The Kennedy School of Government had banned all smoking within the building, but had not yet banned smoking just outside the doors facing the Charles River, to the south of the complex. An African American woman, about fifty years of age, took a light from me, and we stood in the falling snow enjoying our smokes. That was a heavy year for snow. It seemed that every day about the same time the two of us would be standing here in a blizzard.
\n<\/p>\n
[A timely repost from QM<\/a>]<\/p>\n I never knew her name, but I knew she worked in the cafeteria. We talked about a wide range of topics, including (and possibly mainly) the weather. A week or so earlier, we had an especially interesting conversation.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my nephew, you know.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Who?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153That Bennett boy. We live on the same street. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re blood, and I know him as well as I know anybody, and I can tell you he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n She was talking about Willie Bennett, who had just a few days before that conversation been picked out of a lineup as the killer of Carol DiMaiti Stewart.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not saying he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have done it. Willie is NOT a good boy; I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll leave it at that. But everybody knows where he was that night. He wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t near that place. We know he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Charles and Carol Stewart were at a childbirth class at the main baby hospital in town. I remember this really well, because two of my best friends were taking childbirth classes at that time at the same hospital on the same evening. So, when I heard on the news that a couple leaving that hospital from a childbirth class had been attacked, the woman killed and the man shot in the gut, I checked on my friends. It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t them.<\/p>\n The event made national news in part because one of those cop shows was filming that night in Boston. Charles called on a cell phone to say his wife and he had been shot, but he was disoriented and he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know where he was. The dispatcher got on the radio to all of the Boston cops at once, and had them run their sirens one at a time, asking Charles if he could hear the sound. Using this method, they located the car containing the victims, and were able to save Charles. Carol died later that night, and the fetus, delivered months early, died several days later.<\/p>\n And they picked up Willie because he was a known bad guy and resembled the description Charles had given of the assailant. Charles then picked Willie out of the lineup, apparently confirming that he was the assailant.<\/p>\n This would be a good time to mention that Charles and Carol were white people from an inner-ring suburb of Boston, and Willie was African American from the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inner city.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This matters if you consider the broader social context of this event. Boston has its \u00e2\u20ac\u0153race problems.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n Then a little time went by and the police, quietly and without fanfare, started to get suspicious of the story. In fact, it would later be understood that they were suspicious from the beginning. A little pushing here and a little poking here, and suddenly Charlie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s brother, Matthew, confesses.<\/p>\n It turns out that on the fateful night, Charles called Matthew and gave him an address. When Matthew arrived, he found his sister in-law shot in the head and for all practical purposes dead, and his brother with a gut wound, both in Charles\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 car. Charles gave Matthew a bag containing the firearm used by Charles to shoot his wife and himself and some valuables, like a wallet and stuff, and told him to get rid of the goods. So Matthew, apparently about as dumb as his brother, tossed the bag into a shallow creek not far from where they all lived. This was a creek where everybody tosses shit like this. The first place the cops would look.<\/p>\n Anyway, Matthew ratted out his brother, Willie was released, and Charles became the main suspect.<\/p>\n So, we were standing there in the snow, looking at the river. And I remembered what I had heard just a few minutes earlier.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Did you hear about Charles Stewart?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I asked her.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What about him?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d blowing smoke.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153He jumped into the river this morning. He jumped off the Tobin Bridge. He did not survive.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said, staring out into the river, looking at the nearest bridge, at the thickening ice below the bridge, and the swirling snow and blowing drifts. It would be impossible to imagine how anyone would survive the jump off the bridge we were looking at into that water, and the Tobin Bridge was significantly higher. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Well\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s something.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Kennedy School of Government had banned all smoking within the building, but had not yet banned smoking just outside the doors facing the Charles River, to the south of the complex. An African American woman, about fifty years of age, took a light from me, and we stood in the falling snow enjoying our … Continue reading Charles and Willie<\/span>