BOSTON — On February 16, 2021, Stephenson King Jr. was arrested in Dorchester for strangling a family member. He walked out of the courthouse that same day without posting a dollar. The felony charge carried up to five years in state prison. He never served a day on it.
Nine months later, the case was quietly dismissed. Rachael Rollins was still the District Attorney.
What happened after that is now the most divisive criminal justice story in Boston. King went on to accumulate charge after charge, felony after felony. He was arrested with a loaded ghost gun. He beat an elderly victim. He violated his bail conditions so many times that prosecutors begged judges to hold him. They didn't. A Healey-appointed judge released him on $0 bail. And on March 11, 2026, King allegedly carjacked a woman, rammed a police cruiser, and was shot and killed by a Boston police officer. He had 47 prior criminal charges in Boston alone and was out on bail on four separate felonies.
The officer has been charged with manslaughter. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump has signed on to represent King's family. On Wednesday, Rollins pulled papers to run for DA again.
Rachael Rollins in her official portrait as U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, a position she resigned from in 2023 after federal investigators found she leaked privileged information and lied about it under oath. Official DOJ photo.
The strangulation charge
The charges King faced that day included felony strangulation, assault on a family member, and malicious destruction of property. The court found that domestic abuse was alleged in connection with the offense.
The case never went anywhere. Pretrial hearings were held over Zoom. Discovery deadlines came and went. And on November 17, 2021, all three charges, including the felony, were dismissed for lack of prosecution. Rollins did not leave office until January 10, 2022.
King wasn't some first-time offender who slipped through the cracks. By the time her office let this case die, he already had prior strangulation charges, firearms arrests, drug charges, and a documented history of domestic violence stretching back to 2005.
The threat charge
That wasn't the first time her office walked away from a King prosecution.
Seven months into her tenure, King was charged with threat to commit a crime after an incident on August 18, 2019. That charge happened to fall on the Rollins Memo, the 65-page policy directive she issued in March 2019 telling prosecutors to presumptively decline prosecution of 15 categories of offenses her office considered "low-level" and "driven by poverty, substance use disorder, mental health issues."
On November 25, 2019, the Commonwealth requested the charge be dismissed. The court obliged.
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Shoplifting was also on that list. The Prudential Center and Newbury Street have since become something of a free-for-all. The Canada Goose store has been robbed so many times that police have resorted to public appeals for help identifying suspects. Lululemon gets hit on a regular basis. Crews have been caught driving up from the Bronx to shoplift in Back Bay, which tells you everything you need to know about the current state of deterrence in Suffolk County. The policy framework Rollins built has outlasted her tenure.
What followed
Every crime Stephenson King committed after those dismissals happened because he was free to commit it.
It started in May 2022 with a 209A violation and an assault on a police officer. King pleaded guilty and got probation, which he later violated. Then in January 2024, officers responding to a call at 570 Dudley Street found him passed out on a staircase with a loaded Polymer 80 ghost gun tucked in his sweatshirt. Bail was set at $2,000.
Body camera footage shows officers finding Stephenson King asleep in a stairwell at 570 Dudley Street with a loaded Polymer 80 ghost gun partially concealed in his sweatshirt. Boston Police Department.
From there, the charges kept stacking up. Assault with a dangerous weapon and motor vehicle larceny in February 2024. Two more counts of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in April, including one causing serious bodily injury. Then in June 2025, he was charged with beating an elderly or disabled person badly enough to cause injury.
After that last charge, a judge released him on personal recognizance with GPS monitoring and home confinement. He violated those conditions over and over. Arrested, released, arrested, released. A Healey-appointed judge released him on $0 bail despite the objections of prosecutors who wanted him held.
On March 5, 2026, King violated his conditions again. A warrant was issued. He was a fugitive. Six days later, he was dead.
Officer Nicholas O'Malley, 33, now faces manslaughter charges for the shooting. He is the first Boston police officer prosecuted for an on-duty shooting in more than three decades.
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The race
Suffolk County DA Kevin Hayden, who charged the officer who shot King with manslaughter, a decision that triggered mass police protests and a GoFundMe that has since raised over $500,000 for the officer.
The Suffolk County DA race is shaping up to be a three-way contest, and not one of the candidates is walking in clean.
Incumbent Kevin Hayden is under fire from law enforcement after charging O'Malley with manslaughter, a decision that sent dozens of uniformed officers packing a courthouse in protest and prompted the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association to openly call for candidates to challenge him. A GoFundMe for O'Malley has raised over $500,000. Hayden was also fined $5,000 by the state ethics commission for using his office for political advantage during his 2022 race, the same race Rollins tried to interfere with from inside the U.S. Attorney's office.
Now Rollins wants the seat back. She resigned as U.S. Attorney in May 2023 after the Office of Special Counsel found she leaked privileged federal law enforcement information to help her preferred candidate beat Hayden in that primary, then lied about it under oath when confronted. The Special Counsel called her conduct "egregious." Her law license was suspended in 2024.
And then there's Linda Champion, a former assistant district attorney who worked under Hayden and ran for the seat in 2018. She earned 9% of the vote that year, but she's also the only candidate in the race who hasn't been fined, forced to resign, suspended, or investigated by the federal government.
Rollins and Champion each need 1,000 signatures by April 28 to appear on the ballot. No Republican has entered the race so far. In a county where the Democratic primary has historically been the only election that matters, the two frontrunners are a DA under fire for charging a cop and a former DA who resigned in disgrace from her last government job.
Rollins' office dropped the strangulation charge. Hayden charged the cop. Whether anyone else steps up remains to be seen.
The full criminal record with all 17 court dockets is available in our original investigation.
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