Kathryn Costello was getting ready to run some errands last week when her adult daughter, Rachel, told her there was a police roadblock just down the street from their home on Finn Road. She had been out walking the family’s dog, and as she was coming back, she met a police officer. “Go home and stay inside,” Rachel said the officer told her.
Police were searching for a man who had fled from the Boxborough Regency Hotel after assaulting a woman who worked there. The search on Tuesday, Sept. 5, brought state police and local officers from many nearby towns, including canine teams, drones, boats, and helicopters, to the area in and around the Delaney Wildlife Management Area.
Costello told the Press she abandoned her plan for errands, but she could not stay inside. Her 22-year-old son had gone out running and had not yet come home. She feared for his safety. She and Rachel each took a car to look for him, and the two women drove off in different directions, staying in touch on their cellphones. Rachel soon found her way blocked by another police roadblock.
After driving around for perhaps 20 minutes, Kathryn was on Hillcrest Drive when a man tried to flag her down. He matched the police description of the fugitive—bearded, in his 50s. And, oddly, he had wrapped himself in a tarp. Still on the phone with her daughter, Kathryn told her to alert the police at the roadblock about the man on Hillcrest.
Harvard officers and state police arrived quickly and took the man into custody. Kathryn drove a little farther up Hillcrest and saw her son heading toward her. As they started home together, they passed more police on Finn Road and alerted them as well. They saw the two police cars from Finn Road, along with seven or eight police cars coming from the other direction, all approaching Hillcrest, where the man was taken into custody.
The manhunt was over. It was sometime after 5:30 p.m., and the search had lasted about two hours. Boxborough police took the suspect to a hospital for a mental health evaluation, under the provisions of Title XVII, Ch. 123, Section 12 of Massachusetts General Laws; no further information has been released.
‘It was unsettling’
Meanwhile, neighbors on Stow, Finn, and Eldridge roads had been watching the police cruisers gathering and helicopters hovering. Andra Athos learned about the manhunt while on her way home to Finn Road. She asked a state police officer what was happening, and he explained about the fugitive. Knowing her house had been empty all afternoon, Athos asked, “Could he be in my house?” The officer reassured her that the man had recently been spotted outdoors. “Go inside and lock the doors,” he told her. And she did. “It was unsettling,” she said.
Text messages, posts on the social media site Nextdoor, and emails had been flying, as people asked one another what was happening: “Must be a search.” “They are looking for a guy.” Athos said she began to get messages from friends asking if she was all right. Word spread fast and far. Athos even got a message from Harvard resident Heidi Siegrist, who was then traveling in France.
People who thought to check the Harvard Police Department’s Facebook page had seen a statement about the search and a warning: “Please avoid the area.” On Nextdoor, some residents of Harvard and Boxborough wondered why their towns had not used the Blackboard Connect service or the reverse 911 call system to let people know what was going on.
In a later email to the Press, Police Chief James Babu said time had been the problem: “The situation was very fluid, and we were moving from one area to another. I was in the woods searching, and we did not have the time to do a reverse 911.”
Another question that arose in the wake of the incident was communication with the schools. Bromfield students had already been dismissed at 2:40 p.m., before the incident began. Children at Hildreth Elementary School, however, were dismissed at 3:30 p.m., almost the same time that residents texted they saw police cars heading down Stow Road. One mother who lives on Stow Road said she got a text about the search while in the pickup line at HES, so she took her children to the library instead of home.
Asked if school administrators had been informed of the police activity, Superintendent Linda Dwight replied in an email, “The school leaders were not contacted, so we did not take any action with dismissal. I have been in contact with Chief Babu since, and they will add contacting us to their protocol going forward.” At the next School Committee meeting, Dwight said in her report that if she had been informed, she would have had Bus 1 return to the school and asked parents to pick up their children there. Part of Bus 1’s route covers Stow and Finn roads and Hillcrest Drive.
‘Areas we can improve on’
The police chief confirmed the schools would be notified in the future. Babu wrote, “[As] part of our after-action assessment, we found areas … that we can improve on. … We will also notify the school in the future.”
Babu said the search focused on the Boxborough side of the town line at first, even while a perimeter was being set up in Harvard as well. The hunt shifted to Harvard a little later, after another sighting of the suspect. Babu placed the time of the main search within Harvard between 4:30 p.m. and 6 p.m., so he said there was no contact between the school buses and the roadblocks.
“There are lots of moving parts,” Babu wrote, “but we have to understand that we only have a very limited amount of staff to do everything as well.”
