We had seen this evil before.
It hardly matters that Kashif Parvaiz was just 4 years old when Chuck Stuart decided to end his marriage by firing a bullet through the head of his pregnant wife, Carol, shooting himself in the abdomen . . . while blaming all on a “black man.”
Since that September night on Mission Hill in 1989, Stuart’s epic malevolence has become a tragic part of our cultural landscape.
Kashif Parvaiz’s alleged plot to get out of his marriage by having his wife, Nazish Noorani, murdered Tuesday night in a New Jersey suburb during an orchestrated attack in which he was also wounded, looks like an eerie piece of deja vu.
Indeed, there would appear to be a lot of Chuck Stuart in Kashif Parvaiz. Like Stuart, Parvaiz also told the cops that a “black man” was among the attackers who killed his wife and shot him.
And, yes, the police in Boonton, N.J., immediately launched a search for these phantom murderers, just as Boston police tore through Mission Hill in the aftermath of Chuck’s heinous lie.
But fortunately, here is where the similarity between Kashif Parvaiz and Chuck Stuart ends. Unlike what happened in Boston, it took only a couple of days for Morris County prosecutor Robert A. Bianchi to issue the following statement:
“After considerable investigative analysis, law enforcement quickly concluded that this was not a bias crime.
“This was sadly the alleged handiwork of the victim’s husband, who allegedly did the unthinkable and plotted to murder his wife . . .”
Two days.
Newman Flanagan, who was Suffolk DA at the time of the Stuart case, didn’t arrive at that conclusion until months later, when Stuart threw himself off the Tobin Bridge.
And trust me when I tell you, Flanagan still couldn’t believe it.
Not until Stuart killed himself was this city ready to let go of the “Camelot couple” myth that adorned the doomed Stuart marriage.
We wanted so much to buy the notion that a handsome young fur salesman and his devoted, expectant wife were set upon by a mayhem-minded thug after taking a wrong turn into a “bad” neighborhood.
We would learn that the only evil person in Mission Hill that night was Chuck Stuart, who staged the murder, and his dim-witted brother, Matthew, who disposed of the gun Chuck used on Carol and himself.
A key part of Chuck Stuart’s diabolical scheme was to exploit Boston’s raw nerve of race. The soothing that came to this city was delivered by the proud grieving and graceful family of Carol DiMaiti Stuart. They converted their heartache into scholarships for Mission Hill children.
But that is only part of the legacy of the Stuart case. When one half of a picture-perfect couple meets with sudden violence and death, cops, mindful of his deception, are no longer quick to rule out the husband.
Those cops in New Jersey did not make a ghastly situation worse by up-ending an innocent neighborhood.
In that, they perhaps unknowingly borrowed something good from the twisted saga of Chuck Stuart.
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