Menino urges end to late-night parties

BOSTON — An argument at an after-hours party last weekend erupted in gunfire, killing a woman and prompting the mayor to call for an end to the late-night parties.

“It’s crazy. It’s nuts,” Mayor Thomas Menino told the Boston Globe. “We know all those parties bring bad events in our city. They always end up in some kind of violence.”

Chiara Levin, 22, was shot in the head and pronounced dead at about 4 a.m. on March 24, police said. No arrests had been made as of Tuesday night.

Levin, who recently moved to New York City, was in Boston to celebrate a relative’s birthday. She left a bar when it closed at 2 a.m. Saturday with two friends and went with a larger group to an after-hours house party in a high-crime area of the city’s Dorchester neighborhood.

She was in a car getting ready to leave when the gunfire started.

There were five or six shots, a neighbor, Jocelyn Duran, 39, told the New York Daily News.

“I looked out the window and there were two black cars,” she said. “A guy was screaming, ‘Go, go, go!’ and the two cars sped off in different directions.”

Levin’s friends took her to Boston Medical Center, where police were called at about 3:58 a.m. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said there was a significant lapse in time between the shooting and when Levin arrived at the hospital.

Levin’s closest friend, Robyn Sussman, told the Daily News she spoke with both people who had been in the car with Levin the night of the shooting. She said they had tried to get her to a hospital right away.

“These are good kids, good friends of hers, much more upset than we could be because they saw it happen,” Sussman said.

Menino said police had recently increased street patrols in the neighborhood where Levin was shot. He didn’t offer a plan for putting an end to the parties.

Levin had grown up in the small Kentucky town of Danville, where she was the valedictorian of her high school.

“She was such a terrific human being, struck down in her prime,” said Angela Johnson, Levin’s principal at Danville High School. “We looked forward to seeing what she was going to accomplish, and it’s just not to be.”

(Associated Press)