Boston Mayor Michelle Wu issued a formal apology on Wednesday to Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett, two Black men wrongly accused in the high-profile 1989 murder of a pregnant White woman, Carol Stuart. The case coarsened divisions in a city long split along racial lines and renewed suspicion and anger within the city's Black community, directed at the Boston Police Department, the Associated Press reports . “I am so sorry for what you endured,” Mayor Wu said. “I am so sorry for the pain that you have carried for so many years." Wu noted that police, acting "on a false racist claim framing a Black man for (Stuart's) death,” launched a systemic campaign targeting Black men in a nearby Black neighborhood and across the city.
Alan Swanson and Willie Bennett were wrongly named as suspects in the Oct. 23, 1989, death of Carol Stuart, whose husband, Charles Stuart, had orchestrated her killing. Stuart, who was also white, portrayed his wife's death as part of an attempted carjacking committed by an unidentified Black gunman. As officers pursued a phantom assailant, they arrested Swanson, then Bennett in a massive crackdown in Mission Hill, a traditionally Black neighborhood. Neither man was formally charged. Charles Stuart’s brother, Matthew, eventually confessed to helping him hide the gun.