Father of Slain Son Presides at Killer’s Wedding

The Rev. Walter Everett spoke from the heart Saturday when he presided over the wedding of his son’s killer.

“Love means knowing that you can say: ‘I’m sorry,’ and that the other person will forgive you,” Everett told Michael Carlucci and his bride at the altar. “ ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I forgive you’ are the key words in any relationship.”

The men’s relationship depended on the words.

Carlucci fatally shot Everett’s 24-year-old son, Scott, in 1987 in a drunken scuffle at the apartment building where both lived. He said he never meant to kill him.

Everett, 60, didn’t speak of his son at the wedding attended by about 85 people in the Golden Hill United Methodist Church, only of love.

“Love is patient and kind,” the pastor told the couple, reading from the Bible. “It does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.”

After his son was killed, Everett was angry when he heard Carlucci would be sentenced to only five years in prison for manslaughter.

That changed when he heard Carlucci apologize at his sentencing hearing. On the one-year anniversary of his son’s death, Everett wrote Carlucci in state prison to offer forgiveness.

“That decision for me didn’t come easily,” Everett said before the wedding. “I began to see how the anger was destroying me.”

Everett, who adopted Scott when he was 22 months old, said he wrote the letter as a way “to get through it.” Afterward, he found “some inner peace.”

When Carlucci read the letter, he broke down in tears. He wrote back, and a friendship developed.

Carlucci, 34, was released in 1991. Everett, pastor of United Methodist Church in Hartford, even testified on his behalf at a parole hearing. Everett’s own marriage of 34 years, which was already troubled, ended after he forgave Carlucci.

As a wedding gift, Everett gave Carlucci and his bride, Sandie Foerster, a box of 16 crayons. The pastor said each color represents an emotion.

“Purple I see as a symbol of penitence,” Everett told the couple. “Blue is a color symbolizing loyalty and trust.”

Everett said before the ceremony that those feelings helped him carry on with his life.

“It began with an act of forgiveness,” he said. “The healing process, I think, is an ongoing thing. Today is a definite milestone.”