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Kevin Lino Is Indicted in the 2010 and 2012 Killings of Two Unhoused Men in Lowell and Cambridge

Prosecutors say he beat Gary Melanson to death under a Lowell bridge and gave Douglas Leon Clarke a fatal dose of heroin by the Charles River.

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Illustration: stacks of old dusty evidence cartons in a records basement

On the afternoon of November 29, 2010, an anonymous caller told Lowell police there was a body under the Rogers Street Bridge. Officers found Gary A. Melanson, 54, sprawled over a collapsed tent with numerous visible wounds. The autopsy found blunt impact injuries to his head, torso and extremities, among them fractured ribs, a collapsed lung and a fractured left arm. Even so, the manner of his death was ruled undetermined.

Two years later, on August 2, 2012, Cambridge police answered a call about a man apparently unconscious near 975 Memorial Drive, on the bank of the Charles River. He was Douglas Leon Clarke, 30, who often went by the name "Rage" and was known to police as unhoused and living around Harvard Square. His blood held a substantial concentration of morphine, along with codeine, ethanol and gabapentin. His death was recorded as an accident, the result of acute and chronic substance abuse, and at the time nothing suggested anyone had intended it.

On August 5, 2025, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan, Lowell Police Commissioner Gregory Hudon and Cambridge Police Commissioner Christine Elow announced that Kevin J. Lino, 38, a former Lowell resident, had been indicted on two counts of first-degree murder, one for each man.

The case opened in 2018, according to the district attorney, when Massachusetts State Police working an unrelated investigation involving Lino learned of his possible involvement in two homicides. The office's Cold Case Unit, working with state and local police, then established probable cause. Prosecutors say Lino, then 23, and Melanson were both unhoused and staying near the Rogers Street Bridge, and that Lino had warned the older man to stop lighting fires to keep warm because he believed they drew police and firefighters to the spot. When Melanson ignored him, prosecutors allege, Lino rushed him, a much smaller and older man, and struck him repeatedly with a metal baseball bat.

Prosecutors describe a different grievance in Clarke's death. Lino, then 25, and Clarke were both part of a group of unhoused people who gathered by the Harvard Square MBTA station, and Lino allegedly took it upon himself to drive out the group's heroin users, assaulting many of them throughout the day. After a confrontation with Clarke, prosecutors say, he resolved to punish him for his insolence and offered him a quantity of heroin he knew would cause an overdose, the kind of dose sometimes called a "hot shot."

"These cases, not initially ruled by the Medical Examiner to be homicides, left the families and friends of Mr. Melanson and Mr. Clarke with little or incorrect information about what had happened to them," Ryan said.

Lino was already behind bars. The district attorney's release said only that he was serving a sentence on an unrelated case out of Suffolk County. At the news conference in Woburn, Ryan said he was serving a life sentence there for beating a man to death in Boston and a 40-year sentence for the murder of a homeless man in Montana, Boston 25 News reported. The new charges will be prosecuted in Middlesex Superior Court, with an arraignment to be scheduled in the coming weeks. Lino has not been tried on either.

This account rests on the Middlesex District Attorney's release of August 5, 2025, and on Boston 25 News's report of that day's news conference. The Boston and Montana sentences come from Ryan's remarks as Boston 25 reported them; neither source names the men in those cases.

Sources