With McHugh waiting outside, Velez and Donovan entered the convenience store. Donovan had enough marijuana on him for a blunt, so — in addition to a fistful of ice for his swollen hand and a pack of cigarettes — he bought a loose cigar to gut and stuff. Velez didn't buy anything, but took a handful of napkins off the counter.
Back outside, the three perps, still in search of beer, walked toward Kenmore Square on upper Newbury Street. Three blocks down, Donovan ducked onto Kenmore Street to relieve himself while the other two waited. When he re-emerged, Donovan found McHugh wiping down his bloody knife with napkins that Velez had grabbed at the Li'l Peach.
It was then, Donovan claims, that he first realized they could all be in serious trouble. Donovan asked McHugh if he had stabbed someone while he was urinating. At that moment, McHugh told the others that he chased Donovan's sucker punch with a lethal shanking, and that he'd done it "just to see what it was like to watch somebody die."
Looking back, says Donovan, "At this point I'm thinking he's sick in the head, and I told him to give me the knife. It was a crazy knife, like something you would see on a crazy redneck hunting show. Right then, I realized that he stabbed someone, and right after that the cops started coming, but I still didn't think that I was in much trouble for anything besides punching someone."
As Donovan pleaded with McHugh to get rid of the knife (even suggesting that he chuck it onto the shoulder of I-90), he heard Velez shout, "Paddy wagon," prompting McHugh to stash the weapon behind the wheel of a nearby car. At 10:12 pm, two Boston University police officers approached the three boys, holding their guns with shaky hands. Within minutes of McHugh, Velez, and Donovan being handcuffed and placed in squad cars, Raustein succumbed to his injuries at Massachusetts General Hospital. His last words, spoken at the murder scene, were: "They took my wallet."
FALLING STAR Yngve Raustein was walking along a stretch of Memorial Drive near MIT with a friend in September 1992 when he bumped into three young men from East Cambridge. Minutes later, he was beaten, robbed, and fatally wounded.
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TOWNS AND GOWNSThe weekend after Raustein's murder, doors around Cambridge were being locked and nooses were being measured. Students told reporters they were scared to walk on campus; MIT leaders exacerbated fears by warning people to avoid the area after dark; some activists petitioned administrators to increase lighting along Memorial Drive, while one student wrote a letter to the MIT newspaper, the Tech, asserting that the campus gun ban ought to be lifted. To make matters worse, in an unrelated incident two days after Raustein's murder, a 30-year-old Roxbury man was arrested for striking an 18-year-old MIT freshman with a radio in an attempt to rob her.
