Two Boston doctors were murdered by a homeless man they reportedly befriended. Drs. Richard Field and Lina Bolinas were found dead in their $1.9 million South Boston penthouse late Friday.
Before he died, Dr. Field managed to send a frantic text message to a neighbor begging for help. Alarmed, the neighbor called police.
When police arrived on the 11th floor of the secure luxury building on Dorchester Avenue at 8:45 p.m., they were met with gunfire from inside Dr. Field’s penthouse. Police exchanged gunfire with the suspect and he was wounded.
“They opened up the door and shots were fired at them,” said Boston Police Commissioner William Evans. “I mean, you have a guy here who just killed two people and he had nothing to lose.”
The suspect was identified as 30-year-old Bampumim Teixeira of Chelsea. He was transported to a local hospital and treated for non-life threatening injuries.
During a sweep of the apartment, a SWAT team made a horrifying discovery. The bodies of Dr. Field and his fiancée, Dr. Lina Bolinas, were found with their hands bound and their throats cut.
A message of “retribution” was scrawled on a blood spattered wall.
Dr. Field, 49, was a pain management specialist in Beverly and Dr. Bolinas, 38, was a pediatric anesthesiologist at the Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary. She also taught at Harvard Medical School.
“They just seemed like decent folks. It’s not what you’d expect,” resident Jack Fu told CBS Boston. Another neighbor, Marisa Richards, said the slain couple must have known the killer.
“It’s a very safe area. It’s a very secure building. The security is really safe. It’s very hard to get into the building, so I was shocked,” Richards said.
“If someone would come here and go up to the 11th floor of a penthouse, we gotta believe there was some type of knowledge of each other,” said Commissioner Evans.
Evans noted that a special key was needed to enter the building and to operate the elevator to the 11th floor.
Teixeira was described by his ex-girlfriend as a security guard. He was raised by an aunt in Cape Verde. At age 20, he moved to Boston with his aunt. After falling out with her, he moved out and lived in homeless shelters.
He was arrested and charged with robbing the same bank in 2014 and in 2016. He pled guilty to 2 counts of larceny and was sentenced in 2016 to serve 364 days in a house of correction, according to the Boston Globe.
When Teixeira was released in April, 2017, he called his ex-girlfriend, who described him as “charming” and a “gentleman” who was good with her 9-year-old son.
She said she never saw him drink or smoke and he always wore a suit and tie. “I don’t think he owns a pair of sneakers,” she told the Globe.
She said Teixeira broke up with her in February 2016, offering no explanation — except to say he was “not a good person.”
She said she was shocked to learn he was arrested for bank robbery later that summer.
On April 22, she received a text message from Teixeira informing her he’d just gotten out of jail. They spoke for more than an hour on the phone and he told her again, “I’m not a good person.”
He said he didn’t plan to live long.
She told him she would pray for him, and he replied, “Yeah, I need prayer.”
She said she asked him why he didn’t rob her when they dated for 6 months. She said he responded, “No, I don’t steal from people. I rob banks.”
“I said, ‘OK — but you don’t hurt people, right?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, I wouldn’t do something like that.'”
“Lies,” she said bitterly.
Tears streamed down her face as she talked about their conversation.
“Why would he do this?” she asked.
