Profile of a suspect

Profile of a suspect

By Christine Mcconville and Colneth Smiley Jr. | Sunday, October 3, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Local Coverage

Photo by Herald file

Kimani Washington is a vicious drunk, an aspiring rapper and a swaggeringly confident ladies’ man, who turned away from his loving family to embrace the thug life, devastated friends and relatives said yesterday. But even as a hardened career criminal, Washington, 35, a father of five, knows better than to get mixed up in the slaughter of a mother and her baby, they said.
“My whole family is blown away,” one of Washington’s many cousins told the Herald yesterday. “Women and children are off-limits, he knows that.”
Late Friday, Washington was arrested on firearms and other charges in connection with the Mattapan massacre that left three adults and a toddler dead and another man clinging to life. Washington, who also goes by Kimani Ikhal, has not been charged with murder.
“I’m flabbergasted,” said Tabitha Alford-Cinelli of Hyde Park, who told the Herald she was a “little cousin” to Washington. “I don’t know my cousin to be that type of person. He went to prison for drug charges and things like that, but nothing this drastic.”
Washington was a fun-loving child who grew up in Grove Hall and was still a student at Charlestown High School when his first child, a boy, was born. Around that same time, relatives said, he started drinking and fighting.
“He’s known as a bar brawler,” one cousin said about the 5-foot-9, 190-pound Washington. “He’s been in and out of the system for years.”
By the mid-2000s, the Boston police said he was one of their most-wanted criminals. Over the years he faced charges of forging checks, trying to pass counterfeit cash, and assault and battery.
It was a role that Washington apparently relished. On Facebook, he brags of being “The realest (racial epithet) livin’ In and outta prison.”
That bravado made him popular with the ladies, said friends and relatives, although Washington did not have a steady job, own a car or have a permanent residence.
Shai Childers, 22, an “off and on” former girlfriend who last spoke to him a couple weeks ago, said Washington took pride in pointing out to her that he was featured on “Boston’s Most Wanted” on cable’s On Demand.
And he was hardly a model boyfriend.
“He looked nice, was caring, loving and sweet, but he seemed like a liar,” she said. “He just lied to me a lot about other females.”
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