The ganged-up former dean of Boston English High School who shot a 17-year-old student who was dealing weed for him in the school but refused to join the Almighty Latin Kings and Queens gang was sentenced to more than 18 years in federal prison for racketeering.
“I just feel, like, he tried to kill me for the simple fact that I, you know, didn’t want to become a gang member, and I didn’t want to follow those — the track of what he was doing, so he thought that it was just better off to kill me because I knew too much,” victim Luis Angel Rodriguez said in his deposition, describing the night on March 5, 2015.
That’s the night Shaun “Rev” Harrison, now 63, pulled out a Ruger pistol and shot a .380 caliber bullet into the back of Rodriguez’s head outside a Sunoco gas station on Massachusetts Avenue after a conversation about slumping marijuana sales.
Harrison had left Rodriguez for dead. Thankfully, as U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin wrote in August, the bullet had missed Rodriguez’s brain stem and carotid artery by two centimeters and “Rodriguez survived through a combination of gritty determination … and good fortune.”
Rodriguez plugged the bullet hole with some fingers to staunch the bleeding, court docs detail, and then dragged himself off the snowy sidewalk, hailed a passing cab and offered up one word through his shattered jaw to seal Harrison’s fate: “Rev.”
That’s the name Harrison had earned from his students for a pastor-like demeanor in the two months before his arrest for attempted murder, according to court records.
He was sentenced for the charge to 26 years in state prison in June 2018.
“You professed to be a man of religion, you promote yourself as one who can mentor troubled youth,” Suffolk Superior Court Judge Christopher Muse said at the sentencing, “and yet you violated their safety by bringing drugs and violence to them.”
But that wasn’t all. The feds had a word to say about this practice of recruiting gang members from the high schoolers he was supposed to be a role model for.
He pleaded guilty to anti-corruption law conspiracy charges, commonly called RICO charges, in federal court last August as the 60th and final defendant in a massive criminal case that also netted the likes of Wilson “King Dub” Peguero, who went from leading the DK5 chapter of the Kings to a sentence of 30 months on RICO charges and Alexis “King Lexi” Peguero, who was second in command of the same unit got 21 months.
On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel sentenced Harrison to 218 months, which is 18 years and two months, in federal prison — which started that day and is to run concurrent with his state sentence.
The bullet is still lodged in Rodriguez’s head and his life is burdened by the injury and the life-long conditions they carry, including partial facial paralysis and hearing loss. He has to use weights for his eyelids to open and close, as the Herald previously reported, and has at times been addicted to the opiates he was prescribed for the pain.
Last August, Judge Sorokin ordered Harrison to pay more than $10 million for the pain, trauma and medical bills his actions caused.
“His efforts to overcome emotional trauma and addiction and addiction caused by this incident have been nothing short of heroic,” his attorney John Martin told the Herald in August. “And he strives every day to be a positive influence on his community.”