WBZ reports a child injured in a six-alarm fire on Meridian Street in East Boston on April 2 has died. A second person was reported dead the day of the fire, the cause of which has yet to be announced.

Mary Ellen spotted this frog, 90% of it underwater, in a vernal pool at Brook Farm in West Roxbury.

A federal judge today tossed a man's request to quash a charge of using a gun in furtherance of a drug crime on Second Amendment grounds, concluding that even the most recent Supreme Court gun decisions still only allow gun ownership for "law abiding" reasons and that using guns to stave off other drug dealers doesn't count.

The ruling comes in the case of a guy facing federal charges for the cocaine, crack and handguns, one with an obliterated serial number, federal agents say they found in an apartment in 2021 he and a co-defendant allegedly used in Mansfield as a drug stash house.

In a motion to US District Court Judge Nathaniel Gorton, Malik Parson's lawyer argued recent Supreme Court decisions spelling out the right of Americans to pack weaponry made the charge of possession of a firearm in furtherance of drug trafficking activity unconstitutional, because Parson had the two guns "for self defense to avoid a drug robbery."

Nice try, but nope, Gorton answered today. Gorton wrote that the 2008 Heller decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled the Second Amendment gave individuals the right to have guns at home "for a lawful purpose." True, that means self defense, but:

It follows that for the government to prove that Parsons violated § 924(c) [the law related to use of guns as part of a drug crime], it must demonstrate that he possessed a firearm to promote illicit activity. He claims that the charged conduct encompasses self-defense against robbery but allegations that a firearm was possessed for the indisputably unlawful purpose of defending a stash of narcotics and ill-gotten proceeds vitiates any constitutionally cognizable assertion of "self-defense."

That brought Gorton to the 2022 Bruen decision, which extended the Second Amendment self-protection right to include wandering around in public with a gun - but which also notes that decisions dating back to the 17th century in England, allow the prohibition of "carrying arms to the terror of the public with ill intent." And that, Gorton continued, means:

Employing firearms, even defensively, to further a criminal drug conspiracy fits within that tradition of proscribing the ill-intended use of arms.

He concluded:

It strains credulity to assert that the Framers sought to protect the bearing of arms for the purposes of promoting criminal conduct, even if the arms in question are deployed defensively. The motion will be denied.

A Readville church is asking a judge to let it ignore a restriction in the 1897 deed that limits the use of a side building to "a free and public reading room and library" so that it can put up a six-unit apartment building in its place.

In its suit, filed in state Land Court, the Blue Hill Community Church cites a state law that allows for such deed restrictions to be overridden if they would cause "irreparable harm" - which the church says would happen since it can't afford repairs on the old 10 Hamilton St. building, next to and around the corner from its chapel at 215 Neponset Valley Parkway.

The suit was actually filed in the name of the Blue Hill Evangelical Society, which was formed in the 1880s, then voted to dissolve in 1991 after selling both properties to the church. And the suit is not against neighbors who have said they oppose the razing of the former library building but against Ellen Stetson and her heirs.

Stetson was a Bostonian with a summer home on Sprague Street in Hyde Park - then an independent town in Norfolk County - when she sold the 8,300-square-foot Hamilton Street lot behind the society's chapel to the society for construction of a library - for the consideration of $1 in 1897.

The society spent $4,000 for construction of the library - and named it after Trinity Church leader Phillips Brooks, who gave one of his last sermons before his death in 1893 in its chapel.

When the reading room opened, it had several hundred books and "a complete set of Harper's Monthly," according to a 1981 Massachusetts Historical Commission report, which found that while the building itself was not at all unique architecturally, it has historical significance for Hyde Park - and once featured a large brick fireplace topped by a portrait of Brooks painted by Stetson.

For six decades, the Phillips Brooks Memorial Reading Room served as Stetson intended - first as a branch of the Hyde Park Library, then, after the town was annexed to Boston in 1912, as a branch of the Boston Public Library.

BPL closed the branch in 1956, five years after its librarians helped organize Christmas festivities that included a play titled "Santa Claus Brings Christmas (to Those who Live in Books)" written by both permanent staffers and Miss Berit Lambertsen, a volunteer student librarian from Norway, who had earlier led a Great Books discussion about the Song of the Volsungs.

In 2022, the Hyde Park Bulletin reported, the church filed plans to replace the former library with an apartment building. Residents and the Hyde Park Neighborhood Association objected to demolition of the historic building and its replacement with apartments. To date, neither the Zoning Board of Appeal nor the Landmarks Commission has considered the proposal.

In its suit, the church argues the deed restriction:

Would impede reasonable use of the land for purposes for which it is most suitable and would contribute to the deterioration of 10 Hamilton. ... The petitioner, Blue Hill, is currently restrained in its ability to alienate [sel] its property and unless the rights and responsibilities of the Petitioner, Blue Hill, and the Responded, Estate of Ellen F. Stetson, her Heirs, Devises and Legal Representatives, are determined, the Respondent will continue to enforce the restriction and the Petitioner Blue Hill will thereby suffer irreparable harm.

In the deed in which it accepted the building in 1991, the church acknowledged the property was "subject to all prior restrictions" in the 1897 deed conveying the property from Stetson to the evangelical society, including that the property was to be used for "a free and public reading room and library" and to "to suffer said premises to be used for no purposes whatever" other than as a library.

Photo posted under this Creative Commons license..

WBZ reports on the man's plunge at 72 Gardner St. in the GAP area mainly occupied by BU students.

Ron Newman took in the Patriots Day parade through Lexington today (alas, the recreation of the Battle of Old North Bridge was canceled due to flooding).

Newman also reports the day was marred a bit by the presence of some Nazis who stood along the route pushing their plan to have New England secede and become a Nazi whites-only ethnostate. At least while he was there, they just stood there and most of them didn't even don their traditional face-hiding balaclavas.

The mayor's office and the BAA announced the fastest man, woman and non-binary runners in today's Marathon: Miles Batty, an MGH orthopedic surgery resident from West Roxbury who finished in 2:25, Ariana Maida, a Dana-Farber physician's assistant from Jamaica Plain, who completed the course in 2:48:50 and Nonie Anderson, a BC Law School student from Brighton, whose time was 3:44:18.

Batty once ran a sub-4-minute mile, as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University.

However, the time for the fastest banana went to Matthew Seidel of Oakland, CA, who established a new Guinness record today for the fastest Marathon fruit, when he peeled out from Hopkinton to Back Bay while dressed in a banana suit in 2:35:38.

That's almost six minutes faster than the previous record for fastest fruit-based time in a Marathon, set in 2020 in Arizona, by a man also dressed as a banana.

Matt Frank spotted this sky-blue VW Bug against the blue sky at Revere Beach this afternoon.

Martin Lieberman noticed a developing theme among signs people held to cheer on the runners today. Another example.

Hugmajesty watched the runners rolling by near Cleveland Circle:

She also caught some of the dogs at the race.

Michael Burstein videoed some of the runners going by on Beacon Street in Brookline:

A snake found some old concrete and asphalt chunks a good place to do some sunning at the kayak launch in Millennium Park in West Roxbury this afternoon.

Jamaica Plain News reports bb.q Chicken is moving into the Centre Street space where Cafe Beirut used to be.

A roving UHub photographer reports from Beacon Street at Kent Street in Brookline, where the Green Line stop was supposed to remain open until 10 a.m., but which was closed at 8:40 a.m.

There was no access through the fence. While I waited, a woman was trying to take her kid to daycare and was only able to get through because an employee from the fence company was still around and unlocked the fence for her. Five people who had gotten off the outbound train followed her, saying they were trying to get to work. Kent St is one of the stations workers at the Longwood Medical Area use, and several of them had badges from the hospitals. When I pointed out to the fence guy that according to the MBTA this station is open until 10 AM and people (including me) need to get to work, he responded "You should have planned better." I asked him if people would be allowed to unlatch the fence to cross before 10 and was told they would not be. I checked the MBTA website last night and this morning, and there is nothing about above ground stations only being accessible from one side. The fence company workers said they were just doing their job and the Marathon volunteers said there was nobody from the Marathon organization I could email about this.

Mary Ellen spotted this blue grosbeak at Millennium Park in West Roxbury today.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round, until the bus driver gets on Storrow Drive and skee-ronches right into the infamous Bridge of Double Storrows by Mass Eye and Ear. Tom Leonard couldn't help but photograph the scene this morning, given that the stuck bus was backing up traffic like nobody's business.

A federal appeals court yesterday upheld an earlier lower-court ruling that a woman who was suspended from the theology master's program at Boston University for refusing to take the nasal Covid-19 tests the university once required has no case because the school no longer requires the tests.

The court's rejected Caitlin Corrigan's argument that BU could bring back the testing regimen in the future and that she needed protection should she in fact take the school up on its offer to resume the classes she stopped not long after she started at the BU School of Theology, and so her case remains as moot.

Because it is absolutely clear that BU ended its mandatory testing program in response to encouraging public health data and there are no signs that the pandemic will worsen, it is not reasonable to expect that BU again will impose a similar testing program.

Corrigan, who loves horse deworming paste as much as she hates Covid-19 vaccines, was represented by Robert Meltzer, a Concord attorney who has had his own problems convincing federal judges that public-health efforts to combat Covid-19 are evil incarnate. In his case, a federal judge rejected his lawsuit against the Massachusetts state court system for requiring masks after courts reopened, in which he claimed the requirement was the equivalent of waterboarding and a violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

Meltzer's work on Corrigan's case was supported by Children's Health Defense, the anti-vax group run by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at least until he officially declared he was running for president. Last fall, Kennedy told the group that if elected, he would stop all government research into communicable diseases for at least eight years.

In addition to declaring her suit moot in general, the court also rejected Corrigan's claim that Boston University had somehow stealthily enacted and then rescinded its testing requirements too quickly for a court to have considered them - which would give the appeals court an exception under mootness rules to consider them. Referring to the two years the BU requirement was in place, the court said:

It is struthious at best to suggest that a resource-intensive effort continuously spanning almost two years is so fleeting that a court could never have time to pass on its legality.

"Struthious" is a word referring to the behavior of ostriches, which are sometimes thought to bury their heads in the sand - and an indication for people who have yet to read the full opinion that it was written by Judge Bruce Selya, who has long been known for making lawyers and other judges reach for their dictionaries.

Patrick spotted the Nuclear Emergency Support Team's radiation-sensing helicopter over Boylston Street today, doing the annual pre-Marathon check of background-radiation levels, just in case.

A concerned citizen filed a 311 complaint asking for help for an injured turkey on Beacon Street near Exeter in the Back Bay:

There is a hurt turkey, all alone at 270 Beacon Street. It appears to have an injury to one of its legs. It had been here for three days. I have already contacted three wildlife preservationists and they won’t help because turkeys are “aggressive”. This turkey is hurt and needs to be relocated. What can be done?

Chris Hugenberger shows us his Marathonned house on Albano Street in Roslindale.

Also see: Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings are ready.