Massachusetts’ Attorney General Andrea Campbell said that her neighbor who was busted last week for allegedly dealing meth and fentanyl had been terrorizing the neighborhood for years.
“As you all know, I live in Mattapan and there was a recent Herald article about a bust of some trafficking of meth and fentanyl,” Campbell said at the outset of her interview on WGBH Tuesday morning. “It is a major public safety hazard for my family, for my husband, my kids and for the whole neighborhood. The sad part is it’s been a problem property in the city for probably over four years.”
Campbell had declined to comment for the initial Herald article but said Tuesday that Kemar Barcley, 31, had “illegally” moved into the house of her neighbor, Helen, an “elder Irish woman who lived in Mattapan probably close to 50 years,” after she had died during the COVID pandemic. The Herald had erroneously reported that Barcley lived two doors down from, and not right next door to, Campbell due to confusion over the street’s house numbering system.
Barcley was arrested and charged Wednesday on three charges of trafficking Class A and Class B drugs, namely crystal methamphetamine and fentanyl. The bust came after a multi-week investigation by the Massachusetts State Police that included controlled purchases that, according to the police report, amounted to a total of 45.5 grams of crystal and three pressed pills of fentanyl. During the arrest, two other men were charged with drug-related offenses.
Campbell’s Tuesday interview stressed that Campbell, even with the power inherent in her former position as a Boston city councilor and then a year as attorney general — the state’s top law enforcement officer — wasn’t enough to get her neighborhood’s problem taken care of.
“At one point one individual did wave to me and I thought, ‘The audacity!’” Campbell said, scoring a laugh with the Boston Public Library crowd. “There are several communities, not just in Boston but across the commonwealth, that deal with this level of crime, and I’m really proud to work with a great state police unit, in partnership with local law enforcement, to get drugs and guns off the street but of course want to do that in my same neighborhood.”
She said she’s been pushing city agencies, including the Boston Housing Authority, the owner, she said, of the building where Barcley legally lives, to take a more proactive approach toward crimes like these.
“We cannot always be reactive. We have to be proactive. And one way to be proactive is when someone is living in a neighborhood and they’re seeing certain things … We need to look into that, and we tend to wait for something horrific to happen,” Campbell said.
“You get the speed humps only after some person gets hit by a car. You get the enforcement action only after someone has trafficked meth in your community,” she added. “So I think for me, as someone who wants to get things done and not point fingers, this is unacceptable.”