The Combat Zone Chase

In the small hours of 16 November 1976, after the Harvard football team 'broke training' with a dinner at the Harvard Club, groups of players wandered into the Combat Zone, Boston's downtown strip of bars. Two women on the street were suspected of lifting teammate Charlie Kaye's wallet, and the students gave chase. Three local men stepped in: Richard Allen, a bouncer, blocked the students' path; Edward Soares knocked one of them, Stephen Saxon, to the pavement on Tremont Street; and Leon Easterling ran up with a knife and stabbed player Thomas Lincoln. The students retreated to their van, but the brawl flared again. Senior Andrew Puopolo was grappling with Soares beside the van when Easterling drove the knife into his chest. Puopolo died on 17 December 1976 after a month in a coma. All three men were tried together in Suffolk Superior Court for first-degree murder; the Commonwealth's theory was a joint enterprise, with Soares and Allen as abettors who knew Easterling carried a knife. The prosecutor used 44 of his 48 peremptory strikes, removing 12 of the 13 Black people in the jury pool but only 32 of 94 white ones; the defence objected each time and asked for a hearing, which the judge refused. A jury with a single Black member, who became its foreman, convicted all three of first-degree murder, carrying mandatory life.