By 1990, of New Bedford’s nearly 100,000 residents, over 6,500 were Hispanic, mostly from Puerto Rico but also from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Central and South America.79 About 87 percent were white, including the many Irish, Welsh, German, Polish, French Canadian, Scotch, and Portuguese Americans who had migrated for work, hoping to leave poverty behind in their homelands.80 About 12 percent were self-described as black, meaning not only African Americans but also Cape Verdeans, Azoreans, and Pacific Islanders. The remainder included a small minority of Asians and Native Americans.81
Longtime residents became devoted to the city, as often happens in neighborhoods where associations seek to assist struggling citizens and help police rout out troublemakers. In 2011, a year after my first visit, I met Loretta Bourque, who at age ninety still ran a community group in her neighborhood. She bemoaned how even during the Great Depression, everyone in New Bedford got along better than they did in the 1990s.82 But like many who were born in the city, she had chosen to stay, believing in New Bedford’s potential. So, too, had Helena Marques, a Portuguese immigrant who grew up in the city and ultimately became executive director of the Immigrant Assistance Program, whose goal was to aid immigrants in adjusting to their new country.83 As a girl, she had once been picked on at Keith Middle School—the same school Karter attended—for being an immigrant.84 Marques was all too aware of how stereotyping unfolded. The city’s mocking nickname, “New Beige,” was a play on the way the town’s name supposedly sounded to the first Portuguese people who stepped foot in “New Beigeford.”
Ken Resendes, another leader of a local neighborhood group, said that in the era of Karter’s crime, tension flooded the city more than in later years.85 I met Resendes in a New Bedford Dunkin’ Donuts, and he talked about the historical separation of neighborhoods. He agreed with Karter that poverty was widespread in New Bedford, and that the North End had always been the safest neighborhood, claiming the newest and best-kept houses. In the South End, drugs had infested the streets. He drove me around that part of the city and pointed out old mills, restaurants, and churches that looked weathered and desolate. Suspicious fires at a small company had left several grass lots burned black, and boarded-up storefronts stood next door to falling-down businesses with names like Squeaky Clean Laundry. In infamous Weld Square, before an attempt at a cleanup, prostitutes mingled among the many elderly residents while kids played in the street.
The revitalization of New Bedford’s waterfront had begun in the years I visited, and a spring day meant the smell of the sea and the sound of seagulls overhead. The downtown wharf area would soon pulse with restaurants and nightlife. The city worked hard to preserve its historic buildings and advertised its actively growing seaport and shipping industry. But in 1993, the Whaling City’s renowned fishing industry had been decimated by drug use.86 According to Hans Schatte, a local journalist, part of the problem after the recession of the late 1980s was that the city government failed to develop a recovery plan.87 The Standard-Times ran Schatte’s long exposé calling for the need to educate the city’s residents and train them for a new job market. In the year of Karter’s crime, fewer than half the adults aged twenty-five years or older over had a high school diploma. Fewer than 9 percent had earned a bachelor’s degree, and most college graduates moved away. Fall River’s Bristol Community College would not develop a satellite campus in New Bedford until 2001, and for many residents the newly established Dartmouth campus of the University of Massachusetts was too expensive. According to Schatte’s article, New Bedford’s historical dependence on low-skilled jobs had “shredded” residents’ “ticket to the middle class.”88
This economic dead end showed up in the exodus of businesses from the area. Between 1985 and 1993, twenty major employers moved away: Goodyear Tires, Stride Rite Shoes, and Morse Cutting Tools, many having been offered tax incentives in other states or choosing to ship jobs overseas, where labor was cheaper.89 While Boston had developed over 445,000 jobs after the recession, in New Bedford the unemployment rate was more than twice what it was in state capital90—the tenth-highest in the nation.91 Without work and accessible educational opportunities, local populations suffered; poverty always lurked around the corner and crime was not far behind. Community members, barely scraping by, experienced rising levels of petty theft and aggravated assault, both attributed to the economy.92
From Karter’s letters and his parents, Sharon and Derek Reed, I learned about how he and his family fit into this picture.93 Sharon was a blend of Irish and Polish, while Derek was of Irish, Portuguese, and Native American descent. Karter’s father’s family had made its way to the “city of ships” from Tennessee, while his mother was born and raised in New Bedford. The couple first met in 1975, at a party. At nineteen, Derek, with his charismatic smile and lanky athleticism, was an obvious bad-boy type. He already had two children with one woman and a third on the way with another. He had done time for armed robbery, but he was not yet on hard drugs—that would happen after one of his best friends died suddenly by drowning, followed by the death of his mother.
Sharon, whose surname was coincidentally also Reed, grew up a few blocks from the Hillman Street house. She said that although she was just seventeen years old and knew that Derek was living with another woman in the projects, she ignored all the warning signs. He complimented everything about her, from her gazelle-like body to her long hair that fell in a sheet across her back. They began dating and, not long after, moved in together. Months later, on June 6, 1976, when Derek was twenty years old and Sharon seventeen, Karter was born. He was premature, weighing only 3.7 pounds. Both Sharon and Derek told me they adored their child. But Sharon had essentially grown up without a mother, and Derek without a father. Karter would later say that “although [his] mother and father did the best they could, they had no idea how to be parents.”
Despite the difficulties and the poverty, early on they were a happy family. Derek said Sharon was the best thing that ever happened to him, and Sharon believed her new husband would finally settle down. After Karter was born, their daughters Katie and Karla came along in 1979 and 1985. Derek found steady employment working the second shift for a rope company. He took Karter four-wheeling, advised troubled neighborhood kids who were motherless or fatherless, coached Little League, and took the family on occasional vacations. Karter said that everyone loved his parents: “If they knew you needed school clothes, they’d get them for you.”
Sadly, the good times wouldn’t last; by 1993, Derek was in prison, having been sentenced to eighteen to twenty years. He’d been busted near Cape Cod in 1991 after selling ten ounces of uncut cocaine to an undercover agent for $6,000. Sharon had thrown him out for the third and final time just before the arrest, determined to forget how he had once attacked and choked her, then beat the neighbor who responded to her cries for help. She was drinking a lot and had a new boyfriend, whom Karter hated. Aside from babysitting other people’s children, Sharon wasn’t working, and without Derek’s income—some of it coming from drugs—the family was on the edge of being evicted. Karter’s world was falling apart.
Then came April 12, 1993.
At 3:30 p.m. on Easter Sunday 1993, Gator Collet pulled up in his gray Hyundai and told Karter that their friend Nigel Thomas was going to fight Shawn Pina. Karter had known Gator since they were five, and the two had grown particularly close at Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School (known as the “Voke”), which they had both attended until recently. Before moving a few miles away to Dartmouth, Gator had lived right around the corner from Karter. The two were often mistaken for cousins, a fact that annoyed Karter when publicity about his crime later hit the newspapers.
Outwardly, the boys seemed fairly ordinary. With a few other neighborhood friends, they played street games and climbed trees. They first named themselves the “Bloodhounds” until they realized that bloodhounds were floppy-eared dogs and in no way ferocious. So they became “The Wrecking Crue,” after a Nintendo