Posted on 10/01/2007 6:47:14 AM PDT by raccoonradio
There are times, Bob Curley admits, when it’s hard to keep from focusing on dark thoughts, and today will be one of them because this is the 10th anniversary of his boy’s horrific death.
“I’ll see kids who were his friends, all grown up, and wonder, what would he have been like now? He’d be 20; maybe he’d be in the military. Who knows? I can’t help thinking about things like that.”
Jeffrey Curley, 10, was walking home from his grandmother’s house the day two homosexual lovers who were predatory pedophiles lured him into their car with the promise of $50 and a new bicycle.
As subsequent details emerged, they enraged the populace.
After attempting to fend off his attackers, Jeff was suffocated by them and taken to an apartment where one molested his dead body. Investigators later found those rooms strewn with photographs and literature depicting men having sex with young boys.
The corpse was placed in a plastic trunk, filled with concrete and lime, sealed with duct tape, then dumped into the Great Works River in Maine where it was discovered a week later.
“I remember the day we buried him,” Curley, 52, said. “The limo was taking us through Harvard Square and when I saw kids playing soccer on the common it upset me, like, how could anyone be playing games at a time like that? I was pretty messed up, and it got worse.”
A mechanic for the Cambridge Fire Department, he couldn’t shake the memory of his final moments with his son.
“His brother Shaun had just gotten his license,” he recalled. “He had an old junkbox car sitting in the yard. So I came over from work, bringing a container of gasoline. We were going to pour it into the carburetor to get it going.
“I asked Jeff to get a small cup. When he came back I began lecturing him on how dangerous gasoline could be, and why it was so important to be careful. It was our last conversation and that’s how they killed him, smothering him with a rag soaked in gasoline. I thought about that for a long time.”
He also found himself beset by fears.
“I began expecting the worst, especially at work. The guys were really supportive, rallying around me. But I’d work on a truck, then go home and worry all night long that someone might get killed because something I did turned out wrong. There was a constant fear that bad things were going to happen again.”
As time went by he sought relief in drinking.
“That was never a problem before Jeff died,” he said. “But now it was getting to be a very big one. I was looking for a way to numb those pains and fears, to deal with the anger that kept building inside me, but things just got worse.”
At 6:30 one morning in the summer of 2005, when “I found myself sitting at the beach in South Boston with nowhere to go,” Curley picked up a paper and read about a 33-year-old Charlestown man, gifted and much loved, who drank himself to death.
“His name was Chris Mulligan,” he recalled. “As I began reading I thought, ‘Another rummy bites the dust.’ But by the end I was crying, telling myself it was time to look in the mirror. I never met Chris Mulligan, but I believe he saved my life.”
Curley has been sober ever since.
“Now, many of my memories are good ones. I’ll remember playing catch with him, or teaching him how to skate, or running along the river with him following me on his bike, doing wheelies, clowning around, saying, ‘Hey, Dad, how am I looking? I’m getting strong, huh?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, I can smell you over here.’ And he’d laugh. He had a great sense of humor. He was really a funny kid.”
Sometimes, however, it’s what happens to other people’s kids that stops Curley in his tracks.
“When Jeff died, there was so much media attention. It helped to know how much everyone cared. But now when I read of kids dying in the city there’s just a little mention about ‘a shooting in Dorchester.’
“That’s all. You never hear much more about them, and I’ll start feeling bad for those families whose hearts have been ripped out, the way ours were, wishing there was some way to tell them someone understands, someone cares.”
But on the whole, he says, he’s doing OK.
“I hear the word closure a lot. Anybody who’s been through something like this will tell you there is no such thing. Yes, things do get better; yes, you do move on.
“But it’s not as if you lost your pet or broke up with your girlfriend, then got over it. This is something you never get over. So you just have to find a way to manage it, knowing it’s going to be with you for the rest of your life.”
ah OK! I stand corrected.
A society that denies a father’s justice does not deserve to exist.
Correct.
Dear God, what a nightmare. I can’t imagine surviving it, except in the most technical sense of the term. It is The Unthinkable Thought.
“A prison guard called in a talk show to say that those 2 pervs are not doing easy time.”
***
Good. But I still say that all perverts, regardless of whether their victims are killed or alive, should be strung up by their gonads.
>>Defeated by Martha Coakley,
the 2 reasons she won: massive exposure on TV (just call
her Liveshot Coakley), and the
“D” next to her name. This is Massachusetts after all.
Globe, Sep 06: “Coakley’s office has recently handled a string of high-profile prosecutions, including the case against British national Neil Entwistle for allegedly murdering his wife and nine-month-old daughter.”
This is exactly why I boycott companies like Miller brewing and Ford. There are alot of people on here that say it isnt worth the time. But we must unite and do something. Everytime you purchase a product you are voting for a company. There are alternatives to everything out there and has become the lesser of two evils. I try to choose products from companies which dont support NAMBLA or the vehemently anti-Christian/antifamily (i.e. Miller Brewing, Kodak, Ford). I know its not much but other than voting for true conservatives (e.g. Tancredo or Hunter) what else can we do?
I beg to differ:
They should have faced Curley's father while he held a fully loaded Mossberg 835.
It should have been federal, but the Clinton DOJ dropped the ball.
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