http://www.vikilist.com/images/upload/5Lril-s70BU-Abg2E-tuxpK-KYpHg-HKyw9.jpg

A labor foreman now living in Maine, Rakes vividly recalls the “blind anger” that motivated him—anger aimed, he says, at the urban policies that were ruining the close-knit South Boston neighborhood where he’d grown up. “When the busing started, it was, ‘You can’t have half your friends’—that’s the way it was put towards us,” Rakes says. “They took half the guys and girls I grew up with and said, ‘You’re going to school on the other side of town.’ Nobody understood it at 15.”

The day he borrowed his family’s flag for the demonstration, Rakes says, he was simmering with two years of pent-up frustration. Another set of protesters threw debris and rocks at his group, he adds, and that “sent everybody over the edge....It kind of exploded at that moment.”

Rakes’ actions at City Hall Plaza led to a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon and a two-year suspended sentence. “The picture—it says what it says, but it doesn’t tell the whole story,” he says. “You know, there’s nothing I can do about it. I just move on in my life.”

From Wikipedia
In 1983 the Boston police issued a warrant alleging that Rakes had beaten to death the brother of his girlfriend. He fled prosecution, but returned in 1988 after the murder charge was dropped. Rakes carried the stigma of being known as "the flag kid", but eventually turned his life around, getting married and having a family while laboring as a construction worker and later in hazardous waste.

yeah sounds like he really turned things around lol.