‘Rescue 911’ to Show Footage from Stuart Case

Dying Carol Stuart and her seriously wounded husband, Charles, lie in their bloody car on a Boston street--and you can watch the real thing from your living room.

You can hear Stuart--the real Stuart, not an actor--plead with paramedics to take care of his wife before tending to him. Later, he would be suspected of having shot both her and himself, and ultimately he killed himself.

The case made headlines around the country, but the CBS show “Rescue 911” was in at the beginning. On the night of Oct. 23, 1989, “Rescue 911,” a show that dramatizes real cases, using as much real footage and people as possible, was with one of the Boston Emergency Medical Service ambulances that arrived on the scene.

The footage the camera crew took that night is part of the segment on the Stuart case that airs on the show Tuesday at 8 p.m.

The segment opens with the actual tape of Stuart’s desperate call from his car phone, telling dispatchers he and his wife had been shot but that he could not give his location.

It makes a good news story, the way the heroic husband had held on and gotten help for himself and his pregnant wife; the resourcefulness of Boston police and Massachusetts State Troopers in finding them.

At one point, the 911 dispatchers hear a police siren coming through the phone line from the now-unconscious Stuart. The police dispatcher has all radio cars in the area cut their sirens. Then one by one they sound off, until the 911 crew hears a siren. That gives them a good fix on the location.

The most dramatic material comes when the ambulances arrive on the scene and host William Shatner informs you that what you are about to see is not a simulation.

You see two bloody people in their car. You see paramedics cut Carol Stuart loose from her seat belt and pull her from the car. She is rushed to a hospital. You are told her child was delivered by Cesarean section. She died within hours; the child died 17 days later.

The camera crew follows Stuart into the ambulance, and later to the emergency room of Boston City Hospital where he lies almost naked as doctors work on him. Over and over he asks about his wife.

Other segments of “Rescue 911” detail the struggle of U.S. Marine rescue units and doctors at a trauma center in Orange County to save the life of a pilot who survived the crash of his jet fighter; and the race of a Jackson, Miss., woman to stop an out-of-control car after the driver suffered an apparent heart attack.