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Man shot to death on Old Road in Dorchester; suspect arrested
By adamg on Sun, 09/03/2023 - 11:32am
Boston Police report a man was shot where Old Road meets Columbia Road around 11:40 p.m. on Saturday.
Arriving officers found Xavier Rivas, 22, of Roxbury, lying on the ground with multiple gunshot wounds. He was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Boston Police updated that Mikai Thomson, 21, of Dorchester, arrested around 3 p.m. at Albert and Ruggles street in Roxbury was charged with murdering Rivas, as well as assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon and illegal possession of a loaded firearm.
Police say Thomson was initially arrested on a separate warrant for assault and battery on a police officer and gun charges for an incident on Aug. 21, but that they eventually linked him to Rivas's death.
Rivas's death ends a stretch of more than a month in which Boston did not have any murders.
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Comments
Sort of lost in all the talk
Sort of lost in all the talk of rising homicide rates in cities nationwide is the fact that 2019 was a really bad year in Boston for homicides and numbers have luckily been quite low in the years coming out of the pandemic (almost twice as many at this date in 2019 versus 2022 and 2023).
After a homicide free august,
After a homicide free august, this seems to be the first of September
Boston murder statistics
Both June and August had no murders in Boston, the first murder-free months since Adam started keeping tabs on murders in 2013.
As of 9/20 there have been 26 murders in Boston, a rate of about 36 per year. 36 would be the lowest number of murders in the city since 2013 at least:
2013 45
2014 51
2015 40
2016 48
2017 55
2018 56
2019 40
2020 58
2021 38
2022 41
There were a couple of years in the late '90s with fewer, after more than 100 in the early '90s. A lot of this is luck: the difference between a murder and someone getting shot is usually a matter of inches. Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan account for 72% of murders but are only 30% of the city by population.
There was a poll out this summer that asked people about crime in various cities. Boston and Dallas were thought to be the safest. People aren't exactly well-informed: Dallas, which has twice as many people in the city as Boston, had about 5 times as many murders.