The Middlesex District Attorney’s office dropped all charges against Victor Rivas, a South Boston man involved in a fatal stabbing in Cambridge on January 6. Rivas had pled “not guilty” to charges of felony assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in the stabbing death of Antoine Johnson, a Freetown man who engaged in an altercation with Rivas at a Cambridge Housing Alliance supportive housing project. The prosecutors concluded that it was Johnson who initially attacked Rivas, and that Rivas had stabbed Johnson to defend himself.
“It was clear to me from the start that Mr. Rivas had acted purely in proper self-defense,” Rivas’s attorney, Carolyn McGowan, said in a statement she shared with Cambridge Day. “We are grateful that the Commonwealth took seriously Mr. Rivas’ report to police about the decedent having violently attacked him with a knife, and that they remained open-minded and subsequently uncovered extensive evidence substantiating that Mr. Rivas was telling the truth.”
According to a document reviewed by Cambridge Day, assistant district attorney Nicole Allain filed a nolle prosequi (“will no longer prosecute”) motion with the court, which was accepted by Judge David E. Frank on Monday, June 8. The case was on the Middlesex District Court’s docket for Friday June 12 but was pulled from it on Monday. The two-page filing outlines the timeline of events and evidence the District Attorney’s office collected during its investigation of the case…