Parents’ Touch Helps the Healing

We yield to no one in our admiration for Joe Montana, but the real heroes of this week--and of many weeks to come--are a quiet Boston couple named Giusto and Evelyn DiMaiti.

He is a retired pasta salesman; she is an employee of a social service agency. They are the parents of Carol Stuart, the pregnant young woman who was allegedly shot by her husband before he turned the gun on himself and then told told authorities they were robbed by a black man. The Stuarts’ son was taken from his dying mother’s body that night and died two weeks later from premature birth complications. Desperate to apprehend the man they believed responsible, police virtually occupied the racially mixed Mission Hill district, where the shooting occurred. And they arrested a black man who Charles Stuart falsely identified as the killer. When authorities began to suspect him, Stuart took his own life.

White Bostonians were left to shake their heads in disbelief, while black Bostonians shook their fists in rage at the majority’s obvious willingness to believe a now obviously unbelievable story.

It is a tale incorporating enough wrongs to embitter a saint. But bitterness is what the DiMaitis have had the courage to put aside and, in so doing, they have become a living reproach to all who believe that the flinty insistence on retribution is the only antidote to loss. Determined that their daughter’s memory not be a source of racial divisiveness, they have created a foundation to grant college scholarships to students from Mission Hill. The couple’s lawyer said they wanted their daughter “to be remembered . . . as a woman who left behind a legacy of healing and compassion.”

And so she has. Mission Hills’ community leaders say the DiMaitis’ gesture already has had a healing effect. It also is a reminder to all of us that decent people determined to do the right thing can make a difference, however long the odds against them.