This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe Magazine on July 28, 1996.
Barrington Nevins had a jacket. Anthony Robinson, police say, had a gun. Now Nevins is dead, and Robinson stands accused of his murder. The question is why it happened.
THE BLACK LEATHER JACKET, trimmed in shearling at the collar, was in style on the streets. It made its wearer at once cool and vulnerable. the envy of both the righteous and the rough. No particular reason. Just because. It was, at the moment, simply the jacket to have.
Barrington Nevins, who was 17, saved his money from a part-time job on an assembly line to buy the jacket. He paid about $500 for it at Wilson Leather, in Downton Crossing, last fall, and then he wore it everywhere. He wouldn’t even store it in his locker at Brighton High School, where he was a senior and on the honor roll; he’d keep it on, or at least within his sight.
On the day after Thanksgiving, around 4 p.m., Nevins slipped his jacket on over his pressed shirt and creased jeans. He was in a good mood; his learner’s permit to drive a car had come in the mail that day, and he wanted to celebrate. His sister, Alicia, who was two years older, heard him leave their three-decker on Wheatland Avenue, in Dorchester, but she didn’t ask where he was going. Though he usually preferred to stay with his books and computer games, that night Nevins was going to see the thriller Heat with a group of friends.
Around 6 o’clock, a Brighton High classmate saw Nevins with his friends at the Downtown Crossing subway stop. She waved, and he waved back from across the tracks. After hanging out there for a while, the group – like Nevins, all of them Jamaican – headed toward Franklin Field. They had one more stop to make, to pick up a friend who lived near Browning Avenue, in Dorchester.
Browning was a troublesome street, one that police visited often, mostly at night. They had answered 215 calls there over the past 36 months: noisy parties, drug dealing, knife fights, suspicious people, gunfire. By the time Nevins and his friends got there, darkness had engulfed the hilly street. Broken liquor bottles and fast-food wrappers littered the curb; a few street lamps shone weakly on the run-down three-deckers. It was about 7:30 by then, and the safety of sunrise was a long time away.
Still, Nevins had little reason to be afraid. He had walked in this Dorchester neighborhood several times before, though he lived on the other side of the tracks, and he knew people there. At the top of the hill, near the scruffy front yard of a peeling yellow-and-green house at 22 Browning, he ran into one of them: Anthony Robinson, known to his crowd as Ant.
Nevins and Robinson were not close, but they knew each other from the neighborhood, and several mutual friends describe their relationship as friendly. Just a few weeks earlier, Nevins had let Robinson use his bicycle. He’d even lent Robinson some money – not much, maybe $40 or $50. When Robinson couldn’t pay him back, friends say, Nevins told him not to worry about it.
Like Nevins, Robinson was 17. But he was trouble. Though he hadn’t committed any violent crimes, he’d done enough – pulling a false alarm, trespassing, riding in a stolen car, urinating in a neighbor’s hallway – to land him in the custody of the Department of Youth Services, on and off, for the past two years.
Now, Robinson was cruising Browning Avenue with two partners, all wearing black down jackets and hooded sweatshirts pulled tight around their faces. One carried a handgun, police say, and Robinson held a loaded .22-caliber rifle under his coat. They set out that night, police say Robinson told them, with a plan: to rob the first person they saw.
What happened next, when the two group met at the top of the hill, is recorded in the statements to police of at least four witnesses. One witness, in an apparently unrelated event, has since been killed; of the remaining witnesses, two said they can positively identify Robinson. His crew, the witnesses said, demanded money – and coats. At first, Nevins and his friends thought it was a joke. Robinson and his partners, though, made it clear they weren’t joking: Witnesses said they pulled out the rifle and the handgun.
The coats came off; the money came out.
Nevins looked at his black leather jacket in Robinson’s hands, witnesses told police, and stared at him with contempt.
One of Robinson’s partners began to yell. Nevins, witnesses said, made some kind of small, sudden move, a flicker in the stillness. Nevins had no weapon, but Robinson reacted as if he did. He squeezed the trigger of his rifle, the witnesses said, and fired a shot. The group scattered. Then, witnesses said, Robinson fired again, bullet after bullet, eight firecrackers in the night. Most flew harmlessly in the air, their casings falling on the sidewalk. Robinson and his partners gathered up the coats and jackets and about $20 in cash, witnesses said, and ran. The other four teen-agers stood motionless, silently looking at one another, nervous and relieved.
All except Barrington Nevins. He lay on the sidewalk, a bullet in his heart. He was dead.
Anthony Robinson is in the Nashua Street Jail, awaiting trial on a first-degree murder charge. Even now, friends and relatives say, he does not understand the gravity of a possible life sentence – a strong likelihood, given his taped confession to police and several eyewitness statements identifying him as the killer. Defense attorney Randy Gioia would not discuss the case beyond saying his client denies all charges and has pleaded not guilty; he would not allow Robinson to be interviewed. Many others connected with the case are either unwilling or unable to speak about it. Barrington Nevins’ mother, for example, lives in Jamaica and will not talk to reporters; Anthony Robinson’s mother, who has a history of drug abuse, has not told any of her relatives where she is living and could not be located.
But from police records, and from the words of those who did talk – the youths’ friends, family members, teachers, counselors, and particularly their fathers – what emerges is a tragic story of the collision of two young lives. It is the story of an unpredictable place, where passing through can mean passing on. A place where the virtuous and the criminal, side by side, live, play, and die, many for no comprehensible reason – or, as they say on the street, “Just ‘cuz.”
“Whenever I look at my classroom full of students,” says Ann Marie Johns, who taught Nevins in her anatomy class at Brighton High School, “I don’t know which one will be killed or which one will become a killer.”
In this case, Barrington Nevins was killed, and Anthony Robinson stands accused of being the killer. As for the jacket, by the way, no one seems to know where it is.
ANTHONY ROBINSON WAS BORN INTO TROUBLE on August 8, 1978. His mother, Yvette Robinson, had dropped out of high school. As far as friends and relatives can remember, she never held a job, never paid rent, never, for that matter, had a telephone in her own name. She already had one son, Kenneth, by a man people knew only as “Pie.” Her income came in the form of state assistance, at that time about $260 a month.
Anthony was not his father’s first child. Edward Dibbles had married and divorced before and says he had fathered at least two other children. Anthony was his baby boy, though, and special; they looked alike. Says Dibbles with a grin: “I never denied him.” As far as the state was concerned, however, Anthony had no father: Yvette Robinson refused to list Dibbles on Anthony’s birth certificate. “She would get more from welfare if she said she didn’t know who the father was,” Dibbles explains.
The omission made sense at the time. Both parents were drug addicts. Dibbles had grown up middle-class in Boston, the son of a Baptist-preacher father and a missionary mother, but he had used drugs since he was 13. He started with beer and wine, then marijuana, then cocaine and heroin.
He had known Yvette for years; he had served for a year as a Navy seaman with her brother, and when they came home to Boston, she was always around. They got high together, and they fell in love, The drug party continued after their marriage, in 1975. Anthony came three years later.
“He was so smart as a kid,” Dibbles says proudly. “We didn’t have to potty-train him. He knew everybody’s name and telephone number. He could write his own name.”
In some ways, life was fine for the young family. Dibbles had graduated from Boston English in 1970 and, except for his Navy stint, had worked as a technician for the telephone company in its Harrison Avenue facility. “Anthony always told people that he wanted to be a telephone man,” Dibbles says. “Just like his daddy.”
They were not well off, but they were able to furnish a series of apartments; one in Mission Hill, then a duplex on Wood Avenue in Mattapan, then a Dorchester triple-decker on Nightingale Street, near Franklin Field. “We tried to keep appearances up,” he says. “We never did any drugs in front of the children. We tried to keep the house clean, the children clothed and fed. I thought we were being sensible.”
They were not being sensible, of course, and eventually Dibbles saw that and got fed up. “I never realized back then how bad my addiction was,” he says. “I was unable to feel or really care about anything or anyone. I thought being a father was, if your children knew who you were, and if you gave them something now and again, then you were doing what you were supposed to be doing.”
He did understand one thing: If he was going to get straight, he had to leave Yvette, who, he says, had no intention of giving up drinking and drugging. Anthony was 7 years old. “I sat him down and explained to him that me and his mother couldn’t live together anymore,” Dibbles recalls. “He really didn’t show a lot of emotion. Never has.”
That year was rough for Anthony. He was in second grade at the Joyce Kilmer School; out of 180 school days, he missed 56. His grades, too, slipped precipitously, from A’s and B’s in the first grade to D’s in everything but physical education. The following year, he missed only 12 days of school and improved his grades, but records show that he was frequently disruptive in class.
Clearly, his life at home had deteriorated. Dibbles, who later was divorced from Yvette, rarely visited, usually only to give Anthony money or clothes for his birthday or Christmas. “Things were rough over there,” Dibbles says. His former wife, he says, was usually drunk, high, or passed out. Anthony’s older half-brother, Kenneth, caught their mother with a needle in her arm several times, family members say. Strangers came and went at all hours. Profanity was common, tempers short, and fights frequent. Heating bills went unpaid, leaving apartments cold in winter; Anthony slept in coats and sweatshirts. “There would be no food, either,” says one relative, who asked not to be named. “She would keep some canned food there, stuff like Vienna sausages and soup. But no real food. And the house was always filthy. Sometimes she would get high and clean the house from top to bottom, but most of the time, it was just filthy. Except Anthony’s room. He tried to keep it neat.”
Anthony’s cousin Nicole Grier lived nearby on Kingsdale Street. Every now and then, she saw Anthony staring out of his second-floor window. If he saw her, he would wave, and she would invite him over to her house, where she lived with her mother, Betty, on the first floor; her grandparents lived upstairs.
Then, one overnight visit stretched into several days. Soon, Anthony was staying with the Griers for months at a time, even listing their telephone number at school for emergencies. He was comfortable there. He loved Betty Grier’s fried chicken and macaroni and cheese; he’d sit around the kitchen table with large bowls of Sugar Pops of Cap’n Crunch or bags of microwave popcorn. He played computer games, cards, Monopoly.
“I never had any problems with him,” Betty Grier says. “He did what I told him. I wish that I could have done more for him. But he wasn’t my responsibility. He wasn’t my child.”
The Griers bought him tennis shoes, jeans, and a nice suit for Easter; but most of the clothing was stolen when he returned home to visit his mother. When the Griers asked him about the missing clothes, his response was silence. He refused to break the bond between mother and son; he never talked about his mama.
Except for the Griers, Anthony’s only other close family member was his half-brother, Kenneth, who had moved out to live with his father, the man called Pie. Kenneth had turned 18 and had graduated from Madison Park High School, and, family members say, he wanted to carve out a life better than the one he had.
Then, one warm night, June 18, 1988, when Anthony was 9, Kenneth didn’t come home. His body was found near the Victory Gardens, in the Fenway. He had been stabbed to death by a man who said Kenneth tried to rob him; a grand jury refused to indict.
Kenneth’s death devastated his young brother. “Anthony was in shock” at the funeral, a relative recalls. “When it was time to leave, Anthony didn’t want to go. He walked past the casket and put his arms around his brother. He wouldn’t let go.”
Dibbles learned of Kenneth’s death after the funeral; he was in drug rehabilitation. Dibbles called his son, but Anthony didn’t want to talk about it. “You never knew what was going on in his head, ” Dibbles says. “He never was a talkative guy. And when Kenny died, he completely shut down.”
His mother continued to have her own problems. She was pregnant, by another man, and when the baby was delivered at Boston City Hospital, doctors found traces of cocaine in his blood and notified the state Department of Social Services. The state did not file criminal neglect charges against her but concluded that she had a drug problem. DSS closed the case two years later; she had attended a few drug counseling sessions. None of Yvette Robinson’s relatives know where she is living now; the youngest of her three sons, Marquis, is in DSS custody.
YELLOW SCHOOL BUSES FASCINATED BARRINGTON NEVINS’ FATHER, Junior Nevins. He first saw them in the late 80’s during a visit to Boston from Jamaica, where he lived in a middle-class section of Kingston. Most of the children there walked to school, some several miles; public buses were available, but children had to pay. Junior Nevins closed his eyes and pictured his oldest son, Barrington, riding on the yellow school buses of America.
He liked the idea; it touched him. “The children had to be like adults,” he says. “They had to catch a bus and go to school. I don’t know. It was something about it.”
America was the land of opportunity, as far as Nevins knew, and the school buses fit his picture of the United States as a place where success knocked on every door and, in the case of children, would deliver them to the promised land of knowledge. “We looked at America like it was a big promotion,” Nevins says. In 1990, he quit his job as an immigration officer at the Kingston airport and told his three children – Barrington, who was then 12 years old; Alicia, who was 13, and Kafer, who was also 12 – that he would send for them as soon as he had found work and settled in.
He flew north and moved in with relatives who owned a triple-decker on Wheatland Avenue, in Dorchester. Once here, Nevins quickly discovered a different American reality. Jobs were slow in coming. “I was going cuckoo,” he says. After a month, he found work as an enumerator with the US Census Bureau, walking around Boston neighborhoods and counting heads in households. The job was better than nothing, and it gave him the chance to see America as more than a tourist.
“I was starting to learn about the politics here, the racism,” he says. “But I still wanted my family here. I needed them. Maybe it was the [school] bus system. I was really touched by the schoolchildren getting off the bus. And in the back of my mind, even though things weren’t great, I still believed that you could do anything here.”
The feeling was powerful, strong enough to overcome his new-found doubts about Boston public schools. He persuaded Barrington’s mother, to whom he was not married, to allow their son to give America a chance.
Still, he worried. “I was very reluctant to take Barrington out of school in Jamaica to come up here,” he says. “I noticed a trend that, once they come to this country, kids take a dive down. The schools don’t demand much from students. Jamaican schools push and encourage. They get the children out of their comfort zone and push them to their full potential.”
From the start, Barrington had pushed in Jamaica. He walked nearly a mile every day with his mother to the Chetolah Park Primary School, in St. Ann Parish, a part of Jamaica better known for the resort area of Ocho Rios. Quiet and reserved, Barrington studied hard and walked proud in his khaki pants and purple cotton shirt, the public school uniform.
His sixth-grade report card demonstrated his abilities. He ranked first among the 51 students in his class. His lowest grade was a B plus in English. The rest were A’s. “Barrington is a very cooperative, reliable and intelligent pupil,” the principal stated on the report card. “He is conscientious and hard working.”
Before Barrington finished his next school year, Nevins asked his son if he would like to come to the United States. “He wasn’t really excited,” Nevins recalls. “He wanted to stay in school in Jamaica. He was a little ambivalent, always asking about the schools. ‘Are they better over there?’ I told him that in order for him to succeed, he had to dare to be different. Then he could make it.”
Barrington arrived in the spring of 1992, when he was 14 years old. Boston school officials told Nevins that his son would be placed in the eighth grade, even though students his age would typically be ninth graders in Jamaica. “I wasn’t proud that he was demoted,” Nevins says. “I didn’t know whether I had made a mistake.” Still, he hoped the change was for the best.
Barrington’s first day of school was March 10, 1992. Nevins was happy. As his son took the yellow school bus to the Charles McCormack Middle School, in Dorchester, Nevins drove his car behind the bus, then met his son in the school’s driveway. “I could have taken him, but I wanted to see him come off the bus,” Nevins says. “I was a little nervous. But it was his first day. I wanted to be there and help him around the school.”
Nevins had little reason to be nervous. At the McCormack school, Barrington barely missed the honor roll and earned a spot on the school’s honorable mention list. Barrington was driven; he once told his father that he heard in school that black students did not perform well in mathematics, and “he was shocked by that,” Nevins recalls. “He had never heard anything like that before in his life. He took it upon himself to change that image.”
Harvey Tanzer, an eighth-grade mathematics teacher for 29 years, remembers Barrington’s first year at the McCormack school. “He was very polite, soft-spoken, very interested in life after high school,” Tanzer says. “Barrington was all business, which was unusual for a child of his age. He was very serious about his education, very disciplined, no playing around.”
ANTHONY ROBINSON ALSO LEFT A LASTING IMPRESSION at the McCormack school. “You mean Crazy Anthony?” says headmaster Charles Martin. “He was one of the most disturbed individuals I have ever met.”
Martin remembers the year: 1992. The Boston School Department had closed the Oliver Wendell Holmes School, in Dorchester, in a budget-cutting move, and 100 students from that school came to McCormack. “We almost had to impose martial law,” says Martin. “A lot of the Holmes kids had not been in a disciplined environment like the McCormack and were in sore need of lessons on civility and social skills.”
Even in this tough crowd, Robinson stood out. “Anthony was a very violent, very vulgar young man,” Martin says. “He just didn’t appear ready for a school setting. He came in late for class, was disrespectful to teachers, and belligerent to other students.”
During one class, a teacher asked him if he had his schoolbooks. “Anthony never had his,” the teacher recalls. “When I asked him, he yelled, ‘Why you picking on me? I don’t know where the hell they are.’ ”
Robinson had to visit the principal’s office at least three or four times a week. “I was very concerned about his emotional stability,” Martin says. “I would stand toe-to-toe with him and ask basic questions about his role models, how much supervision he received at home, what he felt he came to school for, where he saw himself in the future. He didn’t really have answers for those questions.”
Robinson liked to show off in front of his friends. He punched other students and groped young women in hallways. Martin remembers having long discussions with him about “assault and sexual assault.” But the talks didn’t seem to do much good. Robinson was involved in several fights and treated teachers with utter disrespect. “Everyone,” Martin says, “knew him as antisocial and aberrant.”
Finally, Martin decided he had no choice: Three months after school began, he arranged a disciplinary hearing in November 1992 to expel Robinson, who was then 14. “I had to weigh the needs of the individual versus the needs of the group,” Martin explains. “Anthony was draining. He required so much time and energy that he was becoming a major distraction.”
Robinson was sent to the Log School, an alternative school run by Joe Carpenito in a tiny white, three-story building on the corner of Bowdoin Street and Geneva Avenue in Dorchester. Over the years, students have helped renovate the building by painting rooms, removing trash, and sanding floors. The school’s goal, explains Carpenito, is to give its students skills they can use in the workplace. He wants to build character, he says, and for the most part, his students respond.
But it is an uphill battle. Carpenito reaches into his desk and pulls out knives that students have given him to hold during the school day. “Many of them were afraid to walk the streets without any kind of protection,” he says. “What am I supposed to do? Tell them not to carry them?”
Robinson’s mother filled out the application forms for the Log School. Her answers about Anthony are revealing: Asked how her child expressed his feelings, she wrote, “By anger. He gets mad quickly.” The effect her divorce had on her son, she wrote, was “just a bad temper.”
Teachers at the Log School put it more strongly. His January 21, 1993, report card described Robinson as a “disturbing influence in class” who exerted a minimum amount of effort and earned F’s in conduct. His report card four months later was even worse: He failed seven of his nine courses. “Anthony continues to have complicated behavioral problems related to violence/abusive language and acting smart,” his guidance counselor wrote. “He had no problems with academics; behavior is the issue.”
Robinson’s unpredictable behavior had already drawn attention from police in May 1992. After he urinated in a neighbor’s hallway, police charged him with indecent exposure and malicious destruction of property; he was released that night, and the case was later continued without a finding. Police arrested Robinson again, less than two months later, for trespassing. After that arrest, Robinson skipped several hearings scheduled in Dorchester juvenile court, and he was placed on probation.
Then, on April 13, 1993, Robinson sneaked into his old school, the McCormack, and pulled a fire alarm when he thought no one was looking. He was charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace, and pulling a false alarm. Because this act violated his probation, he was expelled from the Log School. He also got a new address: a secured facility in Brockton under the custody of the state Department of Youth Services. Ten days before he was scheduled to check into the facility, however, Anthony Robinson and several of his friends were caught riding around Boston in a stolen car. Police added another charge to his rap sheet – knowingly receiving stolen property – and sent him to Brockton.
MEANWHILE, IN THE WIDE AND STATELY CORRIDORS of Brighton High School, Barrington Nevins was fitting right in. He was liked by both students and teachers. Cutting an impressive figure in his black leather jacket, he strolled the halls with a quiet air of purpose, loose and relaxed, his arms moving in sync with his stride. He dressed well, with starched creases pressed into his jeans, always worn above his hips – no baggy prison fashion for him. Nevins kept his hair cut short, sometimes with a design styled into it: a rose, a vine, or a B for Barrington.
His friends were amused by some of his eccentric habits. He never carried his books around the hallways, preferring to store them in hideaways scattered throughout the building: He kept his biology book underneath a shelf in his anatomy class, his history book in a file cabinet. He carried his homework for each class neatly folded and crisp in his back pocket. And he clearly had ambition. “I attained many beliefs in high school,” he wrote in one assigned paper; “for example, one must be self-motivated to achieve his destiny. I learned that without self-motivation it is impossible for anybody to try to lead or inspire to achieve.”
But Nevins had a lighter side, too. He could be silly, laughing at himself and his habits. And when his close friends teased him, Nevins remained good-natured. “He was very playful,” one friend says. “He would just sit there and smile. We would talk about his head and how it was shaped like a heart with two big lobes on the side of it. He would just smile.” Friends would sometimes imitate that smile and the way he would rock back in his chair, his head tilted back, biting his lips to keep from laughing. When Nevins would raise his hand in front of his face to hide his smile, they would ask how a teenager had such manly hands.
Though he was good-natured, one friend recalls, “he wasn’t talkative at all. You had to go up to him and talk. He always looked like he didn’t know anything. He played like he was dumb or something. But the next thing you know, he received a 100 on his test.” Most of his classmates knew he was serious about his work. Once, a history class was held in the cafeteria under the supervision of a substitute teacher. “Everybody was goofing off,” remembers the friend. “Everybody except Barrington. He was the only one doing the work.”
Every day, after school, Nevins worked on a shrink-wrapping assembly line at Greater Boston Rehabilitation Services Inc., near the Lechmere T stop. Pursell Edwards, who describes Nevins as having a lot of “hustle,” was his supervisor for two years, but their relationship was more like that of an uncle and nephew: one full of wisdom, the other eager to learn. They were both from Jamaica, a bond that transcended their age difference.
“Because of our shared culture and understanding, I talked to him about the opportunities that he had here and how he must gravitate toward them,” Edwards says. “Barrington was one of those kids who naturally gravitated toward success.”
Nevins was quietly competitive, even at work on the assembly line. Most of the other workers had some physical or mental impairment but were still able to perform basic functions; Nevins was one of dozens of Brighton High School students who signed up for after-school work, at minimum wage, to acquire job experience.
“Nevins and his friends made fun of each other after work,” says Marco Oliveira, another supervisor. “They would talk about who worked and who didn’t work. They were a lively group, especially considering that they went to school all day, then turned around and worked at night. In a sense, Barrington was a star among them.”
FOR ANTHONY ROBINSON, inside the DYS Brockton facility, life was extremely regimented. Hallway and bedroom doors were locked. He needed permission to eat, walk from one room to another, go to the bathroom, or watch television. Good behavior was rewarded with telephone privileges or the right to hang a poster in the bedroom. Classes were held Monday through Friday, with no vacations, no time off from household duties, no exceptions from random or scheduled drug tests.
But Robinson had managed to smoke some marijuana inside Brockton, according to sources familiar with the case, and DYS officials wanted him to urinate into a cup. He escaped before the test was administered, and he returned to his Franklin Field neighborhood.
Looking for him, DYS officials called the Griers; the Griers eventually found Dibbles, but he could not help. “I could have found him,” Dibbles says. “But I had just finished a drug program. I couldn’t go back to those neighborhoods without seeing some of my old friends. The next thing you know, I would have had a drink, then another, and then I would have started partying the way I liked to party.”
Two months later, DYS officials caught up with Robinson when the police busted him for breaking into a house. For the next 18 months, Robinson was back in DYS custody, this time in Grafton, His social worker there took a special interest in him, family members say, and he responded by performing well in classes. Robinson even scrapped his plans to become a rapper and told family members that he wanted to become a counselor, helping out children before they got in trouble like him.
In May 1995, when Robinson was 16 years old, the Grafton facility granted him a certificate, stating that he had complied with the rules and regulations of the 10-month program. Armed with this stamp of approval, DYS officials said, he was no ready for the freedom of living in a foster home. On July 28, 1995, a foster family was found.
But three days later, just when things seemed to be turning around in his life, Robinson chose to escape again, becoming absent without leave from the DYS program. Four months later, DYS finally dispatched a team of investigators to find him. “He was a relatively lightweight criminal,” explains one DYS official. “Even though he had spent a lot of time in secured facilities, he had not committed any violent acts.”
Meanwhile, Robinson had been hanging out with his friends near Franklin Field, living for a few days with one, then another. “He wasn’t a leader,” his father says. “He was a follower, looking for a place to fit in.”
A social worker who asked not to be identified and who was not assigned to Robinson often saw him hanging out near Talbot and Browning avenues. “I’d pull up in my car and see him with his boys,” the social worker says, but “he wasn’t like the other kids who were around him. He was really smart in a dumb way.” Robinson told some of his friends that he wanted to go back to school, but he didn’t take any steps to make that happen. “I always worried about something happening to him,” the social worker says. “He always looked sad to me. You got the sense that no one had ever really cared about him. He never had a dream.”
On the day before Thanksgiving 1995, Dibbles talked on the phone with his son. Dibbles who says he had been sober for the previous two years, made plans to get together with his son over the weekend at Dibbles’ Attleboro apartment. But that was before Robinson allegedly went out with his friends and a .22 rifle, before Barrington Nevins went out with his friends and a black leather jacket.
Dibbles did not hear from his son for two weeks, until a phone call came from Dibbles’ sister in Petersburg, Virginia. Robinson, whom she had not seen in seven years, had arrived at her door in a big car with three other teen-agers and said he wanted to see his grandmother, who lived nearby. There was a look on Robinson’s face that his aunt could not quite read – and that her nephew would not spell out. But she sensed trouble.
Dibbles told his sister what he had learned from seeing his son’s mug shot on the TV news. “Anthony is wanted for murder,” he said. His sister handed the telephone to Robinson. “You need to think about turning yourself in,” Dibbles told him. “They are going to catch you sooner or later, and they catch you wrong, you might die.”
Robinson agreed. Because his aunt didn’t want trouble in her home, she put him up in a motor lodge in downtown Petersburg. The next morning, police went there, only to learn that Robinson had checked out; he had gone back to his aunt’s house. She called later that afternoon and told police that her nephew was now ready to surrender. “There was no problem,” says Sgt. Patrick Kelleher, of the Petersburg police. “He was cooperative and respectful. He was not overly nervous. He was calm. He was not the typical thug.”
Robinson then made a confession, Petersburg police say: He took Barrington Nevins’ black leather jacket, and then he shot him dead.
BARRINGTON NEVINS’ BODY WAS FLOWN HOME TO JAMAICA, where he was buried. Anthony Robinson remains in the Nashua Street Jail; one of his alleged partners on the night of the crime, Charles Monteiro, is in DYS custody. Both are awaiting trial.
No matter what happens at the trial, Barrington Nevins’ death is a source of unceasing guilt for two men: one for bringing his son to America, the other for leaving his son alone. Junior Nevins now tells his fellow Jamaicans that the American dream is only for some, and they are better off staying in their country. “It’s just not worth it,” he says.
As for Edward Dibbles, “I can’t help but think that Anthony is paying for the sins of my past,” he says. “No matter how much I blame myself, nothing is going to change. Somebody’s son is dead, and another one might be in prison for an extremely long time. Two lives just wasted. Over what?” —
Journalist & Author Howard Manly 