banister and fled into the street, Patrick
crumpled to the ground and called for someone to help. But the
apartment door did not open.

"Hector said he couldn't get the door open," Rudolph said. "And then
he just looked at me. When he finally did get the door open he turned
Patrick over so he could breathe. Patrick took a deep breath, and then
he stopped breathing."