At around 9:40 PM on Thursday, May 23rd, gunshots were heard in Donnelly Field, the park right behind Cambridge Street Upper School. According to a statement released by Cambridge police, two victims were wounded, and while one suspect, Yonayvi Cruceta, 23, was charged and arrested, the investigation is still ongoing.
On May 30th at a Community Safety meeting on the matter, City Councilor Burhan Azeem, who lives across from the field, reported that there were around two dozen young adults between the ages of 18 and 22 on the basketball courts that Thursday. These nighttime games are a regular occurrence, with Ben, a father at the meeting, stating that his nine-year-old son was playing baseball on the field an hour before the shooting. “I patched up the bullet hole that came into our triple-decker a couple days ago with wood filler,” Ben said. Now, his home is constantly surrounded by police. “The blue light coming in our windows doesn’t make me feel safe. It just reminds me that I’m in a crime scene,” he told officers at the meeting.
For many in the neighborhood, the shooting has shaken their previous sense of security. “Donnelly Field was always a safe place where people hang out and where kids go to the park in the summer,” Anita Gibbs, a decades-long resident of the area, said during the meeting. “I was shocked about the Donnelly Field shooting. I am very concerned with the youths.” Azeem echoed her sentiments, describing how he watched one young man wrap his shirt around his wounded friend’s leg to stop the bleeding. “It was scary,” he said. Beyond the counselor, influential members from around Cambridge were at the meeting, including Mayor Denise Simmons and City Manager Yi-An Huang, who made some opening and closing remarks. “I was here to support the community,” School Committee member David Weinstein, another attendee, told the Register Forum.
While the listening ears were appreciated, police actions were less welcome. Cambridge officers’ intense response created some discomfort, with one mother reporting that police racially profiled her son, who was outside at the time, but not related to the incident. “A police officer approached him and said that he looked suspicious,” she stated at the meeting. “What made him look suspicious? Skin color? That was very upsetting to me as a mother — my son was detained, handcuffed, thrown up against a car, and for what, because he was outside.”
Police Commissioner Christine Elow promised to follow up with the mother, as well as turn down the blue lights. As for the more distant future, Elow hopes to increase preventative measures by focusing on programs that connect with young adults, who can disconnect from the Cambridge community after graduating high school. Shade, a youth organization aiming to build a teen-hangout structure at Donnelly Field, is taking a similar approach. “There’s really not a lot of places in Cambridge for teens to go to, especially at a certain time,” intern Cheryl Rateau ’25 told the Register Forum. “We want Donnelly Field to be a safer place.”
