Boston officials are warning that public drinking will not be tolerated at this Sunday’s St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston, as police also urge attendees to be vigilant about drink spiking during one of the city’s busiest nightlife weekends.

The Boston Police Department issued a community alert ahead of the celebration reminding attendees that public drinking, providing alcohol to minors, and open containers in public are illegal.

Police also cautioned attendees about the risks of drink spiking — when drugs such as “roofies” are secretly placed into beverages. These substances are often colorless, odorless, and tasteless and can cause disorientation, confusion, temporary paralysis, or unconsciousness, leaving victims vulnerable, according to the BPD statement. 

Police advised having drinks served directly by a bartender or server and to keep beverages attended at all times. BPD also suggested using drink-testing tools, such as test strips or special nail polish designed to detect drugs, and covering drinks when they are not being actively consumed. 

“Let’s work together to ensure a safe and enjoyable spring break for all,” police said. 

The warnings come as local officials say they are backing stronger enforcement after last year’s parade weekend saw incidents of violence and disorder. 

City Councilor Ed Flynn, U.S. Rep Stephen Lynch, state Sen. Nick Collins, and state Rep. David Biele wrote a joint letter to education leaders across Massachusetts, asking them to notify Boston-area college presidents and high school superintendents about the public safety protocols and potential consequences for students who break the law. 

“As elected officials, we have given our full support to public safety officials to enforce the law and keep the community safe,” they wrote.  

The group said it has spent the past year working with state and local agencies on a task force to address the “unacceptable ‘anything goes’ atmosphere” that developed last year. Issues included public drinking, disturbing incidents of violence, public assaults, people standing on rooftops without roof decks, overcrowded bars, beer cans thrown at parade marchers, and public urination on private property. 

“The Task Force is committed to restoring the Evacuation Day & St. Patrick’s Parade to a family-friendly event — inclusive for our seniors, persons with disabilities, and young children and families — that not only focuses on celebrating a consequential victory during the American Revolution, but to honor the service and sacrifice of our veterans, military families and first responders, as well as our proud immigrant heritage,” the group wrote.

In addition, the task force said they have developed strategies to address public drinking and underage alcohol smuggling on the MBTA, and Boston Fire Department Commissioner Paul Burke said there will be enforcement over roof deck overcrowding.

The City of Boston Licensing Board told Boston.com that it has reminded establishments about special rules in place for parade day.

Rules that licensees must follow include not serving alcohol before 12 p.m. without express permission, alcohol service must end by 7 p.m., and all patrons must leave licensed premises by 7:30 p.m. 

The spiking problem

Concerns about drink spiking were also discussed during a City Council hearing Thursday led by Councilor Gabriela Coletta Zapata.

Zapata said dozens of drink-spiking incidents are reported in Boston each year. The city recorded 116 reports in 2022, 107 in 2023, and 71 in 2024.

While the numbers have declined, experts believe many cases go unreported, she said.

Flynn said he has been meeting with Boston police monthly to discuss the issue and safety planning ahead of the parade.

The hearing also included testimony from residents, including one woman who said she was drugged in late 2022 at age 56 and taken to Massachusetts General Hospital.

She said she was denied a toxicology screen because she had not been sexually assaulted.

“I’m grateful I wasn’t, but a victim should not have to experience the worst-case scenario to receive basic medical evidence collection,” she said.

Wu administration officials and Boston police testifying at the hearing said a number of steps have been taken to try to prevent drink spiking, including distributing thousands of drink covers to bars and restaurants so patrons can protect their beverages. 

But the woman who testified said she had never encountered the covers.

“Where are they? I live in Boston, go out often, and have never seen one,” she said. 

“Any one of you could be drugged today, via a glass of water, coffee, wine. Your teenage daughter, your son, your mother, your father — nobody’s immune,” she added. 

Councilor Erin Murphy questioned whether the approach is effective, saying she has never seen people using the drink covers and that they could imply victims are responsible for preventing their drinks from being tampered with.

Boston Police Capt. Det. Terry Thomas said bars and restaurants are encouraged to remake drinks for anyone who suspects their beverage may have been spiked.

Zapata said the concerts are particularly relevant heading into St. Patrick’s Day celebrations — “one of the busiest weekends for nightlife” in Boston.

“We know Boston is safe, but we also know that drink spiking has been a concern in the city over the last several years,” Zapata said. “Public safety means making sure people can enjoy [themselves] without worrying that their drink could be tampered with.”

In 2010, at age 19, Sony Ton-Aime was introduced to English. Born in Haiti, he’d grown up speaking Haitian Creole at home and French at school. Now he was enrolled at Kent State University, where he’d spend a semester in the English as a Second Language program.

Sixteen years later, it’s safe to say Ton-Aime is up to speed as far as English goes. He’s well into his third year as executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, the region’s premiere showcase for visiting authors. And he’s just published his first book of poetry, “Konbit,” as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series.

‘Your time has come’

The 93-page collection evokes the Haitian Revolution of 1791 and its contemporary echoes. Its theme is reflected in its title: “Konbit,” said Ton-Aime, is a Haitian Creole word for any project that requires the collective to achieve, whether that’s bringing in the harvest, staging a wedding, or pulling a car out of a ditch.

Many of the nearly 60 poems invoke the Bois Caiman ceremony, a religious gathering in August 1791 attended mostly by enslaved Blacks at which they resolved to overthrow French colonizers. Ton-Aime draws on both the historical record and the folklore surrounding the event to depict leaders like Dutty Boukman and Cecile Fatiman.

“Fatiman Contemplates the Knife on the Eve of the Bois Caiman Ceremony” begins, “blood-tinted blade / rusted yet never dull / prayer in waiting / always out of reach / you so many times have failed / you for far too long / have been hidden / your time has come …”

Poems in the latter portions of the book depict the Haiti of the 1990s and thereafter, when Ton-Aime grew up and came of age. Verses like “In the ’80s the U.S. Destroyed Haiti’s Rice Culture” (“a country / on its knees with promise of a full belly”) and “1994” collapse the history into a contemporary world of earthquakes, automobiles, HIV, corrupt aid workers and the effects of climate change.

But there is also joy, typically experienced in community. In the book’s title poem, Ton-Aime writes, “The children fill the holes with handfuls of corn. It is life. Men dig holes, children occupy them, and women mend the world.”

The book is replete with mothers and mother figures, a theme Ton-Aime said honors his own mother but also Haiti as “a nurturing place” and the women who looked after him as a child when his mother went off to sell secondhand clothes in the market. “She left me with the folks in the village, the women in the village,” he said. “And so many of them really took care of me and I came to see them as really mothers, in a way.”

In highlighting figures like Boukman, Fatiman and the unsung mothers of Haiti, Ton-Aime also seeks to emphasize the resourcefulness and creativity of marginalized people. He said their example can be a powerful one in troubled times.

“We have faced existential threats as well in the past, and I wanted this collection to be a way to connect them and for folks to feel a sense of optimism that our ancestors, our forefathers and foremothers, survived this,” he said. “And we can as well survive them.”

‘I can tell my own stories’

As a child, Ton-Aime loved reading and writing. At Kent State, in a practical move, he studied accounting and worked in that field back home. But the love of poetry he found in Kent State’s writing community brought him back to earn a master’s degree in poetry through the Northeast Ohio MFA Program.

A new career in arts administration led him first to the Cleveland-based nonprofit Lake Erie Ink, and then, in 2020, to New York’s famed Chautauqua Institute, where he became director of literary arts.

But even at PAL, as he was hosting authors like Zadie Smith, Percival Everett and Elizabeth Gilbert, he continued working on poetry. He especially credited as an inspiration the work of Jamaican-born American poet Shara McCallum.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I do not need to be an American to write poetry in [the] United States. I can keep my own authentic voice. I can tell my own stories that will relate to folks, right? And Shara McCallum was really the first person that gave me this permission to be my authentic self.”

Ton-Aime’s other literary projects include the Haitian Creole translation of “Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour Story” and co-authoring the Haitian Creole course on Duolingo.

McCallum, who is a Penn State professor, and poet Joy Priest, who teaches in the University of Pittsburgh’s master of fine arts program, will join Ton-Aime at the “Konbit” book launch on Sun., March 15. The event, at Alphabet City, on the North Side, is free, but registration is recommended.

The Connecticut “House of Horrors” mom accused of imprisoning her stepson in foul conditions for over 20 years hid her face as she scurried to and from court on the anniversary of her arrest.

Kimberly Sullivan, 57, ducked for cover as she rushed from her car to a Waterbury court for a brief hearing Thursday, and then back out minutes later.

Sullivan refused to answer questions like “What’s wrong with you, why did you do that to your stepson?” as she passed with sunglasses on and a hood over her face.

She was sporting her typically flamboyant looks – purple hair and a suit to match.

Sullivan is accused of keeping her stepson – now 33 – locked in a filthy room in their Waterbury home beginning when he was around 10, only letting him out for a few hours so he could do chores.

The stepson – currently known only as “S” in public — weighed just 68 pounds when he was discovered in February 2025 after he apparently set fire to his room in a desperate escape attempt.

Police initially thought they were dealing with a typical housefire, but S soon began telling terrifying tales of being taken out of school as a boy, before being relegated to the upstairs storage room that allegedly became his prison-home for decades.

Sullivan was arrested within weeks, but soon freed on $300,000 bail while being ordered not to contact her stepson.

She was in court for barely two minutes a year later on Thursday, with her attorney discussing logistics for obtaining the stepson’s medical records as trial preparations are underway.

Sullivan won a major legal breakthrough in October when a judge granted her access to the medical records after her attorneys argued the typically confidential information was crucial to the defense.

“We are really trying to see what evidence they have and what evidence they are going to produce at trial. I don’t know what’s in there. We’ll know when we see them,” Sullivan’s attorney, Ioannis Kaloidis, told reporters after the hearing.

“It wasn’t true then and it’s not true now,” Kaloidis added when asked whether Sullivan really did starve her stepson – but he refused to comment when asked why S weighed just 68-pounds when rescued from the housefire.

“We’ll see,” the attorney told The Post, shrugging.

Sullivan has been in hiding since she was arrested – with her attorney saying she’d been branded “public enemy number one” in the last year.

“As you can imagine, any time your face is plastered all over the news, you become public enemy number one. It does make it difficult to go out and resume a normal life,” Kaloidis.

It remains unclear where Sullivan has been living, but the home she shared with her stepson was left a scorched husk after the February fire.

The stepson remains in an undisclosed location, and has reportedly been recovering well after a hospital stay.

Sullivan is due back in court on April 30, and is charged with kidnapping, assault, unlawful restraint and cruelty to persons. She pleaded not guilty to the charges.