Samuel Pineda-Albizures, 38, a Hispanic/Latino male, was shot in the early minutes of October 20, 2017, on Geneva Avenue near Westville Street in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. Officers from District C-11 responded to reports of a shooting at 417 Geneva Avenue shortly after midnight and found a man in his late thirties on the sidewalk with an apparent gunshot wound. He was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Reports at the time indicated the gunfire erupted around 12:22 a.m., with witnesses noting multiple shots in the quiet hours before dawn.
The location—Geneva Avenue at Westville Street—was identified in police and local news accounts as the focal point of the attack, a stretch of Dorchester where the night briefly fractured into sirens and floodlights as investigators worked the scene. The Boston Police Department later listed the case among its 2017 unsolved homicides, confirming the victim’s age and the ruling of homicide by the medical examiner. No arrests were announced, and authorities continued to seek information from the public about the shooter or shooters.
In the days that followed, brief notices and neighborhood alerts sketched the same stark outline: a man in his thirties, felled by gunfire on a Dorchester sidewalk, the investigation active but silent about suspects. Community posts echoed the police call for tips, and subsequent roundups of the year’s killings preserved the particulars—time, place, and manner—without adding names of any suspects. Years later, the absence of an arrest remains the most telling detail, leaving the case open on the department’s roster and the unanswered questions lingering over that corner of Geneva Avenue.
