The Fixer

33

Rick sat in his car-a Ford Taurus rented from Enterprise Rent-A-Car in Central Square-in the Globe parking lot and read through Monica’s file. It was thin, a collection of scrawled notes on scraps of yellow legal pad paper and pink While You Were Out phone message slips and photocopies of documents like the Boston police report on the accident. Her handwriting was atrocious. It took him a few minutes of studying the hieroglyphics before he was able to decrypt it. She’d done interviews with neighbors of the dead family, a schoolteacher who’d taught the fourteen-year-old daughter, and sources in the Boston police. Somehow she’d put together an article about the death of an immigrant family from the Dominican Republic in a terrible accident in the brand-new tunnel.

One of the clips in the file was a Globe Metro desk dispatch on the accident, the first report to hit the paper, a day after it happened. The article was only a paragraph long and was by a junior Metro desk correspondent Rick knew, a woman who’d accepted a buyout and left the Globe some years ago to write a novel but hadn’t met with much success.

JAMAICA PLAIN FAMILY DEAD IN TUNNEL CRASH

By Akila Subramanian

Globe Correspondent

A Jamaica Plain family of three was killed in a single-vehicle collision in the Ted Williams Tunnel at about 2:15 a.m. on Monday, according to police. The driver, Oscar Cabrera, 36, of Hyde Square in Boston, was killed along with his wife, Dolores, 35, and their 14-year-old daughter Graciela. The cause of the crash was not immediately released. Speed did not appear to be a factor in the accident, police said.

That was all at first. The plain facts, but not too many of them.

Then Rick could see in Monica’s notes her attempts to come up with some sort of investigative angle.

CRASH HOW?? was written in big letters on a yellow lined page ripped from a legal pad covered with doodles (mostly bad drawings of horses) and various phone numbers and phrases like traffic signals? and Lane markings??? Next to that: SINGLE CAR COLLISION-wall? Drunk? Scrawled in her crabbed script on a While You Were Out message was suspected DUI pending BAC. That meant that the police were speculating the accident had been caused by drunk driving but they’d know for sure when the blood alcohol levels came back in the pathology report.

As he parsed her other scribblings, it became evident that Monica was stumped trying to figure out how a car could have crashed in the tunnel without hitting another vehicle. Was the accident caused by something in the tunnel? Some problem with the lane markings or the traffic patterns? A concrete stanchion placed where it shouldn’t have been? But her interviews had apparently turned up nothing.

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.