Stuart’s First Murder of the Year
It didn’t take long for Stuart to have its first murder of the year.
At half past five in the afternoon on the first day of the new year, a man was stabbed in Smith-Turner Park on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. He later died of his wound at HCA Lawnwood Hospital in Fort Pierce. I don’t know the reason for the altercation, nor does it matter. It was a senseless killing in our city.
Smith-Turner Park was a dilapidated lot that was masquerading as a park in 2014. That is when a group of residents of East Stuart along with Paul and Paula Nicoletti got behind an initiative to turn the lot into something more than a patch of overgrown vegetation. And they succeeded in their goals.
Lawrence Turner and Richard Smith were East Stuart kids that were drafted into the army. They both ended up in Vietnam where they made the ultimate sacrifice in 1968. There were no public funerals for the two Black soldiers that gave their lives for their country. Though the Supreme Court had knocked down segregation, it still existed in Stuart, Florida, and the South.
Almost 50 years later, Paul Nicoletti, the Stuart city manager and a retired army colonel pushed to have the park cleaned up, and Paula worked tirelessly to make sure it was named for Turner and Smith. She even helped raise the money for some of the improvements. My wife and I donated a bench.
I remember the Memorial Day that the park was dedicated. Both the Smith and Turner families were there. The late James Christie, then a city commissioner, led the ceremonies. It was a hot day.
It is a passive park. You can watch the ducks, and a few souls fish from the dock. A few residents from the veterans’ apartments up the block sometimes go there. You also see the young and not so young men of East Stuart in the park.
Battles over turf, slights, women, or drugs take over the parks of East Stuart at times. A place dedicated to the sacrifice of Turner and Smith in the long-ago Vietnam War is drawn into another type of war with the same senseless killing. Only this time there are no helicopters that will take the boys into battle, only ambulances and the trauma hawk to take the casualties to the hospital.
