Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning - First Season

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

- Start to narrow it down pretty quickly,

take a left on St. Alphonsus, and--

and there was the car.

- 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."

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.

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.

- That hurt, buddy? Your belly hurts?

That hurts when I press?

That's it. Don't go up.

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?

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.

- 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.

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.

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.