Tom Reilly and the Southboro Car Crash: A Primer

Bostonist can hardly open the paper these days without seeing another story about Attorney General Tom Reilly's intervention in the investigation of a car crash in Southboro. Our first inclination was to tune the whole thing out and wait for it to blow over, but with each passing day, we fall further and further behind - we're getting the feeling that some time soon, we're going to find ourselves needing to know and totally unprepared, like that time in our senior year of high school we wrote a detective story on the back of our Trig. test because we didn't know any of the answers (Sorry, Mrs. Doulis). So, we decided to go back over the news and brush up on Drunken-teen-car-crash-gate (yeah, we hate the -gate suffix, but it's fun when you stick it on something long and unwieldy).

So, way back on October 13, two teenage sisters from Southboro were killed when their SUV ran into a utility pole as they returned home from a party where they may have been drinking. The Northborough police began investigating (because that's where the party happened) to see if there was any illegal furnishing of alcohol to minors, and they were apparently prevented by Worcester County DA John Conte from seeing autopsy reports of the two girls. Then, early this month, it came out that Reilly called Conte and asked him not to release the reports, purportedly to protect the family's privacy. Reilly specified that he only asked Conte to keep the reports from the media, not the investigating local police, but the fact that Christopher Murphy, the girls' father, was a contributor to Reilly's campaign (albeit, as Adam at UniversalHub points out, a minor one) meant only one thing: Commence shitstorm. Practically every day has brought a raft of articles and opinion pieces on this story, even though not much has happened (the Governor condemns the AG; the AG tearfully condemns the Governor for condemning him; etc.). Today some actual real news came out: In addition to talking with the girls' father (who contributed a paltry $300), Reilly took a call from Lycos founder and Murphy family friend Bob Davis, who actually did some real fundraising for the AG.

So what does this all amount to? Bostonist isn't sure. By now, everyone pretty much knows the girls had been drinking, so any attempt by the AG to shield the Murphys from further pain has backfired miserably. The Northborough police have decided not to charge the host of the party under the "social host" law, because the girls apparently brought their own booze to the party. That leaves the awful personal fallout for the girls' family, which is too terrible to need more elaboration by us, and the political fallout, which continues to unfold daily. The interesting thing will be to see whether Kerry Healey can make hay of this when the governor's race gets serious. As always, stay tuned.