Three
Boston cops - one a detective
whose beat was to track down stolen
cars - were cleared yesterday of any
wrongdoing in the fatal shooting of
a Dorchester mom who slit the throats
of her own children on a deadly hot
afternoon last summer.
``The
murder of two children so young and
innocent . . . at the hand of their
mother is an unspeakable crime,''
said Suffolk District Attorney Daniel
Conley, who exonerated detective Charles
Daly and patrolmen Daran Edwards and
Thomas Sullivan.
The
three officers found the dead bodies
of 6-year-old Sydney Murphy and her
brother, Scott, 3, piled on top of
each other in their family's dimly
lit, maze-like basement on Milton
Avenue July 2. They shot LaVeta Jackson,
36, 13 times as the 5-foot, 9-inch,
240-pound woman lunged at them from
behind a latched door screaming ``unintelligibly''
and thrashing a bloodied foot-long
kitchen knife over her head.
A
second knife Jackson had apparently
pulled from an upstairs butcher block
was found next to her slaughtered
children.
The
officers ``witnessed a grisly scene,''
Conley said. ``Their use of force
was lawful in order to protect themselves
and their fellow officers.'' None
of the officers emptied their semiautomatic
Glock's 14-shot clips, he said.
Calls
to family members of Jackson, who
had a history of mental illness, were
not returned yesterday.
A
prepared statement released by Boston
police said, ``The officers were faced
with an immediate, unprovoked and
deadly attack, were without means
of escape or cover from that attack
and used the amount of force necessary
to protect themselves.'' |