The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 31

B2 B7 Bll B12 B4 Breakin9 news: Local updates I Politics All Politics are Local lJU Lottery Deaths Weather Celebrations Ask the Teacher Commuting: Starts Stops Big Dig: Continuing coverage Boston Sunday Globe September 9, 2007 Yvonne Abraham Let go, let down si ONLINE TODAY boston.comcityregion (ot7Ml PLYMOUTH Ste 7-v phen Keizer has never run from his past. He first sniffed heroin when he was 13. His father, who worked two jobs and had always made sure the tooth fairy came, tried to wrench his son from the It) iV S- I i GLOBE STAFF PHOTO ILLUSTRATION New rules in Massachusetts allow private agents to control coyotes that roam the state, but animal advocates worry the changes will make the canine predators easier to kill 221 By Keith O'Brien GLOBE STAFF There are more of Number of coyotes hunted and killed in Massachusetts during the harvest year I irst, a cat goes missing. Next, the small dogs in the I neighborhood get spooked. Then, late one night, 105 -ct Hyou hear it: the howling in the distance.

And that is when you know for sure. Coyotes have come to your little slice of suburbia. i so I ffc itf fci iltl li Ml ttii I In recent years, Massachusetts residents, frightened by the proliferation of this predator, I 1981-'82 '85-'87 '91-'92 '96-'97 2001-'02 '06-'07 they're ranging farther Coyotes found in only three towns: Otis, New Salem, and Grafton Found almost everywhere west of Route 128 and on Cape Cod drug's grip. But Keizer became a junkie anyway, and stayed one for more than two decades. He amassed quite a record between highs.

Breaking and entering. Possession. And, in 1976, he was with another addict who held up a South End gas station with a gun. "That's what I was and who I was," Keizer says. "That's what drugs come to sooner or later." In 1994, eager to avoid yet more jail time, he chose detox, thinking he was gaming the system.

But the system gamed him. "Tired of being tired," Keizer got clean. He held down jobs. He fell in love with a nice schoolteacher named Joey. Now Keizer, a tall, stately man of 52, lives with his wife in a pretty house in a bucolic part of Plymouth.

He loves her kids. These days, he looks after his retired father. For the last four-and-a-half years, Keizer had his dream job, working with the troubled men who visit the Main-Spring Coalition for the Homeless shelter in Brockton. He patted them down, made sure they got their chow and their meds, appeared with them in housing court. Right from the start, MainSpring knew where he'd been.

They liked his example. Think you can't get anywhere just because you made big mistakes? Look at Stephen. Stephen made it. "He's a great guy," says Dennis Carman, former head of the shelter. "He is very upfront about where he's been.

His experiences are a great thing for people to be able to relate to." A few months ago, MainSpring was taken over by Father Bill's Place, a stellar charity that gives temporary shelter and permanent housing to the homeless on the South Shore. Father Bill's ran criminal record background checks on all of the MainSpring employees. Keizer's long record came up. Father Bill's let him go. Keizer said they told him they'd give him good references, make it easier for him to find another job or collect unemployment.

He doesn't want unemployment. He doesn't want another job. He doesn't want anybody to feel sorry for him. He just wants to work at the shelter he loves. Father Bill's was perfectly within its rights to terminate Keizer.

But there are rights, and there is right. Right would have been doing what state law allows in these situations: hearing Keizer out on why he's no threat to the men he was working with. Deciding that his armed robbery was so long ago, and so not an obstacle to his work now, that they'd keep him on. They did neither of these things. Maybe they have their reasons, but they didn't respond to my numerous requests to share them.

Keizer has done what we're always saying we want criminals to do: Recognize their mistakes, do their time, give back. He understands why wife abusers should be barred from working in shelters, child predators from schools. What he doesn't get is how a 31-year-old conviction could suddenly make him a danger at the shelter. "Yes, I was a knucklehead," he says now. "I disgraced my family.

But I did the right thing. I have something to offer." Now he has become exactly the wrong kind of example for the broken men at MainSpring. "What does this say to the people I was working with there, that this happened to me?" he asks. "It says, 'Don't bother to change because when you do, someone or something will stop your progress, even if you're doing the right That message is far more harmful to Father Bill's clients than Stephen Keizer could ever be. I have begged wildlife officials to do more to control and kill coyotes.

Now, it seems, they may get their wish. New regulations, recently approved by the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, have authorized private businessmen, who typically remove raccoons from chimneys or squirrels from attics, to trap or kill coyotes on private property. But the changes, which also include an expanded hunting season, do not please everyone. Animal advocacy groups and wildlife biologists say the state does not need to circumvent local animal control officers by bringing in private agents to do the same job. They worry that residents concerned about their pet's safety will now be able to pay someone to kill a coyote for just passing through their yards.

They say that making it easier for more people to kill coyotes will not help reduce the state's coyote population, roughly 10,000 strong, and may make matters worse. Coyotes are adaptable, opportunistic animals, interested in the easy meals that suburban living often provides and in protecting their territory, according to biologists. When a coyote goes down, a new coyote will inevitably move into the area. With more open land at its disposal, a coyote may even breed more. But what troubles Jonathan Way most is the apparent blood thirst that some people have for the coyote.

Way, author of "Suburban Howls: Tracking the Eastern Coyote in Urban Mas- 1959 1980 1 1990 I 2007 Found everywhere except Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket GEORGE PATISTEASGLOBE STAFF Found in scattered parts of Western and Central Massachusetts SOURCE: Mass. Division of Fisheries and Wildlife Two die in Mansfield plane crash Minimi aT4 Brookline church plans irk neighbors By Anna Badkhen GLOBE CORRESPONDENT BROOKLINE To accommodate its rapidly growing Massachusetts congregation, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is planning to build a house of worship on the shadowy slope of a drumlin overlooking Brookline Reservoir Park. But the plan has roiled some members of a high-end residential community whose homes abut the land. A Mormon church, say these residents, will disrupt the landscape, threaten the environment, snag traffic, and, ultimately, depreciate house values in the community, the grounds of which were designed by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who planned Central Park in New York City and Boston's Emerald Necklace. MORMONS, Page B2 Two seriously hurt as craft nosedives By Brian Ballou GLOBE STAFF and Ryan Haggerty GLOBE CORRESPONDENT MANSFIELD A single-engine plane carrying four men nosedived into rocky underbrush just off a runway at Mansfield Municipal Airport after it struggled to take off yesterday, killing two of the men and seriously injuring the others.

The pilot, Lawrence Mann, and Cabot Squire, both of Portland, Maine, died in the crash. Matthew Kramer of Mansfield was airlifted to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and Jared Lamey of Saco, Maine, was airlifted to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, said Mansfield; police. The 1973 Cessna 172 appeared to accelerate slowly when it began its CRASH, Page BS cm; MIKE GEORGEPOOL An investigator examined the wreckage of a single-engine airplane that crashed on takeoff yesterday at Mansfield Municipal Airport. Town hall break-ins Police say two men charged with breaking into town halls in New Hampshire may be suspects in a string of similar crimes in more than a dozen rural towns in Central and Western Massachusetts. Bll Political uproar Jim Ogonowski, whose brother was killed on Sept.

1 1 2001, and who is seeking to become the state's first Republican congressman in more than a decade, is not invited to a State House event marking the attacks. BS Wildcat sightings The possible sighting of a second large feline, possibly a mountain lion, in a Westford neighborhood in the past week has police cautioning residents to keep an eye on pets and small children. B3 Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abrahamglobe.com..