By Richard Weir
The Boston Herald
A “distraught” 16-year-old brandishing a knife and yelling, “Shoot me, shoot me, I want to die,” was wounded by a Weymouth cop early yesterday after he ignored repeated orders to drop his weapon, police and witnesses said.
“The police told him, `Put the knife down. Put the knife down. Put the knife down.’ They said it over and over and over, at least a dozen times,” said Cindy Alkanan, 40, a neighbor at the Lakeview Manor housing project. “Then I heard a gunshot. There were police officers around him. And all I could hear was a police officer saying, `Oh my God, it’s just a kid. Oh my God, it’s just a kid.’ ... He was really upset about it.”
Weymouth police Capt. Joseph Comperchio Jr. said the teen was warned repeatedly to put down the 10-inch kitchen knife before he was shot in the right shoulder by an nine-year veteran officer in the 1 a.m. confrontation.
“Every indication suggests he was coming after the officer waving the knife,” Comperchio said. He said the officer fired one shot at a range of five to 10 feet. “We believe the shooting was justified,” he added.
Detective Lt. Richard Fuller said witnesses told investigators that at one point during the incident, the teen, who has a juvenile arrest record, pleaded with the officers, “Shoot me. Shoot me. I want to die.”
Neighbor Tracy Foley-Wahlberg, 29, said the boy at one point rested his hand with the knife on the back of a cruiser.
“That is when the cop said, `Drop it now or I’m going to shoot you,’ ” she said. “He said, `That’s what I want. Just shoot me. Just shoot me.”
She said the teen, who was “stumbling around ... he could barely hold himself up,” grabbed the knife and started pacing and talking on his cell phone as another officer moved in with a baton. “The next thing I knew shots were fired,” she said.
Comperchio said the teen, who was “distraught” and “yelling and screaming,” had been drinking high-proof 151 rum with three friends, and that the alcohol, combined with an argument with his mom, “appeared to set him off.” The boy apparently brought police to the scene himself with a 911 call.
Police declined to release his name. He has not been formally charged but will face four felony counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of armed assault with intent to murder. Police said he was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital with non-life threatening injuries last night.
Copyright 2010 Boston Herald Inc.