Published October 6, 2010

Ebony Flonory fainted upon seeing the bodies of her sister, Eyanna Florony, and her nephew, Amani Smith. (Via AP)

The woman sitting next to me, Melanie Brown, had been to these before.

“When they close the casket, it’s usually the hardest part,” she whispered to me, as mourners paid their final respects to mother and son.

The body of 2-year-old Amani Smith lay in Eyanna Flonory’s arms, just as the police had found them a block away, on Woolson Street.

The undertakers closed the casket, and a sadness fell over the church. There was a portrait of a smiling Eyanna and the cutest little kid you ever saw.

“I lived on every street in this neighborhood,” Brown said, including Woolson. Her son went to school with Simba Martin, Flonory’s boyfriend, who was laid to rest Tuesday. Brown said it was her godson, 19-year-old Aaron Brown, who was shot to death last August at the Dorchester Y.

Brown can’t take any more violence. She wants the drugs and guns gone. “They don’t want to fix it.” Who is they, I ask? The government, politicians, she says.

Bishop John Borders blames a lot of people. Pastors, teachers, cops, reporters, absent fathers. He declared a “spiritual war” on evil.

“I’m going into a season of prayer. I’m asking God to change the spiritual climate in the City of Boston,” Borders preached, his voice rising. “God has had enough.” He pounded the lectern.

The most powerful words came next:

Our teachers have to teach lessons that are higher than MCAS. We can’t stop at MCAS. We have to go higher than MCAS. Our politicians have to end the lying, and they have to end the division. Our police have to return to neighborhood policing and end police brutality. The media has to stop recording all the bad things that happen in our neighborhood and learn to start recording the positive things that happen in our neighborhoods. And our fathers have to take their families back. Our men have to be men. Our mothers have to take the locks off the doors of their children. They have to go inside of their rooms and throw out everything that doesn’t belong there. And if you know where the guns are, and if you know where the drugs are, stop worrying about being a snitch. You have to report it. You’ve got to get the guns out of this community. And you’ve got to get the drugs out of this city. I’m stirred up! I’m not going to take it anymore!

Eyanna and Amani are murder victims No. 48 and 49 this year. Amani is by far the youngest on this list. And Borders wants the outrage of a 2-year-old’s death to wake up this city.

“God is going to use this death to turn us back to God.”

Published October 6, 2010

Beside Highway. Acton, MA. (Ross Barros-Smith/Flickr)

Photographer Ross Barros-Smith captured the moon rising besides a highway in Acton. An emotive shot and worthy of Hubbub’s Photo Of The Day. He describes the shot:

The photo was taken on August 20th, 2010 at 7:48PM on Weatherbee Street facing south toward Route 2 in Acton, MA. The best public radio station in the country comes in loud and clear from here.

I used a a Canon T2i mounted with an 18mm lens at f/13 and an ND4 graduated neutral density filter with an extra empty filter ring for the vignetting.

Have some pictures of your own? Why not submit them to  WBUR’s Flickr group?

Published October 6, 2010

Then-Minnesota Vikings receiver Randy Moss pretends to "moon" the crowd after catching a 34-yard touchdown pass in an away game against the Green Bay Packers in 2005. (AP)

Unless you were on Twitter last night, you likely woke up today shocked to learn that Patriots star receiver Randy Moss would be traded to the Minnesota Vikings, reportedly for a 3rd round pick.

Most Patriots fans knew that Moss was unhappy that he hadn’t been offered a contract extension by the team, but very few knew that a trade was in the works.

The only New Englander who had caught a whiff of trade action, it seems, is a transplant living on the West Coast. Bill Simmons, ESPN columnist and No. 1 Boston sports fan, had heard rumors and was checking in to them. As a columnist — not a reporter — Simmons isn’t known for working the phones to check on a story.

Not only did Simmons attempt to dig for details, he also mistakenly let his over 1 million Twitter followers in on the hunt.

At around 7:15 Tuesday night, Simmons sent out a tweet (since deleted) that roughly read, “Moss Vikings.” Three minutes later, Simmons (@sportsguy33) immediately followed up his original tweet with a message that read:

@sportsguy33 Sorry that last tweet was supposed to be a DM. Rumors swirling about a Pats-Minny trade for Randy Moss.

Simmons had meant to write a “direct message” — a message only viewable by a specific person and akin to a Twitter e-mail. Instead, Simmons had mistakenly sent his first message to the entire world.

Thanks to Simmons’ popularity and proximity to ESPN’s stable of reporters, the Twitterverse exploded with speculation immediately after Simmons’ original, mistaken, tweet.

Only 13 minutes later, NBC Sports-affiliated blog Pro Football Talk posted a short post titled “Unintended tweet sparks rumors of Moss-to-Minny move.” Mike Florio, the post’s author and main contributor to the site, ended it with “Let the chase begin.”

Veteran NFL reporter Jay Glazer picked up the scent and before 8 p.m. reported via Twitter:

@Jay_Glazer Yes, vikes and pats have been working on trade that sends randy moss to vikes and r very clode (sic) but can’t be done until vikes and moss work out new contract, whcih (sic) they r working on

At 7:58, New England Cable News reported that there was, in fact, no trade in the works. By then, however, most NFL reporters were feverishly trying to get the facts and Twitter users all over the country had a headache.

As we now know, the deal was real and Simmons was right. The Herald’s Ian R. Rappaport reported via Twitter that the Patriots have made the trade official and head coach Bill Belichick even released a rare statement wishing Moss well.

The speculation surrounding the Randy Moss trade perfectly illustrates today’s media landscape. Access to Twitter spurred reporters to cover a breaking story, allowed them to report anything they were able to dig up and inform fans in real time. It also served as a venue for wild speculation, the reportage of false information and lots of questions.

How will the Pats fare without Moss? Have your say in the comments.

Published October 5, 2010

On the day after he would have turned 22, Simba Martin was remembered as a funny, ambitious and engaged young man. He studied abroad in the Netherlands and in France, and he was learning Japanese. He volunteered to work with children at the church. He had enrolled in Quincy College to study criminal justice.

Martin was one of four people — including his girlfriend and her 2-year-old son — gunned down last week in Mattapan. The police are still working feverishly to arrest a shooter. Kimani Washington, arrested over the weekend in New Hampshire, is not charged with murder.

I could not see inside Timothy Baptist Church in Roxbury — standing-room only, and reporters were not welcome — but the song and prayer carried the grief across the street.

My producer, WBUR’s Lisa Tobin, met a next-door neighbor who had braided Martin’s hair. She was asked to braid his hair, one last time, for the wake. She couldn’t do it.

The woman did not give us her name because she is angry about the coverage of the story, and she says the family is angry, too.

As the pallbearers waited to carry his casket, Martin’s family members emerged, some of them drenched in tears. I photographed a woman screaming in agony as she ran from the church steps. Her friend, holding an umbrella over her head, shouted at me: “Don’t take her picture! Don’t do it!”

No one was in the mood to talk to me, a reporter. I tapped shoulders and got waved away. I photographed one woman, sitting on a stoop across the street and crying, who did give me her name — Fatima Miranda. But she wanted to move on. She said only, “He was a good, good friend.”

The program for his wake is adorned with positive messages. “Peace is possible.” “Courage is to be strong and forgive those who’ve done wrong.”

• Simba Martin’s funeral program on Scribd

Published October 5, 2010

Last sunset of August, Plum Island, Parker River National Wildlife Refuge (Rowland Williams/Flickr)

Photographer Rowland Williams captured the last sunset of August at Plum Island in the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge, way up north of Ipswich.

Williams shot this image at 7:05 p.m. on a Canon EOS 40D, f/7.1 @ 1/640, ISO 250. Lovely!

Check out his other work, including recent shots of fall foliage at night. Williams is a star submitter to WBUR’s Flickr group.

Published October 4, 2010

More than a decade ago, a Boston jury convicted British au pair Louise Woodward of second-degree murder, after an eight-month-old child died in her care. The case put shaken baby syndrome in the international spotlight.

British au pair Louise Woodward as she is sentenced in 1997 (Via AP)

Today it’s a diagnosis “rooted in the public consciousness,” writes the attorney Deborah Tuerkheimer. But has conventional science changed since then?

In her provocative op-ed for the New York Times last month, Tuerkheimer said yes:

Experts are questioning the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome. Increasingly, it appears that a good number of the people charged with and convicted of homicide may be innocent. … Scientists are now willing to accept that the symptoms once equated with shaking can be caused in other ways.

The story ignited a firestorm of comments on WBUR’s CommonHealth blog. That got the attention of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker (which called the post “an interesting way of doing journalism in the blog era”) as well as the op-ed author herself, who said: “I am not able to comment on blog comments.”

Continue reading →

Published October 4, 2010

When Susan Reverby discovered that American scientists in the 1940s had injected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis, she was “horrified.” But the Wellesley College professor and Cantabrigian waited months to publicize her finding — and even then, hardly anyone noticed.

“I did some research on this a little while ago, and then I went back to the (University of) Pittsburgh archives in June of ’09. I didn’t get to write this up until … March of 2010,” Reverby told me by phone today.

Wellesley College Prof. Susan Reverby

Reverby was doing research for her book about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study — she helped persuade President Clinton to apologize for it in 1997 — when she stumbled upon unpublished notes about this other horrible experiment.

“I was just completely blown away by this, really horrified,” she said.

“I thought about putting it in my book, but it just didn’t fit. It seemed like it needed its own story, so I held on to try and write it up appropriately.”

As a blogger, I’m almost as blown away that Reverby held on to this news for so long. It’s a scoop any journalist would salivate over.

But Reverby is a historian, not a journalist.

“The context matters. I just don’t work like that. It never would have even occurred to me to do that, never in a million years,” she said. “I’m not a gotcha journalist. I’m not a blogger.”

Continue reading →

Published October 4, 2010

View from the top of Wildcat Mountain (Phish Phood/Flickr)

Phlickr photographer Phish Phood brought back extraordinary images from a leaf-peeping expedition in Jackson, N.H., yesterday. The photographer describes the shot:

We took a gondola ride to the top of Wild Cat mountain and the scenery was simply breathtaking (figuratively and literally as it was cold and windy on top) We love the Fall in New England

New England is a photographer’s dream in fall, as I discovered en route to Pittsfield two weeks ago. If you missed it, we put out the call for your best fall foliage fotos in the “Assignments” section of WBUR’s iPhone app.