"You don't deserve to be here"

State police recruit hazed to death, another driver kills another pedestrian

Hello, everyone, I’m back from me and Katie’s excellent adventure. It was a much needed break from America, from social media and, frankly, from thinking about Worcester. But now I’m back to thinking about Worcester baby let’s go!

The post is a day late because I had to prepare for a last minute show at Ralph’s with my Roky Erickson band The Evil Ones at a Hot Dog Safari event that also featured a mechanical bull riding contest. It was a pain in the ass but it was a fun, silly time. 

Before we begin, I want to give a public thank you to Liz, Sean and Aislinn for holding down the Worcester Sucks fort in my absence over the past two weeks. It’s nice to have a team! 

And the more subscribers we have, the bigger and better that team becomes. Think about it this way: a paid subscription is direct participation in the creation of a new local media ecosystem that organically reflects and serves the local community. We have no advertisers or benefactors to cater to. Our only responsibility is to you, the reader. This is a dramatically different economic structure than any other outlet in this city. It allows us to speak truth to power in a way that others can’t, or won’t. And without speaking truth to power what is journalism’s function, anyway? Especially in this, a time when press releases from the cops or the city manager are just as easy to find as the “news stories” reiterating them? 

Also: Book clubbers don’t forget the next one is on Thursday night! Details here.

In this post, I’m mostly catching myself up on stories I missed while I was away. But in a productive way, I think. I have a few travel essays already written that I planned on sharing today, but I’m going to shelve them for now because there are more pressing matters to attend to. So let’s attend to them.

Hazed to death—another casualty in the war on walkers—council preview—hedge fund to hedge fund—odds and ends

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“You don't deserve to be here”

On Sept. 13 news hit that a young state police recruit from Worcester died “from injuries sustained in a training exercise” at the Massachusetts State Police Academy in New Braintree. His name was Enrique Delgado-Garcia and he was 25 years old. In this preliminary story, Col. John Mawn, the head of the state police, is quoted at length eulogizing the young man: 

He made an immediate impression on his classmates and the Academy staff. By all accounts, Enrique possessed and displayed all the qualities that would have made him an outstanding Trooper: kindness and compassion, dedication, commitment, willingness to work hard to improve himself, and a strong desire help others (sic).

The District Attorney’s Office, where Delgado-Garcia previously worked, extended “thoughts and prayers” through a spokesman. 

Then, on Sept. 18, Giovani JN Baptiste, a former recruit in the same class as Delgado-Garcia and a friend—they were carpool buddies during their training—gave an interview to WBZ News. 

Baptiste says he was subjected to hazing and harassment from his second week of training, though he does not know what happened to his friend.

"For people like me or people like Delgado, Spanish or Black, it's really hard," the former recruit told the I-Team. "They make it really hard for you."

Hard because, he says, he was picked on nearly every day, starting first thing in the morning when instructors would have the other trainees go to his room and yell "go home."

"Imagine like 180 people telling you go home; you know, go home you don't deserve to be here," Baptiste said. "It was a lot for me."

Baptiste is an army reservist. He went through boot camp. The state police training, he said, wasn’t at all like the army. It was “more like a college fraternity hazing instead of elite law enforcement training.”

A state police spokesman denied it outright, and attacked Baptiste’s credibility as a candidate who was dismissed. The state police, the spokesman said, “does not tolerate any form of hazing, discrimination, or misconduct, and we thoroughly investigate any allegation of such behavior."

Sure...

It’s not the first time a “hazing” incident has come to light. An instructor punished recruits by pushing their heads into toilet bowls in 2005. Two years ago, instructors made 20 recruits bear crawl on freshly poured hot pavement. They all suffered serious burns on their hands. 

Last week, the Worcester County District Attorney’s office had declined to take on the investigation, citing their past ties with Delgado-Garcia, but promised an outside investigation. So far, no word on that. 

Yesterday, the ACLU called for a federal investigation of the training center. The ACLU’s legal director, Jessie Rossman, told WZB:

"Against the backdrop of Mr. Delgado-Garcia's death, there are also serious questions that are being raised about whether there is a pattern and practice of discrimination or other systemic illegality at the Massachusetts State Police Academy."

Similarly, State Senators Robyn Kennedy and Michael Moore wrote a letter to Attorney General Andrea Campbell to “request the appointment of a conflict-of-interest Special Assistant Attorney General” to investigate.

But it really needs to be a federal investigation. Friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere put it well:

Link

All of this taken together is an example of what Geo Maher calls “the pig majority” in his 2021 book A World Without Police.¹ That majority isn’t just the police, but every institution and person bound up in the project of guarding what Maher deftly calls “that most peculiar form of property that is whiteness.” It’s the courts and the district attorneys and the prison wardens. It’s the nervous white suburbanites quick to call 911. It’s the media class that paints portrait after portrait of white innocence and Black thuggery. It extends even to language, with “copspeak” lexicon— “officer-involved shooting” taking the place of “killing,” weapons that are “less lethal”—creeping into all corners of public discourse.

Most of all, it’s the vigilante gangs that “have almost always served as a brutal adjunct to the police.” The lynch mobs of the south. The “border patrols” of the southwest. The assault-rifle wielding teenagers who show up at protests to “defend businesses.” The neo nazis... everywhere. The line between the cops and the vigilantes, Maher writes, is vanishingly thin. Indeed it’s often those with a badge among the ranks of such gangs.

It’s not a stretch to believe that this particular training compound amounts to such a gang, and that the “hazing rituals” are this gang’s way of protecting the property of whiteness. What better way is there to process the “go home” chants described by the fellow recruit?

Maher’s chapter on the pig majority includes a paragraph so blistering I have to include the whole thing: 

This expansive amorphous pig majority comes into being long before violence occurs and continues to coalesce and expand after the body is cold. Its backbone is the self deputized white majority that, with an effortlessness bordering on instinct, volunteers to police others, in part because it dreams police dreams and plays them out at home on wives and children, all while praying to a police god. This pig majority is fueled not only by overt racism and a white victimhood complex, but also by that perilous quantity that is white fear. It is part of the so-called implicit bias that leads police to shoot suspects of color—and Black suspects in particular—without hesitation. But white fear is deadly in other ways, too: when it calls 911 to report a suspicious person or a crime; when it describes a suspect; when it moves to a neighborhood and calls the cops on longtime residents and businesses for being too loud, too rowdy. It’s apps like Citizen and local Facebook groups; it’s cop-calling gentrifiers and the real estate developers behind neocolonial land grabs. And, as we’ll see, this pig majority that upholds white supremacy extends far beyond white Americans, conscripting many people of color—some voluntarily, some less so—to do its work as well.

The pig majority might include you, too. But it doesn’t have to. 

For now, I’ll leave it on that note—that very important question to ask yourself, then ask again: Might it include you, this pig majority? And, if so, what are you going to do about it?

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A product of design

We had yet another pedestrian death earlier this week. Like all of them, it was avoidable—a product of design. 

On Tuesday night, a driver rammed their vehicle into two women crossing the street at the corner of Clover and South Ludlow streets. Both were hospitalized. One of them, a 35-year-old Auburn woman named Jami-Lyn Fish, died there. 

Another social murder, carrying our deadly summer into a new season. Fish joins 13-year-old Gianna Rose Simoncini and more than 50 wounded as a 2024 casualty figure in the ongoing war on walkers. 

Everyone in Fish’s life knew her as Jay. She worked at the LaundroMax on Mill Street. The laundromat was one of at least two jobs Jay worked to support her two children, now motherless. "She was a great mom,” Jay’s aunt told the Telegram. “She loved her children. Her children were her everything."

It was a little before 10 p.m. Jay’d just left work. She was 1.6 miles into her walk when she crossed South Ludlow. A driver heading south on that straight-shot road rammed their car into her body, becoming in that moment judge, jury, and executioner—finding Jay guilty of the crime of existing in public without a two-ton exoskeleton of steel and fiberglass. Sentencing her to death. 

The driver was headed south down South Ludlow Street toward Auburn. After hitting the two pedestrians, the driver hit another vehicle as well. That’s all the information we have from the police, who say they’re still investigating. 

The intersection where the driver killed Jay is in a mostly residential area. The road that took the driver southbound into Jay’s body doesn’t have a stop sign, and there are no crosswalks. 

At the scene, there were skid marks that went up onto the sidewalk, per the Telegram. Spray paint marked those, as well as the shoes that the two women were knocked out of by the driver. 

Taking a wider view, the driver hit Jay on a 1.2 mile straightaway taking traffic from Webster Square to the Auburn line. It takes two minutes to drive, according to Google Maps, and 25 minutes to walk. The driver had no stop signs, curb cuts, bollards, or roundabouts to slow them down. They passed just one crosswalk prior. The spot where the driver rammed into Jay is about a third of the way down this stretch—far enough to have reached maximum driving speed. (The police haven’t said how fast the car was going.)

Last week, I spent a few days driving in Ireland. It’s worth explaining that a road like this would look much different over there. 

Irish road design employs small roundabouts at almost every intersection. At each roundabout, there are protected and well marked pedestrian crossings in all directions. 

Here’s an example—a stretch of road I drove a few times that brings traffic from farm country into the small town center of Carrick-On-Sur. 

This stretch is also 1.2 miles, but, as you see, it’s not the straightaway it would be in Worcester. It takes four minutes to drive as opposed to two. There are four roundabouts, as I’ve marked, which naturally check your speed. Also, the road narrows considerably as you get into town. Signs explain this, with drawings and bold “Traffic calming ahead” advisories. The design is not subtle. There are large speed limit warnings over the course of the route that drop from 100 kmph (~62 mph) in the country to 80 to 60 to finally 50 kmph (~31 mph) in the town center. 

As a driver, I found my speed was curbed without having to think about it. The shape of the road made me drive slower than I would have, and it was fine.

For pedestrians, the roundabouts all have built-in, well marked crossing points. The nature of the design allows pedestrians to take one half of the road at a time, safely waiting in the middle behind a raised curb should they need to. 

The roundabout design is generally referred to in traffic engineering circles as a “Dutch roundabout” and in recent years Ireland has been putting them on highways, like this... 

Their version of the Department of Transportation has a page dedicated to traffic calming, saying: 

It has been found that posting speed limits without any physical speed reducing measures does not induce drivers to sufficiently reduce their speed in towns and villages. Traffic calming aims to reduce vehicle speeds in urban and residential areas by self-enforcing traffic engineering methods.

This is just a cursory glimpse at what it looks like when the country you live in gives a shit about road safety. 

The stretch of road that took Jay’s life would look dramatically different in Irish hands. There would have been a roundabout to check the driver’s speed. Jay wouldn’t have had to cross the entire street at once. Her walk from work wouldn’t have been such a gamble. And all of that would have been accomplished without a single police officer involved.  

We do not live in a country that gives a shit however. That much is obvious. 

We live in a country where podunk city councils are allowed to dictate traffic engineering by way of know-nothing resentment politics. We live in a country that lets one shitty townie with a subcommittee chairmanship hold up a bare minimum safety proposal for nine months. Just last week, the council finally passed the 25 mph citywide speed limit after the better part of a year, though it will still take some time to implement. The city administration first proposed the idea last December, and crank councilor Donna Colorio was allowed to make the unilateral decision of tying it up in her subcommittee until August, while the death toll mounted.

It should be said that Irish drivers are not good drivers. They absolutely fly down tight roads with reckless abandon. One night we saw two cars whip around a tight corner nearly bumper-to-bumper and almost smack a pizza delivery driver walking to her car. She took a frightened step back and just shook her head. Several times, a tour bus nearly took our lives, rounding a blind corner with a too-wide turn on a too-small road. 

What I’m saying is it’s not like the Irish are a more responsible, civic-minded group of drivers than Americans. That’s not why we have a pedestrian death toll in the thousands and they have one in the dozens—the difference is that our roads allow reckless drivers to kill people and theirs don’t.

Let’s do a quick data comparison. In 2022, there were more than 7,500 pedestrian deaths in the U.S. That’s a per capita rate of 2.3 per 100,000. In the same year, in Ireland, there were 43 pedestrian deaths. Of course, Ireland is a much smaller country, at 5.12 million to our 333 million. But the per capita rate there comes out to about 0.89. That means America is about two and a half times more deadly a place for pedestrians than Ireland. 

Scanning Irish news stories, their comparatively small problem is the cause of much greater concern. For instance, from the Irish Times, 'Worrying' figures show number of pedestrians killed on Ireland's roads doubled in 2022. Despite the year-over-year increase, Ireland’s rate of pedestrian deaths is generally in keeping with the rest of the developed world. The U.S., on the other hand, is about 50 percent more deadly than all of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan.

In 2023, Ireland announced a plan to invest $556 million in further road safety improvements to address the spike in pedestrian deaths. (Someone do the per capita conversion on that, lol).

Here in Worcester, it took multiple deaths and countless hospitalizations—a gruesome, headline-grabbing summer—to do even the bare minimum of lowering the speed limit. 

And, in the wake of this latest social murder, the tired “enforcement versus infrastructure” debate has raged anew. The Telegram’s Ray Mariano used his bully pulpit to say that infrastructure improvements are too costly and take too long. The former mayor writes: 

Of course, many other traffic-calming measures would be helpful — flashing lights, stop signs, speed bumps, speed humps — but doing all of those things and other steps that were proposed would take years and millions of dollars to implement.

What we really need to do, he said, is hire more cops. 

The question of whether to invest in road infrastructure or traffic enforcement is a much bigger question than it first appears. It’s about whether we build a better and more accommodating society or we allow society to continue to erode at the hands of a police state bureaucracy. 

Our local power elite believes wholeheartedly in the latter approach, as Mariano so neatly demonstrates for us. 

The recognition that we are a global outlier—that this is not normal, not okay—is hard to come by. In Ireland they are dumping money at a problem that pales in comparison to ours. For the most part, we’re just paying lip service. City Manager Eric Batista is trying—he launched the Department of Transportation and Mobility and staffed it with smart, well meaning professionals—but he’s handcuffed by a reactive council and a state and federal government that isn’t investing real money. 

In a 2022 piece for Vox, Marin Cogan diagnoses our unique American sickness nicely. “There are a multitude of reasons peer countries are getting safer for pedestrians while the US gets deadlier,” she writes. They include better regulation of vehicle size and design, safe technology requirements that take pedestrians into account, and aggressively implementing new infrastructure that calms traffic. But the most important difference: “Other developed nations have political leaders who move aggressively and unapologetically toward making streets safe.”

Around America, cities have adopted Vision Zero policies akin to Worcester’s. As with most things, Worcester is late to the trend. But reliably, city governments sign onto the concept in theory, then fail to make the investments needed to carry it out in practice. Check this line from the Bloomberg piece I’m citing here and see if it rings familiar: 

Seleta Reynolds, the director of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, said she has noticed a familiar pattern. “A moment comes when a person shows up to do the actual [infrastructure] project, and it’s down the street from your house. Whether it’s a bike lane or a bus lane, the calculus suddenly changes, and it feels like a fundamental assault on your way of life.”

That’s the key issue in Worcester, as the Mill Street drama so deftly captures. It’s just plain old political will. 

It doesn’t have to be like this. The people holding us back—on the council and at the neighborhood meetings and on Townie Facebook—can simply be ignored. 

Hoboken, New Jersey hasn’t had a single traffic death since 2017. Just on the other side of the Hudson from New York City, Hoboken is considerably more dense and city-like than Worcester. There, it took just one single death of an 89-year-old woman in 2015 for the local government to radically change its traffic policy. The AP writes:

Street parking was already scarce in Hoboken, New Jersey, when the death of an elderly pedestrian spurred city leaders to remove even more spaces in a bid to end traffic fatalities.

The city lowered speed limits, staggered traffic lights, widened curbs to shorten the length of crosswalks (and put up temporary bollards where they don’t have the money to make the full improvements right away). 

Very little, if any, of the success is due to increased traffic enforcement. They just built a safer city. 

What I’m saying is it’s a completely solvable problem. Worcester just isn’t solving it. The people responsible for that have names, addresses and city council seats. There is an election next year. 

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Council preview

The full council starts at 6:30 p.m. Here’s the agenda. Here are the most pressing items, though none of them live up to the term. As always we’ll be streaming the meeting over at WCT3k. 6:15 p.m. start.

George Russell wants to waste city money on full body security scanners for city hall (item 11b). He wants units “similar to the equipment used at Polar Park, the Worcester District Court and other public places, on or before December 31, 2024.” That’s when ARPA money has to be spent, by the way. Can’t think of a more anachronistic use of that money than gating off city hall. Hopefully this gets spiked but I feel like it’ll go through with at least eight votes. 

Candy Mero-Carlson wants an “institutional zoning ordinance” (11c). I googled the term because I’d never heard it before and the only thing that came up was a 1998 report from the Worcester Regional Research Bureau. The report suggests such an ordinance could stop colleges from gobbling up nearby properties, but also warns “these zones may be illegal under state law and could be subject to court challenge.” Lol. 

So... no. Let’s not. 

Moe Bergman wants a formal redo on a vote taken last week to change the rules on speaking time (8a). You don’t see a “reconsideration” like this on agendas often. According to the meeting minutes from last week (item 16a), the rule change was voted down 6-5. Very glad I missed that whole thing to be honest.  

Joe Petty wants the city manager to take over the now-defunct stART On The Street event (11a). I’d rather no event than one put on by city hall types, to be honest. 

Before the full council, there’s an economic development subcommittee meeting at 5 p.m. Tuesday with one agenda item: a report on WPI’s hotel purchases the city manager filed last week. In the report, City Manager Eric Batista acknowledges there’s nothing to be done:

Over the past few weeks, I have been discussing these concerns with WPI. In our communications it has been clear that WPI is proceeding with the acquisitions, and they have a right to do so. 

But says he’ll try to pry some concessions anyway:

My goal in these discussions has been to work with WPI to arrive at a mutually agreeable plan moving forward that mitigates these fiscal consequences to the City of Worcester and other indirect impacts. I am hopeful that we will come to a beneficial solution for both sides.

Regardless, it’s sure to be an hour-long episode of “Candy Mero-Carlson Complains Without Offering One Practical Solution.”  

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Hedge fund to hedge fund

Since we’re on the subject, let’s look at the latest with WPI’s hotel purchases. On Monday, we learned that the sale of the two hotels in the Gateway Park area are final. For the measly sum of $46 million, the school bought the Hampton Inn ($20.4 million) and the Courtyard by Marriott ($25.6 million.) The college-as-developer is going forward with the development no matter how much kicking and screaming Tim Murray and the rest of the Economic Development Coordinating Council do in the newspapers. 

Important to note, as I haven’t gotten into this part of the story in any depth, the sale is hedge fund-to-hedge fund. 

The school (a hedge fund) bought the hotels from Blackstone, a massive multi-national private equity firm (colloquially: “big hedge fund”) built on churn-and-burn acquisitions. Hilton was one of those acquisitions. Blackstone bought the hotel chain in 2007, long before the Hampton Inn or the Courtyard ever became part of the Gateway Park urban renewal effort. Both hotels were owned by BREIT, Blackstone’s real estate subsidiary. No one is yelling at Blackstone for selling the hotels, of course.  

One could have seen it coming, though, if they were paying attention: Investors have been fleeing BRIET for years. In a 2022 story about an $8 billion dip in the firm’s market capitalization, Reuters described an investor situation that makes the hotel sales seem inevitable: 

​​For any investment fund that takes money from investors to plow into hard-to-sell assets like property, the ultimate fear is that clients all ask for their cash back at once. If a fund can’t meet the withdrawals from cash or more liquid assets, it would have to offload investments at fire-sale prices to get money as quickly as possible, leading to a vicious feedback loop.

An entity like the Economic Development Coordinating Council would have been wise to pay attention to this. (WPI certainly was.) But, when word of the sale got out, they described being blindsided by it. And now, after the ink has dried, it appears we have another week-long news cycle of “political and business leaders” throwing hissy fits. 

On Tuesday, the Worcester Guardian (the unofficial mouthpiece for the Chamber of Commerce) put up a story headlined “Council to WPI: 'Just because you can doesn't mean you should.” 

The Telegram had its own version:  “'Pockets picked': WPI deal sparks calls to reevaluate city's relationship with colleges.” 

"The number of years I've been on the council, I think this might be the biggest example of getting our pockets picked," Councilor-at-Large Morris Bergman said.

Dramatic! 

Chamber of Commerce President Tim Murray took the messy drama even further, sending a letter directly to MassDevelopment, a state agency that facilitated the hotel sale with a $26 million loan to WPI. Per the Telegram:

Murray wrote "very few" in Worcester believe MassDevelopment's funding of the acquisition meets the agency's stated goals of stimulating business, driving economic growth and helping communities thrive.

Very few people, folks! Very few.

To avoid repeating myself too much, here’s a Worcester Sucks WPI-gate reading list:

Aug. 23 | The EDCC goes to war with WPI 

Aug. 25 | A brief history of the EDCC 

Sept. 1  | A willing party to the hedge fund behind the gown 

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Odds and ends

One more subscriber pitch for the road—if you made it this far you must like what you’re reading!

There’s an open letter put together by local BIPOC-led organizations addressing the concerns over the city’s dismemberment of ARPA money. I signed on, and so should you! Coincidentally, I’m sure, City Manager Eric Batista wrote a Substack post about how he’s spending ARPA money really well actually. And also did an episode of The Buzz about it.

Not that it’s of any consequence but it was extremely funny to read that Kate Toomey made this motion at the last city council meeting: 

We really are a completely ridiculous, cartoon city. Reading the above portion of the meeting minutes, after spending a few weeks away, rekindled that core observation—our baseline make-believe absurdity—like a strong wind on morning embers.

Relatedly, Eric Batista has been tapped to serve on the MassDOT board of directors for some reason. 

Natale Cosenza’s wrongful conviction case against the WPD, which he already won, is heading to federal appeals court because the cops refuse to pay him. 

The first class of the WooSox hall of fame includes not one baseball player, just the people responsible for a 10,000 seat stadium that cannot host concerts because of design flaws. 

A weird one: A public health official at city hall wants the Worcester Public Schools to use a VR school shooter simulator to train fifth graders. What? Like... what?! The WPS politely declined to take Dr. Hirsh up on his ridiculous idea, as they should. 

If you have $2,100 a month you can rent this 375 square foot house on Coburn Ave, per MassLive. 

 It has an “upper area with 94 square feet of living space.” What is this, a center for ants? Just a few years ago $2,100 got you the nicest three bedroom in the neighborhood. And now... this. We’re so fucked. 

And lastly here’s a traditional Irish folk song I heard on the radio over there that blew my mind. 

Got even more powerful when I looked up a translation of the lyrics.

I have not slept / Since the moon lit the heavens last night / Just setting the fire /And stroking the ember to light

The household's retired / And I am left here to sigh / The roosters are crowing / All the world is asleep barring I

1. While we were in London, Katie snagged this book for me from a used bookstore on the strength of the title. “It sounds like what you write about,” I remember her saying. Thank you, Katie!! What a find. It is extremely good.