Boston is paying a total of $150,000 to two men who were wrongly suspected in the 1989 Charles and Carol Stuart case .
Willie Bennett was paid $100,000, while Alan Swanson received $50,000. In Dec. 2023, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu formally apologized to both men.
Charles Stuart had claimed that a Black man shot him and his pregnant wife as they left a birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Carol and her unborn child were killed, but Stuart survived a gunshot wound to the abdomen.
Both Swanson and Bennett were wrongly connected to the case during a manhunt for the shooter. Months later, Matthew Stuart told police that it was his brother who killed Carol, and Charles jumped to his death off the Tobin Bridge before he could be arrested.
“There was no evidence that a Black man committed this crime,” Mayor Wu said in 2023 when she issued the apology to Swanson and Bennett. “What was done to you was unjust, unfair, racist and wrong.”
Bennett told the I-Team’s Cheryl Fiandaca in 2017 that he’d never forget how Charles Stuart changed his life and was bitter that he was never compensated.
“I used to get chills every time I used to hear that, that man’s name,” he said.
Swanson was jailed for three weeks before police focused on Bennett.
CBS Boston 
“It still haunts me everywhere I go,” Swanson told WBZ-TV in 2023, adding that he was left homeless as a result of being wrongly connected to the crime.
The city did not release any further details about the settlement.
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