JOHN RUCH
Police seek teenage suspect
HYDE SQ.—One boyfriend of a local woman was left shot to death and another boyfriend was being sought by police after a March 11 homicide inside 43 Mozart St. that authorities described as a domestic incident.
Shoughan Morgan, 32, of Boston was pronounced dead on the scene of the early-morning crime from a gun-shot wound to the chest, according to the Boston Police Department (BPD).
Gorio “Mikey” Lopez, 19, of Jamaica Plain is the suspected killer, according to BPD. A warrant was issued for his arrest, with police saying they consider him armed and dangerous.
Local landlord Christ Stamatos, who owns the apartment building at 39-43 Mozart, said the men’s mutual girlfriend is a tenant. It is unclear where Morgan or Lopez resided.
“It was a domestic situation where she was seeing two guys at the same time, and you can figure out the rest,” Stamatos said of his understanding of the crime.
Police say that Morgan, a former resident of the building, visited the girlfriend’s apartment at around 2 a.m. and got into an argument with her. Lopez also argued with Morgan, then left the building. Lopez re-turned a short time later and allegedly shot Morgan, according to BPD.
The day before he was killed, Morgan was scheduled to go on trial in Quincy on a charge of making a threat to commit a violent crime, according to David Traub, a spokesperson for the Norfolk County District Attorney’s Office. The case was dismissed without prejudice because the alleged victim, whose testimony was the only evidence, could not be located, Traub said.
Traub said he did not know the details of the threat case and declined to identify the alleged victim.
Morgan’s killing is the second reported homicide in JP this year. In January, a Roslindale man was gunned down on Centre Street, about 200 feet away from the scene of Morgan’s death.
The 39-43 Mozart building, near the John F. Kennedy Elementary School, was long known for crime and bad conditions until 2000, when the Stamatos family bought it and drew acclaim for fixing it up. Stamatos said he is not aware of any problem tenants since then.
BPD incident reports show some significant crime reports at the building in the past three years. They include alleged incidents of cocaine trafficking, counterfeiting, receiving stolen property and assault and
battery with a knife.
State Rep. Jeffrey Sánchez, who long lived nearby on Armstrong Street and remains the landlord of his former home, told the Gazette that the neighborhood remains a good one.
“The entire area was distressed for a long time,” he said when asked about 39-43 Mozart, noting that com-munity work has improved everything. “If you walk up and down the street on my street [Armstrong], they’ll tell you how happy they are there.”
Sánchez said he was in a “state of depression” over the killing, noting that, like so many homicides in recent times, it allegedly involved a young man. He noted the many active youth programs in the area, and wondered what more officials could do.
“That was pretty brazen, just pulling a gun and shooting,” he said.