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Good thing we don't have catacombs

Transit Police are looking for a member of the criminal class who led them on a chase through the Green Line tunnel between Arlington and Boylston stations this afternoon.

The chase began around 12:30 p.m. when the man either mugged somebody or shoplifted something at the City Sports store on Boylston Street. He ran down Boylston to the Arlington T stop and got on an inbound trolley - only to discover he'd been followed by his victim, who got on the same car.

Alerted to the attack, Transit Police awaited the trolley at Boylston. But the miscreant, described as a white man in his 50s, wearing a face mask and a winter jacket, somehow jumped off the train before it pulled into the station.

Transit Police briefly considered hopping on an outbound trolley to try to catch up to him in the tunnel, but quickly got word that an emergency hatch that opens on one of the traffic islands in front of the Four Seasons was open.

However, police now think the Phantom of the Green Line may have actually stayed on the tracks, turned around, walked to Boylston and then calmly escaped up the stairs there.

Kristin Dziadul reports from an announcement her trolley driver made:

Sorry we're stopped, there's a delay. Apparently there's someone running up and down the rail way that shouldn't be there.

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Comments

They were re-enacting Popeye Doyle chasing Charnier in the Fench Connection.

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Sorry to the victim, but man if I don't love a great Hollywood style robbery story. Hope they got him!

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I hope someone reports witnessing how that happened.

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I think Adam has been watching General Hospital too long (this was a plot line on GH in the late 80s).

maybe he was looking for the Lost City of Eterna (a la "One Live to Live" circa 1988)

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Port Charles has more reliable public transit than Boston so art really does imitate life... or reverse... or whatever.

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When a space alien named Casey Rogers comes down and becomes friends with Robin Scorpio, I'll be scared.

(yes I am showing my age here...)

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Perhaps he's hiding amongst the Civil Defense supplies still stored south of Boylston Station along TRemont St.

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Desperate people do desperate things. And it's getting worse for more and more people.

On a side note: Boston/Cambridge is a major draw for troubled and homeless (including many mentally ill) people from across New England and the northeast. Obviously, many locales are not doing their part but dumping their 'problem' on cities like Boston. And desinstitution of the mentally ill since the 70s is a disaster.

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Well we could reopen the state hospitals. Except for the fact the existing facilities were all bulldozed for yuppie condos or public housing.

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That they were horrific torture chambers for those forced to live in them.

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No they weren't, I worked with deinsitutionalized mentally ill people for four years. They wanted nothing more than to go back. The hospitals were simply more expensive than cbfs.

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Because the street is soooo much better than professional psychiatric care in a campus setting.

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You are ignoring the reality and history of mental institutions, at least if your family couldn't afford McLean.

People forget why the goal of deinstitutionalization caught on to begin with. It was because, while professional psychiatric care in a campus setting may have been the ideal, it was far from the reality:

By the 1920s and 1930s, the (Danvers State) hospital started to suffer from severe overcrowding and a lack of funding. The number of patients grew to over 2,000 while the size of staff remained relatively the same. As a result, the quality of care began to deteriorate as the overwhelmed staff struggled to control the massive number of patients. Patients were soon subjected to lobotomies, shock therapy and “special garments,” presumably straitjackets, as a means of control.

Source: http://historyofmassachusetts.org/history-of-danvers-state-hospital/

Grand ideals of campus settings were not the reality due to underfunding and defunding despite increasing caseloads. Nonetheless, people also didn't want to pay for the deinstitutinalization ideal of care, so that never materialized, either.

There are plenty of examples of people with severe physical disabilities or people who lacked verbal abilities due to their mental illness being thrown into understaffed institutions and suffering serious abuse and neglect as well ... such as being handled so roughly that they broke bones and were never treated because they could not communicate. Examples in Massachusetts, and across the country.

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was not entirely fiction.

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And dumping those people on the streets with nothing but a prescription and maybe if they were lucky directions to the nearest homeless shelter was an improvement?

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However, the problem is the same: underfunding of services for mental illness and addiction

We get the level of care that we pay for.

Putting them in lunatic asylums with poor conditions just puts them out of your sight.

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Employer health coverage wasn't likely for people addicted to booze, heroin, etc. and/or suffering from mental illness.Outpatient drug treatment is like $2200 a month and a booming business now in Mass due to Mass Health paying for what these people can't get in other states. Hopefully, ObamaCare will equalize things so these people can go back to states with nicer weather and lower cost of living.

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He didn't escape.....

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The phantom of the green line escaped through the tunnels to his underground lair at 162 Boylston street to his underground concert hall

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I'm shocked he was actually able to get a train and escape in time. Freakishly good timing.

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Assuming he wasn't planning to escape to anywhere east of Government Center.

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