Sandy King, helped break code of silence in Charlestown

Their murderers strolled free on the streets, protected by what was known as Charlestown’s code of silence. For years, residents bore mute witness to carnage in a neighborhood of about 14,000 where everyone knew everyone, a small town tucked inside Boston’s borders.

“The code of silence has reared its ugly head again,’’ Mrs. King told the Globe in 1994, when a friend’s son was shot in the head. “We’ll know by morning who did it, but watch how many witnesses come forward.’’

Turning anguish into action, she publicized the names of victims, comforted relatives of those killed, and made so much noise to break the silence that the impossible happened: On a couple of occasions in the late 1990s, a year passed and no one in Charlestown was murdered.

Mrs. King, who helped found the Charlestown After Murder Program and lent her energy to similar efforts in other neighborhoods, died Feb. 10 in St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton. She was 66, lived in South Boston, and had been treated for pneumonia, along with heart, lung, and kidney ailments.

“If you had to point to one fact that contributed to the demise of the so-called code of silence, which some referred to as the code of cowardice, she would be the primary force,’’ said Joe Desmond, who retired last year after 28 years as a special agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration, including more than a decade in Charlestown.

“She was the number one reason for the success of it being undone,’’ he said. “She encouraged a long list of citizens who, prior to her influence, were unwilling to come forward. She opened the door to the type of community cooperation, which led to the so-called code’s downfall.’’

That wasn’t easy in a neighborhood where some mothers shushed crowds that gathered on sidewalks around the latest murder victim, telling people not to squeal as police sirens approached.

As she organized annual vigils, demanded that law enforcement agencies work together across jurisdictional boundaries, and comforted families at her organization’s meetings in St. Catherine Church, Mrs. King also faced intimidation attempts.

“When I first came out in the mid-1990s to tell the truth about unsolved murders in Charlestown, I figured I’d die in a hail of bullets on Bunker Hill Street,’’ she told her friend Michael Patrick MacDonald, who lost siblings to gun violence and chronicled his South Boston upbringing in his much-praised memoir “All Souls.’’

“Sandy King broke the code of silence in Charlestown and helped the people in Southie break their code as well,’’ MacDonald said. “This is a story that’s never been told. They talk about Charlestown and Southie and all these gangsters, but it took a woman to break the code of silence.’’

After her 20-year-old son, Christopher, was murdered in 1986, Mrs. King moved out of Boston for a few years. Then her husband, John, died of a heart attack, and their 27-year-old son, Jay, was shot to death in Charlestown several months later, in April 1991.

Mrs. King returned to the city, settling in South Boston, but wherever she lived, she kept returning to help those whose relatives had been murdered, many of them mothers throughout Boston who became her sisters against arms.

“We are willing to go anywhere, do anything,’’ Mrs. King said in 1997 during an interfaith vigil for mothers at Trinity Church in Copley Square. “I hope to see a vigil in every community. We are related by the blood of our children.’’

Among her close friends was Catherine Tyler of Dorchester, whose daughter, Gayla, was murdered in Jamaica Plain on Easter morning in 1985. Tyler, who helped run the Living After Murder Program in Roxbury, said her bond with Mrs. King melted traditional differences between their neighborhoods.

“Sandy would come to my house; I would go to her house,’’ she said. “Sandy would come to the events we had, and I would go to hers. We just shared and shared and shared. We spent a lot of time crying together, and that’s OK. Sandy was an honest person, whether you liked what she was saying or not. I liked that about her.’’

As Tyler navigated the court system to seek justice in her daughter’s murder, “Sandy and the Charlestown After Murder Program people sat in the court with me for five years,’’ she said. “She would go to court with anyone, with people she didn’t even know. She would go to court and bring them coffee, whatever was needed.’’

When Mrs. King wasn’t in court, she often was on the phone fielding questions and advising mothers-turned-activists such as Terri Titcomb of Charlestown, whose 21-year-old son, Albert III, was murdered on Nov. 22, 1994, in the Bunker Hill housing development.

“Sandy was just a leader all around,’’ she said. “Sandy would do anything for anyone and was so smart. She will never, ever be replaced. If I needed to call her at 2 o’clock in the morning, I could, that’s how Sandy was. She said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, just make sure I’m buried with a phone.’ ’’

Born Sandra A. Lailer, she was the youngest of three daughters and “was exceptionally special, really, really bright,’’ said her sister Lois Molanari of Nashua.

Mrs. King graduated from Charlestown High School, “but we didn’t have the where-all for her to go to college,’’ her sister said. “We were poor people growing up; that’s how it was for most families in Charlestown.’’

Working as a carhop at a drive-in restaurant on Monument Avenue, Sandy Lailer met John King, and they married when she was 19.

They had four sons, including Matthew, who was born with Down syndrome and died three years ago.

“He was the greatest gift,’’ said Molanari, who formerly worked with her sister at Houghton Mifflin publishing, where Mrs. King was a switchboard operator. “He was her whole life.’’

Years before cofounding the Charlestown After Murder Project, Mrs. King “was an advocate for special-needs kids,’’ MacDonald said. In a eulogy, he wrote that she often would say: “I feel truly sorry for anyone who does not have a kid like Matthew in their life.’’

A service has been held for Mrs. King, who in addition to her sister leaves a son, James of South Boston; a sister, Dorothy Krch of Malden; and a granddaughter.

In her travels, Mrs. King could spot a parent who, like her, had lost a child to violence.

“There’s a look,’’ she told the Globe in 1999, “a lost soul.’’

Her own countenance sometimes told a different story, though.

“You felt safe when you were with Sandy, you felt like nobody could ever mess with you,’’ MacDonald said. “The way she looked and listened, you knew she had the kind of integrity that nobody was going to get away with not telling the truth. You could see that in her face.’’

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.