It was less than civil. "The legislature was trying to deal with the most emotional and divisive issue discussed under the golden dome," recalls Representative Jim Marzilli (D-Arlington). "And instead of discussing whether we should have the death penalty, we had truly vitriolic attacks on people who genuinely [opposed it]. I don't think anyone should be surprised or upset when the victim of a horrible crime reacts with outrage. But we in the legislature are supposed to do something that's a little bit better than responding to gut-level instinct. But lots of politicians played to that demand for vengeance."

On November 6, the death penalty was defeated by the narrowest of margins, after Representative John Slattery of Peabody had a change of heart -- and, some suggested, after some fancy footwork by Finneran. Then the rhetoric really got ugly. Cellucci lashed out at both Slattery and Finneran. Columnist Howie Carr called Slattery a "yellow hack." The representative got death threats and obscene notes.

"After it failed," says Jajuga, the Curleys were "extremely upset. They were furious. They felt they had been betrayed." Slattery said that he had changed his mind purely because his conscience had told him to, but his foes, including the Curleys, weren't satisfied with that explanation.

"It's up to the people out there to make a stand," Bob Curley told the Herald at the time. "Get after these politicians. They can't have their way and do whatever they want." So in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring state senator Paul White, of Dorchester, Bob threw himself behind district city councilor Maura Hennigan, the only death-penalty advocate in the race. He helped distribute Hennigan fliers, which bore a picture of Jeffrey, and urged a vote for her in his memory.

Even jaded political junkies were horrified at the flier, at Hennigan for using the tragedy for political gain, and at Curley for allowing his son's memory to be used to sway voters. Some people thought he had crossed the line from understandable rage to grandstanding.

Now Curley received hate mail, including a letter from someone who claimed to be a priest in Brockton: if Curley continued with his death-penalty advocacy, the letter said, he would never see Jeffrey again, because when he died, Bob would surely go straight to hell. Bob says he also was the subject of a tirade by Marjorie Clapprood on her morning talk show. "She was kind of vicious," says Curley. "She said I should be in my house, crying, and fade off into the sunset. It didn't feel good."

Bob Curley had talked to reporters from the start, desperate to have something in the world change as a result of Jeffrey's death. Now he was criticized for being too public about his feelings and wishes. He'd crossed a line he'd had no idea existed, discovering that some people did not consider him the final arbiter of how best to honor his own son's memory.

"I don't know how you're supposed to grieve," Curley says. "I look at other kids and see what's out there and I can't just do nothing. Jeff Curley isn't going to go down for nothing. I have to make it mean something. If that means standing out there and talking to a reporter, if I have to use this to get attention, then so be it. If people want to criticize me for that, then so be it."

But far worse, Bob Curley found that even the supportive public rhetoric had done little to quell his sense of the futility of it all. Although he admits he was a willing participant, he now regrets his involvement in the death-penalty debate. He still believes executions would deter crimes like the one that took his son away from him, but he no longer judges politicians on the issue, and he certainly doesn't want to be a voice on it now. Indeed, he avoids most questions about that time.

Does he feel he was used?

"Maybe," he says reluctantly, with a sigh. "Maybe I left myself open. Maybe people thought they were doing the right thing. Maybe people were trying to help me. I don't know."


Private battles
This is what Bob Curley knows now: the world is uglier than most people could ever imagine. This he also knows: very bad things happen -- not to other people, but to you.
He is standing beside a huge fire truck at the Inman Square station. He lays a hand on the thick hoses coiled tightly on the truck, smoothing the heavy canvas, slowly tracing the path where the water would flow. It is his job to make sure these trucks are working properly, to get water to fire.

But Bob Curley feels cursed now. Now, even the most fundamental certainties elude him; he constantly second-guesses himself, convinced not just that awful things will happen to him, but that he will make awful things happen to others, too.

"If I was doing work on a pump," he says, "and two of my friends go to tap the water and the water doesn't come out because of something I did, well, what if my friends get killed at a fire? Or what if I worked on a ladder truck and they go to a fire, and the things don't go up, and these people get killed? Or what if there's someone around the corner having a heart attack, and something I did causes our guys not to be able to get out the door to help him?"

Since the death-penalty debates, Bob Curley and his family have continued to struggle with Jeffrey's death, but in less public ways. Bob says Barbara cannot bear to talk about her son any more. "Every time she sees the news, it triggers something with her," he says. He says she can no longer go into Jeffrey's room, stacked full of the tributes people brought for him in the days after his disappearance. And Bob says Jeffrey's grandmother, the final person to see him before he was killed, cannot go back to the house where Jeffrey spoke to her for the last time.

The distress of Jeffrey's brothers Bobby and Shaun, racked by guilt over their actions on the day of his death, has been more destructive, and more visible. On December 17, Bobby Curley, the brother who had confronted Jaynes at the Honda dealership in Newton, disrupted the suspects' arraignment. "He winked at me like he liked me!" Bobby exploded, believing Sicari had provoked him. Shaun wiped tears away with his jacket sleeve, momentarily lost in his own agony. Barbara held Bobby's right arm, trying to calm him. His aunt put a hand gently to his mouth, to no avail. Bobby moved toward Sicari, swearing, until court officers removed him.

This past May, the brothers were picked up for allegedly threatening Salvi Sicari's sister with a baseball bat and swinging a hammer at her. Bob Curley won't comment on the incident, except to say that Bobby wasn't even there at the time. And he pleads for understanding for his sons.

"They're young guys who are feeling a tremendous amount of grief and anger," he says. "Try to imagine somebody doing to the family pet [what they did to Jeff]. You can't imagine how we feel. You just can't imagine."

The Curley boys are having trouble mustering the dignity and control that is apparently expected from families of murder victims. It's not the way they do things where Jeffrey Curley was going to grow up. The shrine is gone. Strangers don't come by any more to lay baseball bats and teddy bears. All they have left to distract them now is the trial.

Bob Curley, like most parents of murder victims, is determined to be in court for every minute of Sicari's and Jaynes's trial, despite the fact that such proceedings rarely bring the closure and satisfaction families hope for. "I just want to see justice be served," he says. "If I didn't go, it's a sign of weakness on my part. I don't want the people sitting on the jury, the judge, or anybody else to forget what happened."

While the rest of his family struggles in private, Bob Curley has a new crusade, and is venturing gingerly back into public life. In the weeks after Jeffrey's death, after the cameras went away, he read everything he could about child abuse, exposing a world whose existence he'd only vaguely known about before. He learned a lot about the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), the organization whose literature police found in Jaynes's apartment.

"These are organized groups of child molesters," says Curley. "They have their publications and their meetings, and they teach their members different tactics on how to lure children, and the whole bit. The more you learn about this, the scarier it gets."

Curley still gets calls from pro-death penalty politicians wanting his public imprimatur, but he's declined them all. Crusading against child pornography is a far safer battle, he says, a less combative way to find a point to his son's death.

He has spoken out in favor of the state's sex-offender registry and of a program that institutionalizes sex offenders who show no signs of rehabilitation after prison time. And several local politicians are helping him introduce what he hopes will be an annual run in Jeffrey's memory, to raise money for the Child Abuse Prevention Program in schools. The five-mile race will be run on October 4. He's thrown himself into promoting the CAP program, using it to propel himself further away from the horror of a year ago.

Yet for all his talk of the future and getting beyond and finding meaning, there is always enormous pain and anger just below the surface. Like his older sons, he still struggles with immense guilt.

"Sometimes I'd think, 'Why couldn't I see it? Was there anything I could have done differently?' " Curley says. But he checks himself, with the same argument he's drilled into Bobby and Shaun every day since the murder. "Jaynes was gonna get Jeffrey and molest him, one way or the other," he says. "It really didn't matter. You can't imagine somebody being that bad. I mean, sexual abuse? I didn't know anything about it."

Once, in four hours of interviews, he admits that sometimes he still feels the kind of murderous anger for what happened to Jeffrey that seemed to drive him during the death-penalty debate. "I feel such rage," he says. "I ask God to forgive me that I feel such rage." But Curley quickly pushes it back down again, ashamed of his admission. "If you give in to the rage," he says, "You'll go to jail, and you won't accomplish anything."

For Bob, there are small mercies: the Roxbury baseball league that named a division for his son; the firefighters who've stuck with him even when it was clear he wasn't getting over it.

And this: his son died, fighting, before he was raped.

"He didn't give in to them. The way we raised him. Everything else doesn't really mean shit to me. I think about that -- Jeff and the courage he showed. He didn't give in to those guys. Anybody who knew him knew he wasn't going to back down."

On such frail consolations does Bob Curley's life now turn.