A FURTHER EXAMPLE of the disparate treatment by law enforcement of cases involving victims of color and White people, or an innocent misunderstanding in the heat of the moment? Those are the dueling accounts of an encounter this week between Boston police and advocates for an East Boston woman who has been missing since late November.
Reina Morales Rojas was seen getting into a van in East Boston on November 26 and later getting dropped off in Somerville. The 41-year-old native of El Salvador hasn’t been heard from since.
Boston Globe columnist Marcela Garcia wrote earlier this week that Morales Rojas’s boyfriend and landlord reported her missing to police in late November. The Boston Police Department did not go public with news of her disappearance, however, until January 12.
The delay has prompted strong criticism from advocates for the immigrant community, particularly in light of the wall-to-wall coverage of the case of Ana Walshe, a white woman living in wealthy Cohasset, who went missing on New Year’s Day and whose case was publicized within days of her disappearance.
On Tuesday night, Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts, an Everett-based advocacy group, organized a vigil outside the East Boston district police station calling for more aggressive action in trying to find Morales Rojas.
On Wednesday, the leader of the group and a representative of El Salvador were scheduled to meet with police at the station to discuss their concerns and hear directly about the status of the investigation. That morning, LUMA executive director Lucy Pineda reached out to Lawyers for Civil Rights to see whether the group could have an attorney accompany them to the meeting. But when two Spanish-speaking lawyers from the organization showed up with Pineda for the 2 p.m. meeting, police balked at holding the session with the attorneys there, said Ivan Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of Lawyers for Civil Rights.
“BPD threatened to cancel the meeting if LUMA insisted on having counsel and barred our lawyers from the meeting,” he said.
Espinoza-Madrigal said LUMA leaders were wary of going into the meeting without a lawyer who understands the issues involved in a missing person case.
“They were afraid of meeting with the police department about a high-profile matter where there is a serious imbalance of power, where immigrants and people of color from a low-income community are meeting with law enforcement officials who are often not the most accessible and community-oriented, at least from the perspective of our clients,” said Espinoza-Madrigal.
The meeting took place without the attorneys from Lawyers for Civil Rights, but Espinoza-Madrigal immediately reached out to City Hall and said he spoke directly with Mayor Michelle Wu on Wednesday afternoon.
“The mayor expressed that a reset would be in the interest of resolving Reina’s disappearance and we quickly determined that a follow-up meeting [with police] with counsel present would be the appropriate next step to keep the investigation focused on Reina’s disappearance and to make sure that the community could help law enforcement officials in this effort,” said Espinoza-Madrigal.
That meeting has not yet been scheduled, but Espinoza-Madrigal said he anticipates setting a date soon.
For its part, the police department acknowledged that it could have publicized Morales Rojas’s disappearance sooner.
“The Boston Police Department is actively working to find Ms. Morales Rojas and has been since she was reported missing on November 28th,” said Mariellen Burns, a spokeswoman for the department. “We have been in regular contact with her family, and we are working closely with other jurisdictions, including Somerville where Ms. Morales Rojas was last seen. We have shared information and photos of her widely with other law enforcement agencies. In our focused efforts to identify her whereabouts, our investigative team regrettably did not share her information publicly until January 12th. However, since then, we have unfortunately not had any successful leads.”
Burns did not directly explain why the attorneys from Lawyers for Civil Rights were shut out of Wednesday’s meeting, but suggested it was because no one at the meeting was the subject of investigation.
“A meeting with BPD was requested by LUMA to have an informal conversation with the executive director of LUMA and the Consul General of El Salvador, and that meeting took place on Wednesday,” Burns said. “Boston Police agreed to have this conversation to answer questions. No one was brought in for questioning or as party to an investigation. Due to any misunderstanding, a follow up meeting will be held with Lawyers for Civil Rights.”
