Police commissioner: Witnesses to teen slaying must step up

BOSTON — Boston’s police commissioner on Thursday admonished students at a city high school for not coming forward with information about the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old classmate.

“Enough with this stop snitching stuff,” Commissioner William Evans said. “We’ve got a mother who lost her 17-year-old son. Step forward. Have some courage and solve this one.”

There have been no arrests in the brazen daylight shooting Wednesday outside a pizza parlor just down the street from Jeremiah Burke High School that left three other people injured: two other teens and a 67-year-old woman. Authorities have not released the victims’ names.

“We know there are students that know exactly what happened,” Evans said at the school as Mayor Marty Walsh and school Superintendent Tommy Chang looked on.

Evans said the shooting may have been sparked by some sort of earlier dispute, but it remains under investigation.

Students said they heard six or seven shots just after a fire alarm went off inside the school, but the shooting and alarm appear to be unconnected, Evans said.

Additional grief counselors have been brought into the school to help students cope, Chang said.

“Our job is to bring normalcy to this school today,” he said.

Victoria Johnson, a student at the school, said she was friends with the teen who was killed. She told WBZ-TV that she had just said goodbye to him.

“He just gave me a hug and said ‘stay safe.’ That’s what we say every day when we leave school,” Johnson said. “He gave me a hug and I said the same back to him.”