Her piece-the other clip in the folder-was a longer article that ran two days later. The coauthor was the reporter who originally caught the story, normal newspaper etiquette. There was no investigative angle to it, but you could tell Monica wanted one. The story, instead, was framed as one of those unfathomable tragedies that just happen from time to time.
TRAGEDY STRIKES IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY
By Monica Kennedy and Akila Subramanian
Globe Correspondents
She was a graceful dancer and talented beginning pianist with a quick smile who loved to help her mother cook.
Family and friends wept openly as they recalled Graciela Cabrera, the 14-year-old Hyde Square resident who was killed in the early hours of Monday morning along with both of her parents when the 1989 Toyota RAV4 driven by her father, Oscar Cabrera, 36, crashed in the Ted Williams Tunnel.
Oscar Cabrera, who worked as an engineer at the Colonnade Hotel in Boston, was remembered as a modest, self-effacing man always quick to volunteer to shovel snow or carry packages for friends and neighbors here in the close-knit Dominican community. Dolores, 35, was recalled as a loving wife and mother and a skilled beautician at Hair Again, a hair salon in Hyde Square. The young family had emigrated from the Dominican Republic 8 years previously.
The outpouring of grief in this working-class neighborhood was matched only by the puzzlement among friends and loved ones as to how this tragedy could have happened.
Authorities are trying to determine what caused Monday’s accident, which closed westbound tunnel traffic for hours until the mangled vehicle could be towed away. Preliminary investigations indicated that Cabrera’s Toyota sustained major damage in the tunnel, but that no other vehicle was involved.
“This is a great loss to the Dominican community,” said civic leader Gloria Antunes of the Hyde Square Community Partnership. “There are no words to express how sorry we are.”
Rick decided to drive over to Hyde Square in the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain and just start asking questions. Sometimes you could pick up details on the ground. His old boss at the Globe, a gruff editor who favored bow ties and boldly striped shirts with white contrasting collars, was always ordering his reporters to get out of their cubicles and get off their phones and their butts and start poking around. “Just showing up,” he liked to say, “is half of good reporting.”
It was time to show up.
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The area around Hyde Square in Jamaica Plain was Boston’s Latin quarter, with bodegas that sold mango puree and plantains, and shops advertising paycheck cashing and money orders. This stretch of Jamaica Plain had been largely German and Irish until the 1960s, when the Cubans and the Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans settled there and transformed it into Boston’s Hispanic area.
His first stop was the office of the Hyde Square Community Partnership, an organization, according to its website, dedicated to creating a safe and strong community, “the beating heart of Latino life in Boston.” It brought together local merchants and politicians and community leaders. Its founder and leader was Gloria Antunes. He’d underlined her name in the printout of Monica’s article. He figured that Antunes would be his best way into the neighborhood. The HSCP was located on the second floor of a building on the first floor of which was a variedades store. He went up the stairs and found a door marked with a HYDE SQUARE COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP sign and a sunburst logo. The door was unlocked.
Inside, sitting at a receptionist’s desk, was a large woman wearing oversize tinted glasses. Behind her an open door revealed an inner office where someone-presumably Gloria Antunes herself-sat behind a bigger desk, talking on the phone.
“May I help you, sir?” the receptionist said.
“I’m looking for Gloria Antunes.”
“Gloria?” she said, smiling broadly. “Of course. May I tell her what this is in reference to?”
He handed her one of his Back Bay magazine business cards. “My name is Rick Hoffman, and I wanted to talk to her about the Cabrera family.”
She was jotting down notes on a pad. “The Cabrera family… Will she know what this is about?”
“They’re the family that was killed in the Ted Williams Tunnel almost twenty years ago.”
“Yes, sir, one moment, please.”
The receptionist got up from her desk and went over to the inner office and knocked on the open door. Then she went inside. A moment later she emerged. “I’m sorry, sir, Gloria is tied up with appointments. Is there something I can help you with?”
“Not really, thanks. I just need to talk with her. It shouldn’t take more than a minute or two. May I-” and he approached Gloria Antunes’s office door.
“Sir, please wait here,” the receptionist protested.
“Ms. Antunes,” Rick said, “I just wanted to talk with you briefly about the Cabreras.” Doorstepping her this way was an aggressive-some would say obnoxious-move, but he knew when he was getting the runaround. Opportunity doesn’t knock, an old saying went; it shows up only when you beat down the door.
Gloria Antunes was a slim, elegant woman with short, curly salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a colorful silk scarf around her shoulders and large hoop earrings. She rose from her desk and said, “Yes, Mr. Hoffman, I got the message but I’m sorry, I have a full plate here. I just don’t have time to talk.”
“Understood. Can I grab five minutes of your time today or tomorrow? Shouldn’t take any more than that.”
She replied in an imperious tone, “Mr. Hoffman, what happened to the Cabreras was a terrible, heartbreaking thing, but I have nothing to contribute.”
“Would you be able to guide me toward any of their survivors?”
“Mr. Hoffman, I told you, I don’t have time to talk. Now, good day.”
Gloria Antunes’s hostility was puzzling. He’d expected a community leader like her to be welcoming, wanting to remember the dead. There was some reason she didn’t want to talk, and he needed to get to the bottom of it.
Within an hour Rick had located the rundown triple-decker house, not far from a behemoth brick housing project, where Oscar Cabrera and his wife and daughter had once lived on the second floor, according to the police report. He sat in his car outside the house, painted olive green, missing shingles, its cement porch steps crumbling. “Now what?” he said out loud to himself.
The family had died eighteen years ago. Maybe someone was around who remembered them and knew something about how they’d been killed. Dolores had worked at a hair salon that was located on Centre Street. He drove around, past a butcher shop called, cleverly, Meatland, an off-brand mobile phone store, and a Latino restaurant whose sign featured a palm tree and a cooked lobster. He found Hair Again salon. It was a “beauty center,” according to a sign in the window, “especializing in” perms, extensions, and highlights.
He asked the young woman at the front desk if anyone there remembered Dolores Cabrera. It took a while for him to be understood. Besides the language barrier, there was the strangeness of the query. But eventually the manager of the salon, an older woman with glossy black hair and high arched eyebrows, came out from the back. “Why you asking about Dolores Cabrera?” she demanded.
“I’m writing an article. Remembering them.”
The woman seemed to soften at once. “She was a sweet girl.”
“Did she or her husband leave any family?”
“Family? Yes, of course. Why?”
Five minutes later, Rick left the salon with one useful piece of information: Oscar Cabrera’s relatives still lived in the triple-decker where the young family had lived. He drove back there and rang the bell.