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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted at 6:33 p.m., Friday, April 22, 2005

Men sentenced to life for Boston murder

By Jay Lindsay
Associated Press

BOSTON — A judge today sentenced four men to mandatory life sentences for the 2001 gang-related stabbing and beating death of a 21-year-old homeless woman from Hawai'i who panhandled in Harvard Square.

Ismael Vasquez, 27, his brother Luiz, 23, Harold Parker, 31, and Scott Davenport, 31, were convicted yesterday in the death of Io Nachtwey, a once-promising languages student from Maui who dropped out of community college and ended up homeless in Boston.

Prosecutors said the Vasquez brothers and Parker planned Nachtwey's death to send a message to rebellious members of the gang they recruited from among the young drifters who hung around Harvard Square. Prosecutors said Nachtwey's boyfriend had also led a revolt within the ranks of the gang.

Two 21-year-old women accused of subduing Nachtwey while Davenport stabbed her pleaded guilty to manslaughter and testified against the men.

"These people are a disease in the human population and they need to be excised from the population of humanity," the victim's father, Bernie Nachtwey, said in an emotional victim impact statement delivered by audiotape.

Nachtwey's mother, Pauline Bernier-Nachtwey, wept during her audio statement; she said she hasn't stopped crying since her daughter was killed.

"It's like there's a hole in my heart," she said. "There's nothing I can do to make it better."

Nachtwey's parents live in Hawai'i and did not attend the trial because they said it would be too painful.

Afterward, a relative of the Vasquez brothers who did not identify herself called the conviction an "injustice" while another criticized the brevity of jury deliberations. The jury deliberated about five hours after a six-week trial.

Nachtwey was conversant in Russian, German, Italian and Spanish. After dropping out of college, she drifted to Cambridge, where friends remembered her as too innocent to live on the street. She panhandled with the cheery request of "spare change or a smile."