In the early morning hours of April 28, 2003, a night out in Boston's Chinatown took a fatal turn for 22-year-old Jose DaVeiga. After leaving a nightclub around 2:30 a.m. with his friends, Christopher Carvalho and Jonathan DaSilva, they were ambushed in the South End. As DaSilva drove their Ford Taurus, they stopped at a red light at the intersection of Albany and East Berkeley streets, unknowingly placing themselves in the path of violence.
Gunmen in two other vehicles, a Honda and a Dodge minivan, opened fire on their car.
DaVeiga was struck three times and succumbed to his injuries shortly after arriving at Boston Medical Center. Carvalho was also critically wounded, shot in the eye and neck. The hail of bullets caused DaSilva to crash the car into a parked vehicle on East Berkeley Street. The assailants in the minivan then opened fire again on the disabled car. Carvalho survived the initial attack but was left paralyzed from the neck down and blind in one eye. He required constant medical care and relied on a machine to breathe until he died in 2007 from pneumonia that his body, weakened by the paralysis, could not fight off.
The investigation that followed identified several suspects. Authorities determined that a group of men who had been at the same nightclub targeted DaVeiga and his friends, believing them to be rivals. The investigation led to the arrest of Odair Fernandes, who was identified as one of the shooters. In 2006, he was convicted of first-degree murder and armed assault with intent to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The drivers of the getaway vehicles, Carlos Silva and Daniel Fernandes, were also identified and initially charged as accessories. However, they both fled before they were scheduled to testify against the other suspected gunmen, which led to charges against two other men being dropped. After years on the run, both Silva and Daniel Fernandes were eventually apprehended. Daniel Fernandes turned himself in and received a 10-year prison sentence. Carlos Silva was captured in 2015 after nearly a decade as a fugitive living under false identities and pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact to murder.
