One Dead After Cambridge July 4th Shooting

A Cambridge Public Works department employee was found fatally shot near the intersection of Broadway and Norfolk Streets early Saturday morning, according to a Cambridge Police Department emergency alert.

Cambridge Police and Fire Department officials arrived at the scene shortly after 5:30 a.m., and found the man, later identified as 32-year-old Xavier Bautista, dead from an apparent gunshot wound, according to the alert.

Investigators believe Bautista was shot shortly before 4:30 a.m., and was found by a pedestrian, who called 911, roughly an hour later. No arrests have been announced, and a CPD spokesperson declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.

Bautista was an off-duty employee of the city’s Public Works Department, according to a Sunday statement from City Manager Yi-An Huang ’05 and Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui.

The shooting comes less than two months after the Cambridge City Council voted to end the city’s use of SpotShotter, a gunshot detection system, amid concerns about its accuracy and privacy implications. The Cambridge Police Department defended its use of the technology, but the Council ultimately voted to remove and disable the system.

The Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association and the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association — the unions representing Cambridge Police Department officers and leadership — released a statement Monday denouncing the city’s decision to remove ShotSpotter.

“The pedestrian’s 911 call was the first alert that emergency personnel had to a shooting in that area. Shot Spotter sensors have previously detected gunfire in that region of the city,” CPPOA spokesperson Cosmo Macero wrote.

Macero added that ShotSpotter’s sensors, which detect loud noises and automatically alert police if they are determined to be gunfire, may have brought responders to Bautista earlier.

“If Shot Spotter detection was received at the time of this incident, Cambridge emergency personnel would have had the opportunity to discover the scene much sooner than 60 minutes after the incident, and render emergency aid to the victim,” Macero wrote.

Bautista’s death marks Cambridge’s second reported homicide this year.

In January, 51-year-old Victor Rivas fatally stabbed Antoine Johnson inside an apartment at 116 Norfolk St. — roughly two blocks away from where Bautista was found Saturday morning. Prosecutors dropped all charges against Rivas in June after determining they could not prove he had not acted in lawful self-defense.

—Staff writer Shawn A. Boehmer can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at shawnb.18. Follow him on X @ShawnBoehmer.