BOSTON.- The mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu offered a formal apology Wednesday to two black men who were wrongly accused of the 1989 murder of a white woman, a case that deepened divisions in a city long divided along racial lines and renewed suspicions and the anger of the black community against the police department.
“I am very sorry for what you had to endure,” the mayor said during a press conference. “I am so sorry for the pain they have carried for so many years.”
Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett were wrongly named as suspects in the October 23, 1989, murder of Carol Stuart, whose husband, Charles Stuart, had orchestrated the crime.
Stuart, who was also white, blamed his wife’s murder — and his own gunshot wound during what he described as an attempted violent carjacking — on an unidentified black man, prompting a police crackdown in one of the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods in search of an unknown assailant.
Charles Stuart said a black man forced his way into his car as he and his wife were leaving a childbirth class at a city hospital on Oct. 23. The man ordered them to drive to the city’s Mission Hill neighborhood and robbed them before shooting Carol Stuart in the head and Charles in the chest, according to Charles.
Carol Stuart, 29, died the next morning at the same hospital where the couple had attended childbirth classes. The baby, born by cesarean section, survived only 17 days.
Charles Stuart survived the shooting, and his description of a black attacker ended up triggering a widespread police “stop and search” campaign of black men in the neighborhood, even as some investigators had already come to doubt his story.
“What was done was unfair, inequitable, racist and wrong,” Wu declared Wednesday.
During the crackdown, police first detained Swanson before ruling out his involvement, and then took Bennett into custody. Stuart would later identify Bennett in late December. But by then, Stuart’s story had already begun to unravel.
Swanson and Bennett denied involvement in Carol Stuart’s death. Charles Stuart’s brother Matthew eventually confessed to helping him hide the gun.
On January 4, 1990, Charles Stuart parked his car on the Tobin Bridge leading to and from Boston and jumped off, plunging to his death. His body was recovered that same day.
Source: With information from AP
