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Thomas Rosa of Chelsea, who was only officially absolved in March of the 1985 murder of Gwendolyn Taylor of Dorchester yesterday sued the state for the 34 years he spent in prison for her murder.

In his suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, Rosa is seeking the maximum $1 million fee state law allows for wrongful imprisonment, along with expungement of his conviction from state records, state-funded medical and mental-health care, at least 50% off any classes at state colleges, housing assistance and attorney's fees.

Rosa was charged with the  murder, rape and kidnapping of Taylor, an 18-year-old Talbot Avenue resident, whose body was found in a car parked at a repair garage on Norfolk Street in December, 1985.

His first trial, in 1986, ended in a mistrial. The next month, a Suffolk Superior Court jury convicted him, but the Supreme Judicial Court overturned the verdict and ordered a new trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict in 1993 - for first-degree murder and kidnapping, with an acquittal on the rape charge.

In 2020, a single justice of the Supreme Judicial Court ordered him freed as he pursued a new trial, based on new evidence, such as the fact that the man's DNA found on the victim's body was not his - and that DNA found on a coat at his home was not the victim's.

In 2023, a Suffolk Superior Court judge vacated his conviction and ordered a new trial. At the time, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office said it planned to retry him, but this past March filed a nolle prosequi form formally and finally dropping his case.

In his complaint, Rosa's attorneys say that in addition to physical evidence, eyewitness accounts were faulty - they said the man last seen with Taylor had fine, straight hair and a missing or gap tooth, while Rosa had thick curly hair and no gap between his front teeth.

But the complaint also blasts Boston Police detectives for allegedly getting witnesses to change their stories when their accounts did not match Rosa's description.

When police focused on Mr. Rosa as the suspect, they convinced the roommate to alter her physical description of the man she saw to avoid the obvious mismatch with Mr. Rosa. ...

Police also convinced the roommate, and the roommate's siter who was in the apartment the night of Taylor's killing, to change their description of the coast they saw on the unfamiliar man after learning that Mr. Rosa had a different coat. ...

The Commonwealth argued to the jury that biologic evidence on Mr. Rosa's coat connected the victim to the coat, but DNA evidence refutes that claim.

In contrast, the complaint continues, Rosa immediately cooperated with detectives once they began to go after him as the suspect - he willingly gave police hair, blood and saliva samples.

And, the complaint alleges, the detectives made up statements by Rosa's wife, who did not speak English, but who was not provided a translator, to rebut his alibi.

Staco City reports (with video and audio from the scene) that somebody was shot in the back on Dacia Street in Dorchester around 1:15 a.m.

At least 17 bullets were fired, hitting not only the victim, but two houses and a parked car.

Two managers at the Fourth Wall, 228 Tremont St. near Stuart Street, told the Boston Licensing Board today they're trying to buy the place from an owner who already has no fans on the board and that their priority is stopping a seeming flood of under-21 drinkers who have been flocking there with fake out-of-state IDs.

"We apologize for being here this morning," Fourth Wall attorney Curt Bletzer told the board at a hearing on on incident on Feb. 13 during which two BPD licensing detectives found a table with seven women, all 19 or 20, with alcoholic beverages - and possibly could have IDed more tykes, only the tables around them quickly emptied out as they were busy examining fake licenses around the table from states west of Williamstown. The bar faces a second hearing for a similar seven-people underage violation in April.

Bletzer said managers Dave Ferrando and Brett Walshaw have already taken steps to beat back the youthful tide, including buying a new license scanner recommended by BPD, hiring more doorpeople and training or retraining all the staff in recognizing fake IDs. The pair also fired the manager on duty on the night of the April incident for not properly checking IDs -  even as they continue to negotiate to buy the bar from serial bar owner Derek Brady, who did not attend the hearing.

Board Chairwoman Kathleen Joyce asked Walshaw if he had himself been trained by Brady on combatting under-age drinking and running a bar according to the law.

When he said he had, she told him she "I highly recommend" that he get re-training from somebody else.  "Mr. Brady has a history of not managing his licensed premises properly in the city of Boston," she said.

In January, the board voted unanimously to shut the Draft, Brady's Harvard Avenue bar, not just because BPD detectives had also found underage drinkers there, but because Brady had hired a friend to manage the place after earlier telling the board he was firing him and vowed to never rehire him after a 2024 incident at his Loyal Nine on Union Street in which the manager was charged with trying to strangle his girlfriend in a basement office. In 2022, the board rejected Brady's bid to buy a defunct bar and restaurant on Brighton Avenue in Allston.

Although still the Fourth Wall's listed owner, Brady did not attend today's hearing. And nobody from the Fourth Wall attended a recent mandatory meeting the licensing board held to discuss keeping the Theater District safe during what could be an unusually busy upcoming summer. Walshaw and Ferrando said they never saw any notices about the required meeting.

"And that's the reason we're trying to fix that," by consummating the sale - which will require licensing-board approval - Bletzer said.

"You should get your act together quickly," Joyce advised.