A community meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday to talk about a weekend shooting that killed Xavier Bautista, a 32-year-old Cambridge resident and a Public Works employee. It was the year’s third gunfire incident.
Representatives from the offices of the mayor, city manager, police department, City Council and Middlesex District Attorney’s Office, along with public health providers, will be available from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the Citywide Senior Center, 806 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square to share information, resources, answer questions and provide support, officials said in a Monday email.
Food and light refreshments will be available starting at 6 p.m.
The most recent community meeting addressing a violent incident was May 19, a week after the second gunfire incident of the year: a May 11 gun battle on Memorial Drive. In that incident, a parolee in emotional distress brought an illegally obtained AK-47 assault rifle to the heavily populated area of 808 and 812 Memorial Drive in the Riverside neighborhood.
Residents at the meeting said eight days after an attack is too long to wait. “That feedback is heard,” city manager Yi-An Huang told them. “For all traumatized, a week later is unacceptable. I totally feel that, and I empathize with it.”
He noted at the time that “in the immediate aftermath of an event, there’s often not very much to share.”
Bautista was shot at 4:30 a.m. Saturday at Broadway and Norfolk Street in The Port neighborhood, police and district attorney Marian Ryan said. The body lay there until a 911 call alerted police at 5:26 a.m., police said. Scanner reports show first responders were on the scene just one minute later, but Bautista was dead when they arrived, and declared so at 5:33 a.m.
Cambridge’s police unions said the shutdown of ShotSpotter gunfire-listening technology, which was voted by city councillors May 18, may have contributed to the death of Bautista by making him wait for help. The technology has also been known to have missed gunfire incidents in the dozen-plus years it was active.
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