BOSTON — A Beacon Hill father woke up around 8 a.m. Saturday, walked downstairs, and found a naked stranger sitting on his couch smoking a crack pipe while his children were one floor above.
The man immediately went back upstairs, locked his kids in their rooms, and called 911, according to the Boston Police Department.
Officers from District A-1 arrived at the Myrtle Street residence at approximately 8:20 a.m. on May 2 and were met by the father on the third floor, who told them the intruder was still on the second floor. Officers proceeded upstairs, announcing their presence as they went, and heard sounds coming from behind a closed bathroom door.
When they opened it, they found Jainel Roman, 28, of Boston, seated on the family's toilet, still unclothed. He was detained on the spot.
The children had remained upstairs the entire time and never came into contact with him, police said.
Roman was transported to Nashua Street Jail for booking and is expected to be arraigned in Boston Municipal Court on charges of breaking and entering in the daytime for a felony with person in fear, vandalizing property, and lewdness, open and gross.
'Enough is enough'
The arrest drew an immediate response from City Hall. Boston City Councilor Ed Flynn told Mass Daily News the break-in was part of a larger pattern — and called for a zero-tolerance response.
"Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case in Boston," Flynn said. "What happened on Beacon Hill on Saturday morning must be a wake-up call for city officials that we must implement a zero-tolerance policy for any criminal activity in Boston."
"Additionally, the court system must hold these dangerous criminals accountable for their actions," Flynn added. "If convicted, a prison sentence is warranted. Enough is enough."
Flynn is the same councilor who tried to declare Boston's drug crisis a public safety emergency last year — a resolution that was killed by Councilor Sharon Durkan, a longtime Wu ally, using a procedural maneuver. Critics at the time accused Durkan of shielding the Wu administration from accountability rather than addressing the crisis.
Boston City Councilors Ed Flynn (left) and Sharon Durkan (right).
Nine months later, a naked man is smoking crack inside a family's home on Myrtle Street. The emergency Flynn tried to declare is now sitting on someone's couch.
A neighborhood in free fall
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Residents say none of this came out of nowhere.
One Beacon Hill local told Mass Daily News the area has been deteriorating for months — and summer hasn't even started. "I feel things are ramping up as we get closer to the summer," the resident said. "It just seems worse already."
Open drug use and discarded needles have become routine, the resident said, much of it radiating from the area around the Boston Public Library and creeping into the surrounding blocks.
Open drug use near Beacon Hill. Photo via X.
The block where Roman broke in has a popular children's playground. "So unsettling that naked crack-smoking men are walking around there," the resident said.
When asked who they hold responsible, the answer was immediate: Mayor Wu, and Durkan herself. "She does not care at all about her constituents," the resident said. "People email her all the time and she truly never responds."
It's not just Beacon Hill
The crisis has metastasized across Boston's most expensive zip codes — the kind of neighborhoods where a brownstone costs seven figures and families used to leave their strollers on the front steps.
In the South End, arrests surged 163% as the open-air drug market at Mass and Cass spilled into the surrounding residential streets. A woman was battered in broad daylight on a block now lined with addicts and needles.
A man slumped on the brick sidewalk outside a South End brownstone. Photo via Instagram.
In Back Bay, residents recently documented needles turning up inside luxury apartment buildings and the Boston Public Library — not on the sidewalk, not in an alley, but inside. A syringe was found on the lobby floor at 131 Clarendon Street, a building that houses Flour Bakery, steps from where families walk in with strollers.
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And just two days before Roman's Beacon Hill arrest, a man was busted with 32 grams of fentanyl on Boylston Street — sitting outside smoking from a glass pipe at 3:50 in the afternoon until officers walked up on him.
Beacon Hill. Back Bay. The South End. Boylston Street. The crisis isn't contained anymore. It's everywhere the money is.
How we got here
The policy trail isn't hard to follow.
In 2022, Wu's administration expanded Boston's needle exchange program to include free pipes that can be used to smoke crack cocaine and methamphetamine — a "harm reduction" strategy that drew national backlash after Fox News reported on it. Even Democratic City Councilor Michael Flaherty said at the time that addicts "need treatment and recovery" — not free paraphernalia.
A crack pipe and syringe distributed through Boston's harm reduction program. Photo: Fox News
Wu said the city had to focus on "immediately saving lives."
By 2025, her own health chief admitted the city was distributing 80,000 needles a month to addicts — a number that stunned the room when it was said out loud. The city installed a taxpayer-funded vending machine in East Boston that dispensed Narcan and clean needles. Democrats on Beacon Hill pushed bills to decriminalize fentanyl and create decriminalization zones around safe injection sites.
A Boston Public Health Commission report found drug-related deaths in the Beacon Hill, Back Bay, North End, and West End communities jumped 47.1% between 2020 and 2022 compared to the prior three years. The response from city leadership: more needles, more pipes, more compassion.
And now a father on Myrtle Street — on the same block as a children's playground, in the shadow of the State House, in the most exclusive neighborhood in Boston — is explaining to his kids why a naked stranger was smoking crack on their couch at eight on a Saturday morning.
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