[TV static drones]
[bright tone]
[beeping]
- Can I help you? - How you doing?
This is Sergeant Grabowski at GHQ in Boston.
I've got somebody that's, uh, just been shot.
Uh, two people that have just been shot.
I've got him on the phone.
Hold on a minute, please. - Mm-hmm.
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
- October 23, 1989.
♪ ♪
A 911 call comes in to state police dispatch.
The first thing the caller says is,
"My wife's been shot.
I've been shot."
- They had been in a birthing class
at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
[sirens wailing]
[beeping]
- October 1989,
I was a deputy superintendent shift commander at Boston EMS.
Evidently, the person that was shot
called the emergency number on a cellular phone,
saying that he was shot and his wife was shot as well.
There's a man shot, and his wife is shot.
They didn't know where they were.
- And during the call, he's getting weaker and weaker.
[line clicks] [dial tone]
- At some point,
about 10 minutes into the call,
he actually stops talking, but the phone is open.
- And that's where the dispatchers,
one of them heard a siren.
- So then they started having cruisers in the field
turn the sirens on, turn the sirens off.
[siren wailing]
- By turning the sirens on and off
of the different cruisers,
they're able to hear one clearly and realize
they're close to the car.
- Bravo 2-1, your siren's on.
[siren wailing]
- Start to narrow it down pretty quickly,
take a left on St. Alphonsus, and--
and there was the car.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[indistinct chatter, shouting]
♪ ♪
- Step back, step back, step back, step back.
♪ ♪
- I stayed with Chuck
and started taking care of him.
He kept saying over and over,
"Don't take care of me.
Take care of my wife. Take care of my wife."
[siren wailing]
[tense music]
♪ ♪
He had a pretty significant gunshot wound.
- One guy? Two guys?
- First thing he would say was, "Black man."
- He described him as a Black male, about 5'10",
raspy voice,
and said that he had fled
into the Mission Hill housing project.
- This one's going to City.
The other one went to, uh, Brigham, okay?
- They rushed them over to the hospital.
[siren wailing]
Carol Stuart would live for about six hours.
There was surgery to remove her baby.
Charles Stuart was in bad shape.
He was critically injured, but he was alive.
[indistinct chatter]
[solemn music]
- That hurt, buddy? Your belly hurts?
That hurts when I press?
- [groans] - That's it. Don't go up.
- [muffled] Where's my wife?
- She went to another hospital.
We can't keep an update,
'cause we're taking care of you, okay?
- Okay. - All right.
- Are you putting in a chest tube?
- No.
- Is there someone you want us to call for you?
- He eventually would be well enough
to begin talking to police again
and provide more information.
- We go live now to the department's
chief of detectives.
What do we know about the suspect?
[dramatic music]
- The police and the mayor
just, uh, briefed us moments ago.
This is what we do know at this hour.
Police are looking for a 30-year-old male,
a Black suspect,
in connection with a double shooting.
Doctors managed to save their baby,
performing an emergency cesarean section.
The baby is also in critical condition tonight.
Deputy Joseph Dunford, the chief of detectives...
- Once at the hospital, you started to realize
that this was gonna be a much bigger incident.
- The assailant shot the woman in the back of the head.
- It started to get bigger and bigger,
and certainly by the next morning, it was--
I mean, it was on the front page of the "Herald."
And it became a national story rather quickly.
♪ ♪
- The killing of 30-year-old Carol Stuart,
seven months pregnant,
sparked cries of outrage in Boston
and around the country.
- This was on every news channel imaginable
because of where it happened and what happened.
♪ ♪
When crimes happen in certain parts of Boston,
we all fit the description,
so we knew what was about to happen.
We knew the hell that was about to descend upon us.
[siren wailing]
- It was open season on Black people.
That's what it was. It was open season.
♪ ♪
- The Stuart case, it'll always be there.
It'll always be a focal point of the bad side of Boston.
- I have had enough!
This community has had enough!
- People involved in this case,
they are eager to unburden themselves of their thoughts,
what it meant at the time, what it still means now.
It's as if we've been waiting
for this case to be just uncorked.
♪ ♪
What is it that happened back then,
and what is the impact that it still has on us now?
♪ ♪
- Boston is a unique place.
We're constantly coming to terms
with our own paradoxes in this city.
We are really well-known
for our liberal, progressive politics.
[soft music]
We're a highly educated people.
♪ ♪
Our universities are the best in the world.
♪ ♪
And yet, Boston is also a place that has
a really checkered history on race relations,
and it's been a long battle here.
♪ ♪
- It's a clannish place.
The shamrocks around this are not an illusion.
It's not just for the Boston Celtics.
This is an Irish town.
This is theirs.
And when you think about the history of this city,
especially if you go way back,
there has always been a split,
that the WASPs controlled the money,
and the Irish controlled the politics.
And the Black people were somewhere in the corner,
trying to get someone's attention
or not get beat up at the same time.
♪ ♪
The biggest juxtaposition for me as a Bostonian
has been, you had heard this legend of Boston
as a birthplace of democracy.
Sumner and Phillips and all of the great abolitionists,
and Frederick Douglass and the 54th Regiment,
all those statues are real, because that's our history.
But then we also have another history as well,
that people will just call this
the most racist city in America.
- In Massachusetts,
a white man named Charles Stuart
has been shot by a Black man.
- They were shot by a Black man
who forced his way into their car.
- A Black man had forced his way into their car,
forced them to drive to a Black neighborhood,
robbed them, and shot them.
Afterwards, Stuart called police on his car phone.
- When I think about the Stuart case,
you have to put it in the proper context
of where we were during that time period.
The modern history of Boston really begins with busing.
♪ ♪
[projector whirring]
[clicks]
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- Boston's not a city.
It's a collection of neighborhoods.
I got here, and people said things like,
"Don't go to South Boston. Don't go to Charlestown."
♪ ♪
Where I had grown up and lived my whole life before that,
in Miami, there was nothing like that.
There weren't neighborhoods
you weren't supposed to go into.
♪ ♪
If you grew up in a certain neighborhood--
Roxbury, Mission Hill, part of Dorchester, Mattapan--
that's where you stayed.
I mean, you might go to Southie
once in a while for a reason,
but it was kind of like it wasn't even
part of the same city.
♪ ♪
I'd meet people from Dorchester
who'd never been to the South End.
To somebody from Miami, that was nuts.
It's, like, 10 minutes down Mass Ave.
What are you talking about?
♪ ♪
- Most cities are naturally segregated.
Boston takes it to an extreme,
especially in the 1990s and before.
- I won't drive up, um, Morton Street.
I won't go through Blue Hill Ave,
not because I've had any bad experiences, just that--
why give myself an opportunity to get put in that situation?
- It's the running story with white folks in Massachusetts.
You can't spend too much time in Roxbury, lower Roxbury,
Dorchester, what have you, because you're gonna be
attacked and all this other stuff.
Whereas our experience was when we left those regions,
that's what happened to us.
♪ ♪
- When I moved to Boston,
my wife was white.
We were strongly advised to avoid South Boston,
advised not to spend much time in Charlestown.
Walking the streets of various neighborhoods,
we were pretty much guaranteed to hear,
uh, racial epithets thrown at us.
- Charlestown?
I went there before, a long time ago.
It was beautiful.
I will never go there no more.
- I assume a person in Charlestown
might feel unsafe going to Roxbury, and vice versa.
Nobody in the city is free to go anyplace they want to go.
- The schools in Black neighborhoods were disastrous.
They were terrible.
And there was just simply more opportunity
in the white communities.
Parents knew that there had to be
more desegregation and more integration in the schools.
- A group of Black parents sued,
and a federal judge named W. Arthur Garrity
ordered the desegregation of the Boston Public Schools.
- At the end of my block was the old NAACP building.
That got firebombed after the busing ruling came.
Like, the first idea was that somebody threw a firebomb
at the NAACP office on Mass Ave.
Like, there's a picture of it.
- The Garrity busing ruling was 1974.
My uncles and my parents used to say all the time,
"We never knew how much they hated us until then.
"We always thought we got along.
"We thought this was a good place.
Had no idea how deeply they hated us until '74."
- I'm ordering you to disperse
in the name of the Commonwealth.
If you're not gonna disperse, you're gonna be arrested.
[crowd chanting] Here we go!
- Why am I very prejudiced?
Well, I wouldn't be if busing didn't start.
When busing started, you know,
I never even seen a colored before.
I never even knew what they were.
But as soon as I got to know 'em,
they, uh--I didn't like 'em off the bat.
- Let us go to our neighborhoods
where our kids are safe.
We want our kids safe.
We want our children safe.
- The '70s were a very tumultuous time in Boston.
The anger of the hundreds, if not thousands,
of whites from South Boston
was because of the impact on a nice lifestyle.
You wanted your kids to go to neighborhood schools
because you had gone to neighborhood schools.
Unfortunately, whites resented this idea
of taking away our lifestyle and forcing this population
of Black and brown people upon us,
of forcing our kids to go into these neighborhoods
that, uh, were so crime-ridden and so deteriorated.
- What Black parents were asking for
was equity in terms of access to schools.
They actually weren't asking
to go to school with white kids.
They just wanted a shot and an opportunity,
and not to have crap buildings and crap facilities.
[crowd chanting indistinctly]
- We have nothing to gain by keeping them here.
Send them back to Roxbury.
[crowd yelling indistinctly]
- But the crowd just kept shouting,
"Bus them back to Africa."
- In Charlestown,
whites burned an effigy of a Black student.
Police had to break them up.
- Remember, right, when I was in the fifth grade,
right, I was doing all kinds, you know,
like, eighth grade work, right?
I know when I went to Roxbury, right,
I was doing the same work, third and fourth grade work.
And I mean, the niggers are just sitting there,
and they didn't know what they were doing.
And I knew what I was doing.
And I asked the teacher, why did he do this?
And he goes, well, he goes,
"Half these people are slow in this class."
And I just walked out, and I never went to school again.
And I've been out of school for almost four years now.
- Some of us--
- And I feel it's because of the Black people,
because of all this busing. - Mm-hmm.
- All of it, I bet you--
- I grew up in Mission Hill.
So we were bused to Brighton,
which was primarily white.
I remember white people throwing rocks at Black kids,
and they were told to go back home.
"You're not allowed here."
- If you rode a bus and you had to be on a detour
and you go through another part of town,
the bus driver would tell you,
"Uh, we're cutting through Southie now."
And we had a bus monitor, which was an adult,
and she would say something like, "Get down!"
So we'd get down on the bus as we're riding through,
because again, you can see who's in the bus
as it's going through the street.
So once they noticed there were brown kids on the bus,
people start throwing shit at the bus.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- All this to go to school.
All of this resistance just to go to school.
The message was sent very clearly that
you belong in your part of town,
and the rest of this is not yours.
♪ ♪
- You learned to adjust.
You had to fight your way.
As a child growing up, you had to fight.
Uh, even in Mission Hill, where I grew up.
♪ ♪
I remember as a nine-year-old going to Cub Scouts,
and every Wednesday,
I would get spit on by white dudes, right?
I, um, would walk down Tremont Street
right in front of Mission Church.
I can remember it vividly.
♪ ♪
And these white guys, they would wait for me
every Wednesday, it seemed, 'cause I had to walk by them.
And I got used to it,
where I would walk and brace myself.
I never told my mom about this, 'cause I was embarrassed.
And I would go into the Cub Scouts,
and I wouldn't tell anyone,
and I'd just go in the bathroom
and wipe myself off.
To be in the position, every Wednesday,
smelling of liquor and spit--
I can still smell it.
[crowd shouting indistinctly]
[poignant music]
♪ ♪
- Boston deserved the reputation that it had,
given the reaction to busing
and the fracture that that created.
Boston deserved the reputation that it had
when Ted Landsmark was attacked
in front of the Boston City Hall.
♪ ♪
- I was on my way
to an affirmative action meeting in City Hall,
and I realized that I was about to walk
into the front of this demonstration
of high school kids against
what they considered to be forced busing.
♪ ♪
A couple of the guys yelled out,
"There's a..."
N-word.
"Get him."
And then they circled back
to jump on me from behind.
And the flag-bearer
then swung the American flag at me...
♪ ♪
Knocking off my glasses and kicking me
in the brief moment that I was knocked down.
And then they ran off
to continue their demonstration,
and I was left standing alone on City Hall Plaza,
uh, bleeding from a nosebleed and kind of dazed,
wondering what had just happened to me.
♪ ♪
[indistinct chatter]
We must avoid being exploited
and having this act of violence exploited
to distract attention from the complex
and extremely urgent problem of the life of this city
and the lives of Black and white people,
and all-colored peoples in this city.
- What happened in the years after
the desegregation controversy
was persistent racial violence.
[tense music]
A Black man actually got attacked
on the State House steps.
It was witnessed by several people.
A state rep, Ray Flynn, came flying down the stairs
and physically broke up the altercation.
♪ ♪
Who was this guy?
- Hi, Vickie. How are you? - How are you?
- Hi, Bill. How are you, Bill? - How are you?
- Good, good.
- If Norman Rockwell wanted to do a portrait
to capture a kid in South Boston,
he should have had Ray Flynn sit for him.
He was an Irish kid.
He was tough.
He was a great basketball player.
He played at South Boston High,
then went on to Providence College.
- The Friars have one of the greatest outside shooters
in college ball in a young man
from Boston, Massachusetts, Ray Flynn.
[cheers and applause]
That's Ray there, number 15.
Swish.
- I think that his experience with African-American kids
in basketball changed him.
He was the guy who had seen beyond
just being in that neighborhood
and had reached out and accepted
some of the things he saw.
- The city's in the midst of the fight
to decide who will lead Boston after Kevin White,
four-term mayor.
♪ ♪
Our people start rallying behind Ray Flynn.
This guy might be the guy. [laughs] 1983.
We're gonna run against the establishment.
We're gonna bring Black and white people together
around economic issues,
and we're gonna put this history
of racial conflict behind us.
[cheers and applause]
- Tonight, Boston made history,
a united city
where the voice of every neighborhood
in this city has been heard.
- In the midst of a city divided by race,
Flynn then comes into office saying,
"We're gonna bring white people
and Black people together to fight the power."
- This is a time to break down the walls
of misunderstanding and bigotry
and build up a new foundation of racial harmony.
- Boston was in need of someone to heal the city.
Ray Flynn was considered one of the good ones.
He was considered one of the progressive,
one of the reformers, one of the ones
who was trying to change the perception of the city.
Black people didn't look at Ray Flynn in that city
as hostile to them.
And he had a lot to answer for, because Ray Flynn was
on the other side of it during busing.
Go look at the pictures.
There's Ray Flynn sitting there with Louise Day Hicks
and the rest of them in the anti-busing brigade.
And now by the '80s, he's the reformer.
He's the one trying to heal the city.
[applause]
- We went from 600 incidents of racial violence a year
to a--a few dozen.
It went from being the most important issue
when Ray Flynn took office
to one that was largely in the rearview mirror.
Not racism.
Racial violence.
Retaliatory violence based strictly on race.
♪ ♪
Our theory of action was,
if you change behavior effectively,
eventually, the attitudes will fade.
♪ ♪
- Particularly after Ray Flynn became the mayor,
things softened.
He was largely responsible for getting people
to realize that there is room here for everyone
to get along together.
And that is what I think we were feeling
in the early '80s.
- Mayor Raymond Flynn.
Give him a big hand.
- I believe that there was a time
that things were getting a little bit better.
He tried to work on race relations.
Because Ray was a good basketball player,
he could come to our gym,
play ball with the young people.
I had a good working relationship
with, uh, Ray Flynn
until the Stuart case happened.
- When did you find out about what happened last night?
- Uh, I was called approximately at 11:00,
and from 11:00 on,
I drove into the Boston City Hospital
and, uh, tried to comfort the Stuart--
Stuarts as much as-- as anyone can
under those type of circumstances.
- Um, if you had to describe the couple
and you had to describe Chuck, certainly to someone who--
who doesn't know him, what would you say?
- Caring.
Caring about--about other people, his family.
Uh, obviously, his close immediate family,
but also every single other employee that we have here,
he has their best interests in heart.
- What can you tell me about the Stuart family?
What kind of neighbors were they?
- They were very quiet.
They kept to themselves.
And they were really, you know, nice people.
They always walked by and said hello,
and my son used to play with--
when we first moved to the neighborhood,
they--we were here 14 years,
and they used to play football and baseball.
And all the younger kids looked up to him, you know?
- The atmosphere was fear on the part of a lot of people,
concern on the part of everyone.
People wanted answers, and they wanted them now.
- Charles and Carol Stuart moved to this house
on a dead-end street in Reading three years ago.
Nearly all the neighbors here know them
and describe the couple as compassionate
and thoughtful neighbors.
But some of those residents now admit
they're scared to go to Boston.
- Realize these areas,
and take precautions and avoid it.
They have to somehow, uh, make sure
they've got adequate security.
- There's obviously a sick individual out there,
or an individual that is, uh, in--
somewhere involved with drugs, or a combination of both.
- Are you afraid to go into Boston?
- Well, by myself, yeah.
- Really? Why?
- Well, because there are, like, crazy people out there.
- In addition to shock and sadness,
residents here are expressing another emotion--
fear.
- Yes, it is rather frightening.
You're almost afraid to go anywhere,
'cause you don't know if you'll be in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
- I think most suburban people have
no clue as to what goes on.
- I think he should-- the person who's done this
should be, uh, put to-- give him the chair
or give him the gas chamber, no parole.
- I think people coming from suburbs,
like in that area, are more separate,
'cause they're not used to dealing with the city.
[tense music]
- White folks in Massachusetts regard every place
where Black folks or Latino folks reside
as the ghetto.
That is something that, like, even as a kid stuck out to me.
It was like, why are white folks
always so scared coming here?
[indistinct chatter]
- Mission Hill was, um--it was fun.
Growing up for me, it was fun.
Like, I played marbles.
I rode bikes, rode dirt bikes.
We used to have the fire hydrants open.
There's, you know, block parties late at night.
- The world seen it as bad, but people that lived there,
it was life.
It was beautiful to us.
Everybody in the projects was like a family.
Everybody knew each other--
knows each other to this very day.
Everybody.
Um, so it was just like a big family growing up.
- Just a whole atmosphere of--
especially in the summertime,
of just families just out there,
because you grew up together,
so you hung out together, and they partied.
And you know, as a kid,
I used to watch all of that stuff go on,
and I used to enjoy it at a young age.
I thought that was the safest place to be.
My childhood, it didn't get worse until 1987.
I seen the transition to crack and all that.
And I think that's when the violence really started.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- New York and particularly the Bronx had been
in turmoil due to the crack epidemic...
♪ ♪
And we thought we were effectively
keeping it out of Boston.
♪ ♪
By the time we get to 1988,
we suddenly realized what was happening underneath our view.
[banging] [indistinct yelling]
♪ ♪
[glass shattering]
A guy by the name of Darryl Whiting
had moved to Boston.
A gang by the name of the New York Boys
had come up.
They had started producing crack
by paying off public housing tenants
in the Orchard Park development.
♪ ♪
From August '88 throughout '89,
there is just constant violence.
♪ ♪
- It affected our household.
It took a hold to my mom,
which brought me to my grandmother's house.
♪ ♪
For me, that was, like, one of the first eye-openers
to what drugs can do to families.
- All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat
facing our nation today is drugs.
- Once crack appeared on the streets of Boston,
there was an increase in crime.
- Crack.
Who's responsible?
- Mission Hill, at that time, it was real bad.
- This--this is crack cocaine.
[indistinct police radio chatter]
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Annunciation Road,
right near where the Stuart case happened,
they used to call it Assassination Road.
So there was a great deal of crime
in the Mission Hill community.
- 11-year-old Tiffany Moore was sitting on a mailbox
on Humboldt Avenue, chatting with neighbors.
Suddenly, shots rang out from a passing car,
and Tiffany was dead.
- And while illegal drug use is found in every community,
nowhere is it worse than our public housing projects.
- Gang violence seems to be on the rise,
and it's got many Boston residents
afraid to even come outside.
- What's the cause of the crime, probably?
- I think it must be about 50% drugs,
50%--we know there's a lot of nuts
running around out there, anyway.
- So is the answer really just getting tougher
or trying to do something about the drug problem?
- I think it's both.
And I think, um--
uh, we really have to let the police do their thing.
[horn blaring]
[indistinct chatter]
- What are we gonna do, you know?
We're out there showing up at the scene.
We're seeing kids shot and killed.
It's in the news.
The public is outraged.
Something's gotta happen.
Police leadership had decided stop and frisk was the answer.
[siren wailing]
- That was the beginning
of our losing control of the police--
losing, even more importantly,
our ability to direct police work.
[indistinct chatter]
Now, suddenly, the police feel that
they can be out there as the solution,
frisking young Black men
regardless of cause or suspicion.
♪ ♪
- You're the most powerful people there is.
You can deprive somebody of their freedom.
Nobody else can do that.
Judges can't do that.
We can stop you from walking down the street
and deprive you of your freedom.
That's a lot of power.
- We had a bunch of cops
running around in Mission Hill--
Fat and Skinny, Blonde Sean, Hightower.
All no good.
No good, especially Fat and Skinny.
♪ ♪
- I'm a retired Boston police officer.
I retired as a detective and worked in the Boston Police
from 1980 to 2016.
I was assigned to Area B2 in Roxbury
with one of my partners.
We ended up working in Mission Hill, in the projects.
Who wanted to be in the projects?
Nobody.
♪ ♪
- They started out in a little patrol car,
but then they wind up giving them a Bronco.
♪ ♪
And when he got in that truck, that was all she wrote.
He was in control of that neighborhood.
He was making sure that you knew he was the boss.
- I--I liked helping the good,
and I loved being bad to the bad.
Some people deserve to go to jail.
You're the most powerful people there is.
You can deprive somebody of their freedom.
- Yep.
- That's a lot of power.
- Yep. That's what they did.
- Just do what the police tell you to do.
And not that we're-- we're bullies.
Just... - [scoffs]
- It makes it easier on everybody.
You don't get killed. I don't get hurt.
- Right.
- You don't get killed. I don't get hurt.
Just follow the rules.
Put your hands behind your back.
It's not--it's not a hard concept.
- He was a--a tyrant.
Beyond a bully.
I can handle a bully.
But a cop,
a white cop...
that's known for setting people up,
you know, putting his hands on people,
that's a--that's a dangerous--
that's a dangerous cop.
[tense music]
- This city has, on a nightly basis,
been dealing with blood in the streets.
White working-class people are horrified
by these kids getting killed by one another,
but it's not "them."
♪ ♪
And that's the thing we feared the most,
something happening where white people would be saying,
"Oh, my God, now they're killing us."
♪ ♪
So now we get to October of 1989.
♪ ♪
[beeping]
♪ ♪
- October 23, 1989.
It was a Monday night.
♪ ♪
I was home watching the kids play Nintendo.
♪ ♪
And uh, Captain Walsh, David Walsh, called my house,
and he said, "Drop what you're doing.
"Get in here right away.
There's been a murder at Mission Projects."
I said, "Okay, I'm on my way."
♪ ♪
I go up in the projects, and I learned that
a husband and wife, who was pregnant, were shot.
- The officer that took the description
in the ambulance was told that
a Black male jumped in their car,
told them to drive into the projects,
uh, where he robbed and shot them.
Did they say, "Oh, my God, this has never happened,
I can't believe it"?
No.
It was just--
it was a robbery that went bad.
♪ ♪
[siren chirping]
- Mayor Flynn calls from the car,
and he said, "Neil, it happened."
♪ ♪
The thing we feared the most--
a Black man had killed a white woman.
Now folks would be able to say, "See? I told you.
They're going to kill white people, not just each other."
- I knew that the mayor would have to make
a show of enforcement, that he was going to do
everything possible to catch the person who did this,
and I'm going to call out every available detective.
I said, "Don't say that."
- Police officers have got the most difficult job
in society today.
They're out there trying to fight a war
and win a war on drugs.
And I've asked the commissioner to put
every single available detective in the city of Boston
on this case to find out who the people are--
or person-- who is responsible for this,
uh, cowardly, senseless, uh, tragedy.
[dramatic music]
- The police and the mayor just, uh,
briefed us moments ago.
This is what we do know at this hour.
Police are looking for a 30-year-old male,
a Black suspect, in connection with a double shooting.
- From Boston tonight, we have a nightmarish story
of random crime and violent death.
- A pregnant woman and her husband,
the victims of random violence tonight.
♪ ♪
- The first reaction is, oh, shit,
because now they're going to come looking
for the person who did it.
This is going to end badly for everybody.
[somber music]
- Good evening.
Here's what's happening tonight.
Boston police continue an intense manhunt,
rounding up anyone who might have information
about the abduction and shooting
of a Reading couple in Roxbury.
- A 33-year-old pregnant woman died
from a gunshot wound to the head
after doctors delivered her baby by cesarean section.
Her husband tonight remains in critical condition.
Eyewitness newsman John Dougherty joins us
live now at Boston Police Area B Station
with the latest on the search for a cold-blooded killer.
[siren wailing]
- The immediate response of the mayor's office
and the Boston PD was
to accept the story unquestioningly,
and we've gotta go find the guy who did this.
- Dozens of police officers, Boston police detectives,
they are all here and all looking
for the killer of Carol Stuart.
- I've never seen that many police officers in my life,
running across the roof.
Man.
I knew it wasn't just a regular Mission Hill person got shot,
'cause people get shot in Mission Hill,
and they don't come like that.
- Go, go, go!
- They scoured the Mission Hill and Roxbury areas,
the suspect described as a Black male,
about 6 feet tall.
- I instructed the police commissioner
of the city of Boston and the police department
to be as aggressive as they ever have been before.
- The measures that were taken were to conduct
these door-to-door searches
through the Mission Main housing development.
[knocking]
- A great deal of the tips that we've been getting
have been coming down here into the Mission Hill projects.
- It was terrifying.
It was like wild, wild West, man.
Because it was a Black man and a pregnant white woman
in Mission Hill,
oh, we definitely gotta get this guy.
[tense music]
That was the attitude. Like cowboys.
♪ ♪
- The Stuart family are the latest victims
in the frightening plague of drugs
and guns in our society.
None of us is safe from this violence.
- What had started to slip away from us with stop and frisk
now was lost completely.
We had no control over police activity.
- I'm walking home from school.
Police start harassing me.
They asked me about if I knew anybody in a gang,
if I was affiliated with one,
if I'd ever been locked up, anything like that.
And I'm like, "No, I'm 14."
- I had to go back to the Tobin Community Center,
where I was director.
Children were coming into the center.
They were crying.
They were afraid to go home.
I'll never forget these guys being strip-searched.
- I live in Roxbury, and I was walking home,
and they just rolled up on me and threw me against the wall
and started searching me.
- And they stopped him and searched him,
make him do things you would never do in public.
- Police pulled up from behind them
and stopped them, searched only four of them,
but made one kid drop his pants.
- Do you think they're doing this because
it was a white person that was shot?
- Yeah, they're getting kind of carried away, you know?
I know a couple people who got shot before, and hey.
- Yeah. - They didn't go about it.
It wasn't even on the news. - Five-day hunt.
- This wasn't about policing.
It was exacting harm and retribution
on those folks who did this.
And they looked at us, essentially, as a tribe.
- I ain't got no clue-- nothing, man.
I ain't did nothing--
- And I think the duality is Carol Stuart.
[solemn music]
I can't, you know, imagine what this must--
must have meant for her family, who--
they were simply trying to find out
who murdered their daughter.
♪ ♪
[bell ringing]
- There were funeral services today
for Carol Stuart, attended by Boston's mayor,
police commissioner, and members of her family,
except for her husband, Charles,
who is still hospitalized,
wounded by the gunman who killed his pregnant wife.
[somber music]
- The funeral was jammed.
It was standing room only.
We were still in shock, deeply grieving,
totally confused.
♪ ♪
Carol was, without question, one of the sunniest people
I've ever known.
Carol came to work for Arthur Young.
She had just graduated from law school.
I got to know her the very first day.
♪ ♪
She was very good at tax law.
We worked ridiculous hours,
and her dad, who made pizza for a living,
would bring us pizza at 9:00 at night
and say, "You work too many hours!
You work too long!"
And he'd come in with all these boxes--
boxes of pizza.
So it was pretty easy to see her--
her generosity of spirit.
♪ ♪
- It's--it's sick.
It's sick.
She had so much, um, to live for.
Um, and her husband,
I remember when they first got engaged.
It was just, uh, a lot to live for, you know?
- When she came to work for Arthur Young,
she was engaged to Chuck Stuart,
and the wedding was not long after
she came to work at Arthur Young.
♪ ♪
She and Chuck met at a restaurant.
She was a waitress, and he was a grill cook.
She would pass him the slip of paper
with the orders on it,
and he would pass her love notes.
In their first year of marriage,
she would come into the office, and she'd say,
"Ugh! You know, Chuck!"
We didn't--you know, and she'd tell this story
about how he would-- he'd done something that--
that just drove her crazy.
And then not 20 minutes later,
a--a large vase
of 12 or 24 roses
would come down the hall to be delivered to Carol.
He took her to New York for the weekends
to--you know, for restaurants and plays,
and he bought her gorgeous jewelry.
♪ ♪
She was very excited about having her first child.
- [sobbing]
♪ ♪
- I remember it being beyond sad.
♪ ♪
Chuck Stuart couldn't be there.
And I remember someone reading the letter
that he wrote for Carol.
- The following is a message from Chuck to his wife, Carol.
♪ ♪
"Good night, sweet wife, my love.
"God has called you to His hands,
"not to take you away from me,
"all the happiness and gladness you brought,
"but to bring you away from the cruelty and violence
"that fills this world.
"He says that for us to truly believe,
"we must know that His will was done
"and that there was some right in this meanest of acts.
In our souls, we must forgive this sinner."
♪ ♪
"You have brought joy and kindness
"to every life you've touched.
"Now you sleep away from me.
"I will never again know the feeling
"of your hand in mine, but I will always feel you.
"I miss you, and I love you.
Your husband, Chuck."
- I remember, like, crying.
♪ ♪
Like, this is--this poor guy.
This is--this is beyond belief, what's happened to him.
♪ ♪
- Boston police remain tight-lipped
about what could be a major break
in the investigation into the shootings
of Chuck and Carol Stuart.
- Boston police remain closed-mouthed
about the material seized
from the apartment at number eight,
Cornelia Court on Saturday night.
The search warrant shows police recovered
what may be a key piece of evidence
in the Stuart murder case.
- My partner and myself are riding around.
Someone flags us down and says,
"There's a couple squatting in this apartment.
They could be involved."
I said, "Okay."
Using our charm, we ended up convincing them
to open the door.
We go in. It's a guy and a girl.
And the girl's whispering to me,
"He did a robbery in Cambridge, and there's a gun in here."
Uh, his name was Alan Swanson.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
I go in the bathroom, and there's a--
a running suit,
black running suit,
soaking in the sink.
- And on the--
behind the toilet,
there's a bunch of newspaper articles
about the Stuart case.
♪ ♪
- The description, the guy had on, uh,
an Adidas tracksuit--typical.
Adidas tracksuit was the outfit
of Black kids in Boston in the late '80s, early '90s.
Everything was Adidas.
It was so open-ended.
It was so generic, the description...
♪ ♪
That it could have been anybody.
- Are the people that shot you,
are they in the area right there?
- The suspect described as a Black male,
about 6 feet tall.
- Police are looking for a Black suspect.
- Obviously, when a crime is committed,
you're gonna go try to solve it.
But the way this went down was a racial overreaction.
- He said they were shot by a Black man.
- It wasn't as though we weren't thinking, okay,
why is this such a given that somebody Black did this?
♪ ♪
Everybody knows the prime suspect
is usually the partner.
- Sure, if the man's bleeding to death,
you would have some sympathy for that.
♪ ♪
But you would also ask, if I'm going to rob somebody,
why would I shoot the pregnant woman
fatally in the head
and shoot him in the side?
♪ ♪
If you were gonna kill someone,
it would be the immediate threat,
which to me would be the man.
All of these things are absolutely
worth interrogating on day one.
- But it didn't happen in a vacuum in the city.
This was building.
You go back between 1974, the Garrity decision,
and you go all the way through to 1990.
[indistinct yelling]
♪ ♪
You've got racial animus in the city
that is just waiting to explode.
When you start connecting all of these dots,
it creates a really ugly puzzle.
You had plenty of Black people thinking,
"Hold on. Wait a minute.
This doesn't quite fit."
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[ominous music]
♪ ♪
[bright tone]