Ayanna Pressley has spent years in Congress positioning herself as a champion of Boston’s working class, railing against inequality from her perch on Capitol Hill.
But something turned up at one of her family’s rental properties that she’d probably rather not talk about.
And the Boston Police Department’s homicide unit is now running a death investigation at a home her husband owns in the city’s Mattapan neighborhood.
What Happened at 25 Malta Street
Police spokesperson James Moccia told CBS News Boston that officers were called to a house on Malta Street in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood at 1:52 p.m. “for a report to investigate a person.”
When they arrived, they found the person deceased, and Moccia said the homicide unit is handling the investigation.
Sergeant Detective John Boyle, another spokesperson for the department, described the situation as a “death investigation.”
The two-story, seven-bedroom home was built in 1910 and is currently for sale, with an asking price of $1.15 million.
The home was built in 1910 and was valued this year at more than $919,000, according to property records. Conan Harris purchased the multi-family property for $340,000 in 2021.
Pressley and her husband don’t live at the rental property, which is owned by Harris and is currently listed for sale for $1.15 million.
A spokesperson for Pressley issued a statement saying the congresswoman “extends her deepest condolences to the impacted family.”
But the statement didn’t address a detail that makes this story a lot harder to wave away.
The New York Post reported that a neighbor named Cherill stated that Boston police previously raided the property about two months ago. There were tenants on each floor of the property at the time of the raid, including high-school aged teenagers, Cherill said.
The realtor selling the property said it went on the market about a month ago, and that the same tenants had been living in the house for “a while.”
Harris attended a renaming ceremony that morning at the Shaw-Roxbury Branch Library, where he delivered remarks at the podium on behalf of Pressley. Pressley herself was in Memphis, Tennessee, appearing with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Summer Lee, and State Representative Justin Pearson.
Details of the dead body’s identity, including gender, name, and cause of death, have not been released. Authorities have not linked Pressley or Harris to the body.
The Man Behind the Property
Conan Harris is not a name most Americans know. But the details of his background are worth understanding.
Harris testified before the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on barriers to making a successful return from prison, drawing on his experience of reintegrating into his community after serving 10 years for drug trafficking.
Three days before Pressley took office in January 2019, Harris left his $92,500-per-year position as public safety adviser to then-Boston mayor Marty Walsh to launch his own consulting business.
And the timing of that career pivot raised eyebrows almost immediately.
By 2021, he more than tripled his annual salary, earning $350,000 by consulting for nonprofits and businesses in the Boston area, and in 2022 earned up to $1.05 million from his consulting businesses, according to Pressley’s financial disclosure.
Experts warned at the time that Harris’s transition into consulting could pose ethical problems, as it created the appearance that he was trying to profit off his wife’s political success.
Pressley’s husband also won a multimillion-dollar project contract courtesy of Democratic Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. The Boston Planning Department awarded DREAM Development a 400-unit housing project in April 2024, and Harris, who served over a decade in prison for drug trafficking, is listed as a partner and investor in DREAM Development, standing to benefit from the $250 million deal.
But the rental empire is what connects directly to this week’s death investigation.
Despite Pressley’s image as an advocate for the working class, her congressionally mandated annual financial disclosure shows that she and her husband’s five rental properties brought in between $145,000 and $350,000 in 2024.
According to financial disclosures, Pressley’s worth went from $12,500 before she was elected in 2018 to up to $8 million in 2024.
When Fox News asked Pressley about her climbing wealth earlier this year, she gave a response that told reporters exactly nothing.
“Sir, I submit a financial disclosure, just like everybody else. There’s nothing to see here,” Pressley told Fox News.
The Bigger Picture Pressley Doesn’t Want Voters to See
Pressley has built her political brand on the idea that she fights for the people getting squeezed at the bottom. She’s a founding member of the Squad, the informal coalition of hard-left House Democrats that includes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. She campaigns on tenant protections, wealth redistribution, and criminal justice reform.
And yet here is the picture that emerges from the public record: a Squad congresswoman and her husband, a convicted drug trafficker turned million-dollar consultant, who own multiple rental properties across Massachusetts worth millions, collect six figures in rent annually, and now have a homicide investigation unfolding at one of those properties, which neighbors say police had already raided two months prior.
That’s not a fringe observation. That’s the documented financial record and the active police investigation.
Earlier this year, Harris made news for a different reason entirely. Harris slapped a phone out of a reporter’s hands inside a city hall building after they attempted to approach Pressley to ask her a question about alleged childcare fraud in Minnesota. The reporter had barely gotten three words out before Harris knocked the device to the floor.
And that incident tells you something about how this couple handles scrutiny.
Pressley has spent years in Congress lecturing about systemic inequality, the dangers of unchecked wealth, and the need for the government to intervene in the lives of ordinary people. But her own financial disclosures read like someone who figured out how to use political connections to build a real estate portfolio and a consulting empire while her constituents struggled with rent in one of the most expensive housing markets in New England.
The property at 25 Malta Street sits right in the middle of Pressley’s own congressional district, in a neighborhood her campaign has long claimed to champion. It seems some sort of criminal activity is suspected at the place, given the prior raid, and now a body has turned up there.
Boston police have not named any suspects, have not released the victim’s identity, and have not established a cause of death. The investigation is ongoing. None of that changes the basic facts on the ground.
But voters in Massachusetts’s 7th Congressional District deserve a lot more than “there’s nothing to see here.”
The Squad has always been better at generating outrage than answering questions. This week, the questions just got a lot harder to dodge.
Sources: New York Post, CBS News Boston, Boston Globe, PJ Media, RedState, Fox News, Dallas Express, Washington Free Beacon, The Appeal, Daily Caller News Foundation