Two Black men who were falsely accused in the notorious 1989 killing of a pregnant white woman in Boston were awarded $150,000 in a settlement with the city this week.

The financial restitution comes nearly two years after Mayor Michelle Wu issued a formal apology on behalf of the city, calling the police investigation into the murder “unjust, racist, and wrong,” and the apology “long overdue.”

On October 23, 1989, Charles Stuart, who was white, called police from his car in Boston’s then-diverse, working-class Mission Hill neighborhood, saying that his pregnant wife had been shot in the head during a carjacking after leaving a birthing class at a nearby hospital. When police arrived, he told them the man who had also shot him in the chest was a Black man wearing a tracksuit.

Carol Stua

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