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Tacary Jones, Friday, March 18

Tacary Jones’s father, Steven Gregory Jones of Mattapan, didn’t see his son often, but he drove Tacary to Jeremiah E. Burke High School the day he was shot to death on an MBTA bus in Dorchester. "He had gotten interested again in finishing school," Jones says of his son. "It seemed like maybe he had turned a corner." On the way home that afternoon, 17-year-old Tacary Jones was part of an altercation between two groups on the 19 bus as it moved down Columbia Road at 2:30. At the corner of Geneva Avenue, one of the young men pulled out a gun and shot Jones in the chest.

Jones, a junior at Burke, had a juvenile police record, and spent most of last year in detention with the Department of Youth Services. He had been back living with his mother and siblings on the corner of Bradlee and School Streets, in Dorchester, for less than two months when he died. He had a girlfriend, and his mother, Henrietta "Didi" Adger, believes that her son had matured and was trying to re-focus his life. Jones had recently purchased a brown Mazda, now parked beside the house, had a driving permit, and was in driving school working toward getting his license — which might have kept him away from confrontations on the bus, like the one that killed him.

"He wanted to be a construction worker," says Jones’s sister Tinea. He also wanted to make a CD — he rapped under the name "Black," a moniker his younger brother has now adopted in tribute.

In 2003, Jones was shot in the buttocks — allegedly by the same young man, 18-year-old Ivan Hodge, now accused of killing him.

Hodge was among the young men who fled the bus after the shooting, and one of two who were chased down by police near the scene. Hodge’s hat and jacket were found in a nearby back yard, along with a .38-caliber handgun, according to the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, which also says that Hodge matches eyewitness descriptions of the shooter.

However, in a strange twist, Hodge’s appointed attorney, John Cunha, has recused himself from the case. He says that he has personal information incriminating someone else in the shooting, making him a potential witness. The DA’s office stands by its accusation against Hodge.

Hodge’s younger brother, Terrell, was stabbed to death last April while waiting for a bus at Ruggles Station, allegedly by Darnell Delaney. Jones’s family has also suffered tragedy: in one of the city’s most disturbing murders, Jones’s 14-year-old cousin, Chauntae, was stabbed and buried alive.

Luis Barrows, Friday, March 18

Luis Barrows, 19, was heading to his grandmother’s house in Roxbury to have dinner with his family — including his mother, who was visiting for the first time since moving to Phoenix, Arizona, two years ago. Luis had stayed in Boston to graduate from South Boston High. He worked in a Dorchester nursing home along with his girlfriend.

That Saturday evening, Luis and his girlfriend got a ride to his grandmother’s house from his girlfriend’s cousin Nicole. On the way, they stopped at the Longfellow Street house, in Dorchester, where Barrows lived as a boarder — his first time living away from family. He had moved there a year earlier.

The three of them were in Nicole’s white Cadillac when the occupants of another car began shooting at them, hitting Nicole twice in the shoulder and putting five bullets into Barrows, who was in the back seat.

According to rumors making the rounds, Nicole was the intended target. She is supposedly dating Baltazar Depina, who is suspected in the January assassination of Cape Verdean Outlaw gang leader Joe Lopes in Revere.

Barrows himself is not Cape Verdean — his mother is Honduran — and had no history of criminal or violent behavior. "Of all the kids, he’s the one I never had to worry about," says his grandmother, Mary Barrows. A former ROTC member, he hoped to become a state trooper. He and his girlfriend took trips in the past year to Florida, and to see a play in New York City.

The Lopes-Depina conflict is allegedly part of a cycle of violence stretching back 10 years in the Cape Verdean community. Now, Barrows’s girlfriend worries that as a witness, she is caught up in it. A group of Cape Verdean men faced off with Barrows’s friends at the hospital the night of the murder, and his girlfriend says she is afraid to step outside her family’s Dorchester home.

Barrows’s family is distraught. His mother blames herself for moving to Phoenix without him, says his 77-year-old grandmother, who recently survived triple-bypass surgery. "There’s guilt flying all over," she says.

Richard Dever, Sunday, March 19

Richard T. Dever, a sergeant in the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, was off-duty at Charlestown’s Sullivan’s Pub — Sully’s, to locals — when Francis Xavier Lang allegedly tried to get a drink. The bartender told Lang, a long-time criminal, that he was not allowed in the bar. When Lang refused to leave, Dever apparently stepped in to help get Lang out the door.

What happened next is murky, but ended with Lang stabbing Dever several times, including once fatally in the chest. According to police, the stabbing took place outside on Main Street. Patrons helped bring Dever back inside the bar, and then out to his car, where his body was ultimately found by police.

Dever was well-liked among corrections officers and other law-enforcement personnel, who came out in large numbers for his funeral. "This thing is so overwhelming," says his father, William Dever. "We received over 120 gifts of flowers at the funeral.

Lang may well have crossed paths with Dever at some point at the Suffolk County House of Correction, where Dever worked during most of his 14 years with the sheriff’s department; Lang passed through the jail more than once. However, any encounter would have taken place several years ago, as Lang had only recently been released from federal prison, where he served four years.

Dever, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was raised in Dorchester and has family throughout the area. Lang has been arrested for the murder, and is expected to plead self-defense.