Hyde Park woman charged with murdering uncle is ordered to evaluation

Clive Francis went up to his troubled niece's room with a vacuum cleaner Saturday afternoon to help clean up some of the glass from the mirror she'd shattered. He didn't come down again because she shot him in the head, a Suffolk County prosecutor said today.

Yvonne Lewis, 36, was ordered held without bail at her arraignment in West Roxbury Municipal Court this afternoon, as relatives of the two and co-workers of Francis's packed the benches, many tightly holding hands, some crying. A number wore jackets from On Time Moving in Mattapan, where Francis worked as a truck driver.

Judge Kathleen Coffey also ordered a 20-day mental-health evaluation after both Lewis's lawyer, Jeffrey Karp, and a court-appointed psychologist said Lewis seemed unable to understand them in the holding cell.

Karp asked that Lewis be allowed to stay in the cell, rather than brought upstairs to the courtroom for the arraignment. But Coffey agreed with assistant Suffolk District Attorney Ian Polumbaum that murder was too serious a charge to allow an arraignment without the defendent present. Two court officers got her upstairs and she entered the prisoner dock bent over in a hospital gown, then slumped over on the bench, below the level of the banister.

Polumbaum said Lewis's family had called on Francis to try to help his niece, a Boston native who'd recently returned from Georgia, where she'd moved after working as a communications technician for Boston Police - and where she acquired a gun license. Polumbaum said family members were concerned by her "somewhat erratic" behavior and called Francis after she started "acting up and breaking things" in her third-floor room on Saturday

The prosecutor said Francis went upstairs to try to talk to Lewis and quickly came down with some shards from the mirror she had just broken. He then went up with a vacuum cleaner to try to clean up the rest of the glass.

With a TV in the house turned way up, nobody heard the three shots Polumbaum said Lewis fired at her uncle. Two missed; one hit him in the head, he said.

Relatives did, however, hear chimes going off when Lewis fled the house - jumping into Francis's SUV and driving away, Polumbaum continued. When they went upstairs to check on Francis, "they found Mr. Francis; he'd been shot in the head" - an empty gun holster nearby.

Polumbaum said police were able to find Lewis at a Peabody hotel by tracking a phone a relative had left in the SUV. He said police found her in a hallway, "curled up on the floor" and not responding to their questions.

Innocent, etc.