Men's-rooms slashing followed by parking-lot head bashing at Mattapan club

The Boston Licensing Board heard details today of a pair of violent, and likely related, incidents at Macumba Latina, 477 River St. that left a patron with with his right forearm slashed open and a man in the parking lot across the street lying on the ground after getting hit in the head with a baseball bat.

Now the board could decide Thursday whether Mattapan's only nightclub could have foreseen or prevented the men's-room slashing. If so, the board would then consider potential penalties for the slashing. Although both the club and police say the incidents were likely related, the board will only consider the slashing because the police citation issued that night was only for the men's room incident.

According to the club and police, a man was with some friends when he went into the men's room around midnight on Sept. 6. Accounts then vary whether there was another man in there with a knife or four men, two of them with a knife, but the man had his forearm opened up with a knife.

Co-owner Max Fernandes said the victim tried running out the front, but that he stopped him to apply first aid and to call for an ambulance. However, the man said he would get himself to the hospital and got into a car, in which he wound up at Carney Hospital.

BPD Sgt. Det. James Moore said he did not know about the stabbing when he responded to 500 River St., the parking lot where many Macumba Latina patrons park, on a report of a man on the ground, semi-conscious after being bashed on the head from behind. He said he was only notified after he arrived there that there was somebody at Carney who had just been stabbed at Macumba Latina.

Fernandes told the board that his security staff had already stopped the stabber outside the men's room, but that he escaped by getting them to agree to let him go back in to pee, only he then ran out the back door. He said what likely happened was that some of the friends of the victim spotted him heading to the parking lot and went after him with a bat.

Fernandes said he did not know how anybody got into the club with a knife, because his veteran doorman is very good about patting down men, "right to their very shoes and boots they are wearing," and that the club has refused entry in the past to people bearing weapons. A woman bouncer performs a similar check on women.

Still, he said that because of the September incident, the club has purchased a metal detector.

Macumba Latina attorney William Rehrey said this was the first stabbing at the club in its 15 years in business.