Before we begin, this episode contains some offensive language and descriptions of violence. It may not be appropriate for all listeners. I was afraid that night, I heard a lot of sirens, police going on early in the night. I was wondering why cops are running in each building. I'm observing, looking outside because I see all the lights and everything going crazy. I'm always like, Mind your business. Get away from the window. They got nothing concerning you. On the night Chuck and Carol Stewart were shot, Don Juan Moses was 11 years old, just a kid in Mission Hill. Life switched just that fast. You heard all the trumbling up the stairs.. That's feet. Don Juan was at home with his mom, grandma, and older cousin. The grownups were playing Spades. I'm watching the game, learning the game. I'm just standing over his shoulder, watching, trying to learn the game. I was like, Oh, man, trying to count the books. They had no idea about the shooting nearby. But then there was noise in the hallway. His mom said it was nothing. She didn't pay no mind to it until it came to my door and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

You answer fast enough, boom, boom, boom, boom. She's like, What the hell is that? And before she gave me an answer, I looked at the P. C. Or I opened the door. It's the Boston police, and they were looking for Don Juan's cousin. They came rushing in like he was like a key witness, a key person to their case. Looking around the house, everybodys was freaking out and yelling like, What's going on? And they described my cousin. His cousin wasn't some key witness. Quite simply, he fit the description of Chuck and Carol Stewart's shooter, Black male. Those two simple words described tens of thousands of people in this city, and they launched a manhunt throughout Black Boston that ensneared hundreds, including Don Juan's cousin. They grabbed him, threw his face to the table. He's struggling like, What are you doing? Da da da. Let you know, boom, take him, slam him against the side of the wall, bust his face up on the wall, snatch him up. He's telling my mom to call his mom. They throw the cuffs on him, basically drag him down three flights of stairs. Thank God he didn't break his arm or his wrist because they treat him like trash.

Just seeing him round people up and throw him in a paddy wagon. It was like the most scariest thing ever to see that like, Wow. The police didn't charge Don Juan's cousin with anything, and he was back home the next day. There's no official record of the raid on Don Juan's home, at least not in the thousands of documents we reviewed. And sure, this exchange could seem small in the grand scheme of things, but not to Don Juan. It changed his understanding of the world and his place in it. That frightening night, those footsteps up the stairs, the banging on the door. He's in his 40s now, and he still doesn't trust the police. I got a camera in my car on my windshield because I'm feared of what can happen. If anything was ever happened to me, I'm good enough with technology where I have that sent to my hard drive to send to people to be aware of what happened to me, Lass. I can't trust their word of a mind. Ever. The police response in late 1989 would shape the way an entire generation of black men would look at law enforcement.

I feel like when they first heard this case, one, two, three, they just knew that you was near the projects. You said a black man did it. That's all we need to know. Raid the project, flood the projects, get everybody out. I want lineups regularly. I want them to be able to tell us which one looks like who and so forth. That's all they was in mindset for. Put somebody to the case. On the night of the shooting in late October 1989, Boston was seized by panic and rage. The police presence on the streets of Roxbury tonight was perhaps unprecedented. At the hospital nearby, doctors worked on Carol for hours, but they couldn't save her. A priest administered her last rights. She died just hours after her baby, Christopher, was delivered by C-section. He was immediately put on life support. Chuck, meanwhile, was lucky to be alive. He had a gaping wound in his lower back. The bullet had traveled upwards and diagonally and torn through his liver and intestines. It missed his aorta by a fraction of an inch. After six hours in surgery, he made it to the ICU, and outside the hospital room, the city was freaking out.

The emotional toll, the rash of violence is taking on our residents, our communities, and on our city. I've had a lump in my throat and tears roll up in my eyes. It just really hits home. It's something that can happen to you anytime, and I think it causes terror. Everyone is looking for the man that pulled the trigger. The suspect is described as being 28 to 34 years old, black, medium complexion, five foot, 10 inches in height, thin, gaunt build, high cheekbones, a short afro. He has shaggy facial hair. And the husband told police he had a raspy voice with a sing-song tone. Boston mayor, Ray Flint, calls in every available detective to work the case. It's all hands on deck. 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 police are hunting for one man, but dozens of people are about to be caught up in the dragnet, and some of them are never going to get free. That shit ate at me since I was a kid. And I have to walk down the street and see three men strip-searched in the middle of the street.

It's hard remembering that because I still live in. Some people have called what happened next a police rampage. In and around Mission Hill, Boston police put the heat on anyone who was even close to the description of the killer. We have virtually a small army on the street. Almost everyone in Mission Hill who lived through it has a story. But the police, they say those are exaggerations. Sure, maybe a few officers overstepped, but an organized assault on every man and boy in the neighborhood, fiction. You're going to hear people telling their own stories in their own voices. You decide. I'm a speaker ponder. I'm a speaker ponder. I'm a speaker ponder. I'm a speaker ponder. I'm Adrian Walker, and this is Murder in Boston, the untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shooting. Episode two, The Manhunt. We are at the Tobin gym, a place that was like a sanctuary to me. The basketball court where I lived so regularly. I lived directly five minutes around the corner. Don Juan is back in his old neighborhood, Mission Hill, at the place he used to come to as a kid, the Tobin Center. They kept up with the place very well.

The floor is amazing. The hoops are still there, same exact. I still got banners up and everything, man. It wasn't easy to grow up in this neighborhood during the crack epidemic. Every single landmark of his childhood seemed like it was tied to a violent memory: a dead body in a trash can or a bullet through a window. But now standing here in this gym, it's different. He's smiling. I just moved my heart to know this is my sanctuary, a place where I never had to worry about no police, no brutality, no violence, no nothing. I could sit here and this is like my second home. That was the Toban for a lot of people in Mission Hill. And my office used to be right over here. One of the guys in charge of the Toban was Ron Bell, and he knew basically every kid in the neighborhood. He thought of himself as a protector of kids like Don Juan. I remember working with children who would wait for me on the steps on Saturday mornings when I would open up the facility. It became somewhat of a Mecca. But after the Strip shooting, cops smothered the community center.

Suddenly, the Tobin wasn't a sanctuary. It was a building full of young black men wearing tracksuits, just like Chuck's description. I remember the news. A pregnant white woman was allegedly killed by a black man. That's what we heard. And it was nothing but police in Mission Hill the next day. I was walking down Trimmond Street here, coming from Mites Donuts. He was on his way to work when he saw a group of black guys detained by the police. Right here, lines up in front of here. Right up here. And I was working right in here. They had their pants pulled down around their ankles. Right here on this fence is where black men were being stripped during the child steward tragedy in 1989. And suddenly, Ron faced this terrible choice. He was the assistant director. He had some power. He could step forward and try to stop the cops. But Ron was also a black man. He was just as much a suspect as any of these guys, and the cops hadn't seen him yet. That's when I turned around. Why did you turn around? Because I don't want to be subjected to that. And it was intimidating to be quite frank.

This feeling of guilt, of complicity, it never left him. That memory of being victimized at night, all the months. It wasn't just a day, Adrian, October 23rd. It was months this went on. The city wanted this to be an open and shut case, and police promised a quick arrest. But even with every available detective call to action, investigators weren't catching any easy breaks. And the longer the search for the killer went on, the wider the net was cast. Chuck had described the shooter as a grown man, but it seemed like the police had a liberal view of that. I was a 13, 14-year-old, skinny, tall, goofy kid. The first time Tito Jackson was stopped by the cops. He had just finished a game of basketball at the Toban. It wasn't a large group. It was like three or four of us, and we weren't wild, whatever. And in fact, we had just left the gym, right? Which means we're tired because we had just basically worked out and we were all headed home to make sure that we did our homework and go back to school the next day. Today, Tito was a successful entrepreneur and local politician.

But in 1989, he was this gangly teenager with a crush on a girl he was desperate to impress. She was also out on the street that day. We were approached by two officers who got out of a squad car and told us to face the fence, put our hands up against the fence. So there he is in front of this girl. He's scared, but he doesn't want to show it. And that swagger that you try to exude at that time and how cool you are and the like. The cops don't give a shit about Tito or his crush. Get up against the fence. We were facing the fence and they patted us down and now drop him. We knew what that meant. This was a situation where you know it's life or death. It is very apparent that if you do the wrong thing, there are real consequences. So right there in the middle of the sidewalk on Trimmond Street, Tito drops his sweatpants. He stood there with his hands on the fence in his underwear. At the time, the thing I was most worried about was not being dehumanized. I was a kid. I was worried that the girl who was there that I had a crush on saw that I did not put lotion on my kneecaps.

They were making fun of me because I had to drop my pants and my knees had a lot of dry skin. They were ashy. The burn that I had was anger at the police officers, but it was mostly because they embarrassed me. He can't say how long it lasted. Considering that the young lady was laughing at me, it felt like an eternity. And then they left and we went on. Tito would be stopped four or five more times in the weeks that followed. And by the way, we weren't special. They were doing this to everybody. Let's talk to these guys. We have officers from just about every unit in the Boston Police Department of working on this case. Intense is the only way you can describe the search that is going on here at Roxbury tonight. They still believe he is somewhere hiding at the Mission Hill Housing projects, and they're hopeful that he surfaces or that someone turns him in. Police are pressing their street informants, hoping talk on the street will flush out a suspect. Black men and teens were the primary targets. Those few weeks after, it was brutal because they just kept on looking and looking and looking.

But others in the neighborhood got swept up too, including a lot of Latino men. I'll never forget them. They were brutal. Jeff Sanchez was a 19-year-old college student, working two jobs when the stopped him and a friend. There were two massive, very big, white men that came at us and grabbed us by the back of the neck. In a horrident way, they threw us in the hallway, told us to drop our pants down because they didn't want to touch us dirty spicks. We're done. We're done. His mom had warned him about what to do in a situation like this. She would always tell me when I was a kid, If the police have us come up to you, you just put your hands up and you just stay quiet. His mom, Maria Sanchez, was a fierce community activist. She was one of the founding members of the Mission Hill task force, a group that advocated for tenants' rights. She remembers how crazy it was after the killing. They get into every apartment to search for who kills the lady. The police was going on down constantly. Oh, the boo- boo- woo. They're We're crazy about this.

It's constant. It was constant. They go through here, but that was constant. They go through the project like a go, come and down from everywhere. So everybody was scared. Before the shooting, the Mission Hill task force had been begging the cops to come and address the rampant crime. But after, when they saw what the police were doing, the group begged them to leave. They were scared. The people was very concerned. And her son, Jeff, he was so disgusted by how he was treated by the police that he left Boston altogether. I couldn't take it. It was too much. There was a lot of abuse that we went through at that time. During that steward murder, it was just, like I said, I couldn't do it. I didn't have the will to. I was afraid that something was going to happen, and I beat myself for it, even to now because I left and I left my sister and I left my mother. Jeff stayed away for five years, but not forever. He went on to become a Harvard professor and a state lawmaker and to study issues of race and class and public policy. But he's still haunted by the moral questions around what happened in 1989.

Why did they unleash this wrath on us? Why did they do this to us? And with the black community, Jesus. They were just being rounded up. They were being rounded up. And it was okay. All right. The cops stopping Black men and boys almost at random. This wasn't new. Not in Boston or America. It's an old American social phenomenon, the widespread routing of black males by police. In Boston, it was called stop and frisk or stop and search. Back in the '80s, when crack arrived and murder rates started soaring, this police tactic was supposed to get guns off the streets. Another night, another shooting in the predominantly black neighborhood, Boston police called Area B. In a recent six-week period, Area B had eight murderers and nearly 300 armed assaults, robberies, and other shooting incidents. So police have begun to stop and search suspected gang members for weapons. Everybody put your hands on the wall. Get your hands on the wall. Everybody get your hands on the wall. I know where you live. They say the searches are conducted legally and only when there is probable cost to believe a weapon will be found. In theory, stop and frisk allowed police officers to stop young men who they believed might be carrying a weapon and search them.

Police were supposed to have reasonable suspicion, but that can be a pretty squishy concept. About two months before the manhunt for Carol Stewart's killer, a Massachusetts judge found these searches to be unconstitutional. These were because they were young and they were black and they were there. Judge Courtland Mathers ordered the Boston police to halt the practice of stop and frisk completely. But the department just refused. So then it was a standoff between the cops and the court, police officials said they were getting hundreds of guns off the streets and that the policy was working. So they kept stopping and frisking men and boys just like they had before. They didn't even try to hide it. In fact, not two weeks before the Stewart investigation began, police officers conducting a stop shot an innocent man as he emptied his pockets at their request. I care about people's civil rights just as much as anybody else. Here's Detective, Detective Billy Celester, at the time, one of Boston's highest ranking black police officers defending the practice. But I also care about the civil rights of the people in this community that have a right to live and walk down the street without being shot at.

It's important to note that not everybody in Boston's black community opposed these searches. Violence was nearing its peak in the city, and people wanted the police to do something. The cruel reality of gangs, guns, and drugs has hit home with a shocking regularity in recent months. It has become a staple of the Boston Night, a sudden, unexplained eruption of urban violence. We are faced with a clear and present danger. It is here. It is now. And we're dealing with it here and now. The Boston Police Department is dealing with it right now. We heard it again and again in our reporting. Back then, it was a war, and the street cops were the foot soldiers. Everything I did, I did from here. I wore my hat on my sleeve. Everything I did, I did because I believed it was the right thing to do. I don't regret the way I operated on the, especially on the street. I'd like to think I was a good policeman. When we started our reporting on this project, and we were asking around about what policing was like in Mission Hill in the '80s, everybody said, You have to talk to Billy Dunn.

Some call me the legend. Billy saw his job in simple terms. He was a good guy, and he was there to get the bad guys. I enjoyed helping people. I liked helping the good, and I loved being bad to the bad. Some people deserve to go to jail. He was the quintessential Irish Boston cop, and he had the looks to match six foot two, 300 pounds, a tatted up former Marine who went from the jungle of Vietnam to the most murderous corners of Boston. The Mission Hill projects, words beat. There were moments that were pretty hairy and scary up there involving interactions with some bad guys. I mean, we were shot at and people trying to stab us. And maybe Vietnam was a good prelude to it. Billy remembers Mission Hill as a chaotic place. One night, he's pulling someone out of a fire. Three nights later, that same person is throwing bottles at him. Sounds terrible, right? Well, Billy loved it. It's cars speeding by, guns going off, people screaming, yelling. When we first went up there, people wouldn't even come out of their houses. After a few years, they would sit on their doorsteps because they knew the police were around and we were going to do the right thing.

But the people were held hostage by five % of the bad guys that lived up there. Billy says he knew the neighborhood so well that mothers told him the names of their babies before they were even born. The kids nicknamed him Fat, and they'd come to him with problems. People used to threaten other people with me. If somebody did something wrong to somebody, they would say, I'm going to tell Fat and Skinny that was me and my partner, or I'm going to tell Dun on you. This sounds like bullshit, but it's not. There are a couple of police officers we've heard a lot about that were always in the Mission Hill area. Did you know? Dun? Dun? Did you know Billy Dun? Yeah, I know him from patrolling down the streets. He just ain't like us. He ain't like nobody. He was our neighborhood in the force. He kept us in line. What do you mean by that? Nine times out of ten if we're getting arrested around mission, he was the one who were doing the arrests. He knew all our names. He knew our family. We're associated with. It's like he was God's eye in the sky, but on the ground.

Good for him. I hope he's dead now. Okay, so Billy Dunn was not exactly beloved. In fact, he'd faced several claims of misconduct, including an accusation that he and two other officers had raped a teenage girl. But Billy was cleared following an internal investigation and a federal grand jury probe. Back in the '80s, everybody in Mission Hill knew him. The night of the shooting, Billy was off-duty. He was down in his basement playing Nintendo with his kids when his captain called. Drop what you're doing. Get in here right away. There's been a murder, at least one murder, maybe two, maybe three, mission projects. He was assigned to work with homicide on the case. These cops, I seen them cry because of this. The attitude of the city and the police department was to get the bad guy. Not at all costs. Not anybody will do. These guys had integrity. To this day, the police defend their tactics and still deny that the mass strip searches ever happened. They wanted to keep Mission Hill quiet. The city didn't want any problems racially or presumptively racially. The police department certainly didn't because you get more bees with honey.

You act civil up there, some people might talk to you. So the last thing we wanted to do was DD invasion on Mission Hill. Billy says that the police rampage through Mission Hill was a creation of the media. Are you kidding me? People got to be fucking retarded to believe that. That don't happen in Russia. They said there was a seizure on Mission Hill. Cops riding with horses. If there was horses up there, they were stepping on needles so they wouldn't last long. I never seen a horse on Mission Hill in my life. It's just shit that never happened. We wanted to get a full picture of exactly what the police did in Mission Hill in the days and weeks following the Stewart shooting. We reached out to almost all of the cops involved in the investigation. Other than Billy, they all declined to talk. So that leaves with old police records, TV news footage, newspaper clips, and the memories of Mission Hill residents. When you compare those things with what the police say, well, they don't match up. A sun-filled morning masked the darkness of this autumn day. Carol Stewart is buried. Four days after the killing, as police scoured Mission Hill for the suspect, Carol's friends and family gathered to mourn in a small city on the outskirts of Boston.

Her funeral service was held in the same church where she and Chuck were married four years earlier. The mayor, police commissioner, and the governor were all there. For the world and all is dead and dying. Oh, Lord. The church was packed. She who pleased God was loved. She who lived among sinners was transported, snatched away, or her soul was pleasing to the Lord. I just remember that everybody was in tears. Carol's friend, Barbara Williamson, had known her for years. We were still in shock, deeply grieving, totally confused. They worked together at an accounting firm where Carol was an attorney. She was, without question, one of the sunniest people I've ever known. She just lit up a room when she came in. She did not have a self-conscious bone in her body. She was just so herself. And herself was hilarious funny. I mean, funny the way Lucille Ball is funny. Carol was gregarious and so earnest that even as an adult, she still wanted to go to Disney World. And she talked a lot about how much she wanted a baby. She was preparing their home, dreaming of a fairy tale life in the suburbs.

She was a pretty romantic person and could romanticize an event like that. But having a child is a life-changing undertaking and feeling something growing inside of you, something that's part of you but isn't you. There's a sacredness about it. When she was murdered, Carol's pregnancy became part of a headline. But while she was alive, it had been intimate and beautiful. And the fact that she was pregnant made her death that much harder to comprehend. I said, What? Carol Stewart. She's dead. She's been shot. Just saying that I have goosebumps. I was stunned. Carol, dead. It just didn't make any sense. And for some reason, Barbara thought immediately of Chuck and Carol's two dogs. Max and Midnight, both black dogs, rescue dogs. Carol adored those dogs, and it's so random. But one of the things that I thought about was, Oh, my God, Carol is going to be worried about who's going to take care of Max at midnight. My sister really believed in the innate goodness of every one of us. That day at the funeral, Carol's brother, Carl, addressed the mourners. Today, we feel a deep sense of loss and outrage. How could this have happened?

What society tolerates this random and senseless violence? I have no answers. I do know however, that Carol would stand totally against any call for vengeance or retaliation. The Valley of darkness, I fear no evil, for you are with me. The Lord is my shepherd. The funeral must soon be over. As we lay Carol's body to rest, our lives will go on. But today is certainly not the end of a family's nightmare. For you are at my side with your rod and your staff that give me courage. Though I walk in the Valley of darkness, I fear no evil. Chuck was still in the hospital and couldn't go to the funeral. So he wrote a letter. Following is a message from Chuck to his wife, Carol. Good night, sweet wife, my love. God has called you to his hands. 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. My life will be more empty without you, as will the lives of your family and friends. 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 and mind, but I will always feel you. I miss you, and I love you. Your husband, Chuck. This was not the only tragedy Chuck would have to endure while recovering. Days after Carroll's funeral, he was taken by ambulance to his baby's bedside to say goodbye. And now their baby boy who was delivered by emergency, Cesarean, has died. His father is doing okay tonight. He's still in the hospital, and police are still looking for the killer. Christopher William Stewart died when he was only 17 days old. Back in Mission Hill, people were laying low. Don Juan remembers how strange the neighborhood looked. Empty. Afterthe math, a lot of people is like a wall, wall, west. It was scarce. You can't really catch any people out there, really, because cops just ran through the projects and just ripped it apart. So people, what do you mean? Everybody's scattered. They scattered. People are just straight scattered all over the place. You don't see people out there like you normally would at a certain hour. Before that happened, people would be out there at 12:00, one o'clock in the morning, just roaming, talking, doing what they do.

No, that stopped everything. People just used to see people booking, be-lining to where they're going. You could tell they was walking in fear. But people everywhere were afraid. There was still a killer on the loose. And the police, Dragnet, continued. Like I said at the start, there is a whole generation of Black men who were by these few weeks in late 1989. Listen to their voices. Well, after October 23rd, me and a couple of friends was walking down Parker Street. A couple of unmarked police cars pulled up on us, searched us, then pulled me to the side and asked me to take down my pants. I felt like my heart dropped out of my chest. I'm like, What the fuck did I do? I wasn't doing anything with going to work. I live in Roxbury and I was walking home and they just rolled upon me and threw me against the wall and started to search me. I refused to take down my pants. They was like, Well, then if you don't want to take down your pants here, we'll arrest you. I was like, Well, pick the handcuffs on me. But before you put them on, it's going to be a fight.

Driving home one day, I saw a whole bunch of young men with their pants and underwear down around their wrinkles on Dudley Street, hands against the wall. Cop got his gun out. And they're searching the kids and they're laughing. The cops are laughing. These kids hadn't done anything. They were leaving church. I remember a number of us coming out standing there and said, Don't worry, young man, we're watching and we will be there for you. They didn't get charged with anything because they hadn't done anything. But they were stopped and humiliated by the police. Everyone walked around in fear. Now, how does all of this make you feel? Well, it makes me feel uncomfortable. What do you mean by uncomfortable? Uncomfortable that my rights have been violated, that this is a free land to walk on. To me, it doesn't seem like a free land. Boston calls itself the Craddle of Liberty. We imagine ourselves as an example for the rest of the country, a city upon a hill. Our State House has an actual Golden Dome that shines in the sun. But the Stewart shooting stripped away that gilding and revealed what was underneath.

You had heard this legend of Boston as a birthplace of democracy, and as a birthplace of abolition, and the statues down in the common of Sumner and Phillips and all of the great abolitionists, and all those statues are real because that's our history. But then we also have another history as well, and a present that people will just call this the most racist city in America. That's on the next episode of Murder in Boston. I'm a speaker for you. Murder in Boston, the untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shooting is presented by The Boston Globe and HBO documentary films. This podcast was reported and written by globe journalist Evan Allen, Elizabeth Coe, Andrew Ryan, and me, your host, Associate Editor Adrian Walker. The projects work was led and also cowritten by Assistant Managing Editor Brendan McCarthy and the Globe's head of audio, Kristen Nelson. Nelson served as senior producer. Melissa Rosales is the Associate Producer. Our theme music can speak upon it by Boston's own Ed-O-G. Reza Dyer is our sound designer. Voiceover direction by Athena Corkanas. Research from Jeremiah Manion. Backchecking by Matt Mahone. The globe's executive editor is Nancy Barnes. Thanks to former Globes, Brian McRory, and Scott Allen, and to Boston Globe Media CEO, Linda Henry.

Additional interviews and audio, courtesy of Jason Haier and Little Room Films. Special thanks to Michael Glockstat and Allison Cohen on the HBO podcast team. The HBO documentary series, Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning is available to stream on Maps. Anderson and Cooper is back with Season 2 of his podcast, All There is. Grief doesn't go away. Do we ever move on from grief or do we just learn to live with it? If we don't address our grief, our hearts close. You'll hear moving and honest discussions and learn from others who have experienced life altering losses. I've been trying to spend as much time as possible with my kids. I love you so much. I love you so much too. Listen to all there is with Anderson Cooper wherever you get your podcasts.