The suspect, according to Stuart, shot him in the stomach and his wife in the head after forcing them to drive into the predominantly Black Mission Hill Housing projects, as it was known at the time.Ĭarol Stuart was killed her baby was delivered by cesarean section but died 17 days later. He said that Boston is a different place today than it was in 1989.įor more than two months that fall and winter, Boston police, prosecutors and media acted on the description that the suspect was an African American man with “a raspy” voice, a man who was wearing a tracksuit the night he carjacked the Stuarts after they left a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “As commissioner, I apologize for the hurt, pain and suffering experienced by everyone affected by the Boston Police Department for their poor investigation and overzealous behavior and more likely unconstitutional behavior,” Cox said.Ĭox also apologized to the family of Carol DiMaiti Stuart “for the lack of professionalism shown by our department during this investigation.” The unprecedented apology comes in the weeks after the Boston Globe launched a podcast, HBO docuseries and print series revisiting the Stuart murder and the city’s response to Charles Stuart’s lie.īoston Police Commissioner Michael Cox said the documentary reminded him of the impact that the Stuart case has had on Boston and its Black communities and expressed regret for the role of the police. HBO’s new docuseries tells the ‘cautionary tale’ of the Charles Stuart case Wu also lamented “the tremendous pain that the city of Boston inflicted on Black residents throughout our neighborhoods 34 years ago.” What was done to you was unjust, unfair, racist and wrong, and this apology is long overdue.” "I am so sorry for the pain that you have carried for so many years. Bennett, the entire Bennett family, and Boston’s entire Black community, I am so sorry for what you endured that day,” Wu said, with Swanson and the Bennett family by her side. On Wednesday, Mayor Michelle Wu - Boston’s first mayor of color - did what no other mayor has done: She formally apologized on behalf of the city to two Black men who were wrongly linked to the fatal shooting 34 years ago, Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett, and to Black Bostonians. And for months, city officials, police and media acted on that presumption, besieging Black neighborhoods in search of a suspect. 23, 1989, Charles Stuart, a white man, fatally shot his pregnant wife, Carol DiMaiti Stuart, in the head and blamed the shocking murder on a Black man.
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