A family's peace | Part I

Last Seen

WBUR

True Crime, Missing, Mystery, Boston, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

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Summary

On a sunny Saturday in 2016, Benine Timothee left her house to visit a friend who lived close by and never returned. She had lived in the United States for only three months when she was shot and killed outside a corner store in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. No arrests have been made, and there are no suspects in the case.

For six years, her family and others have been haunted by the question — what really happened to their mother, wife, and friend on that October afternoon in 2016?

In this three-part series for Last Seen, independent investigative reporter Shannon Dooling joins Benine's family members on their quest for truth and information. Together, they explore what it means to go on living, after losing a loved one so suddenly, with no explanation. And if it's possible to ever find peace, in the absence of closure.

In this first episode, we learn about Benine's life in Haiti, her family's hopes and dreams of a new life in Boston, and why her husband and children feel forgotten by law enforcement.

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Transcript

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0:29.9	WBWR podcasts, Boston.
0:39.9	Shannon, you're an independent investigative reporter based in Boston, and I am neither of those
0:46.4	things. So I want to know, what kinds of stories do you typically pursue?
0:50.9	Yeah, so let's see Nora. I'd say usually I'm looking for, you know, missing money,
0:59.3	missing accountability. We usually try to find, you know, the people in power who are screwing
1:06.8	people over, so to speak, like if there's something wrong with a system, a big picture.
1:11.9	Those are kind of the hard-hitting topics that, you know, attract me.
1:16.9	But every now and then, there's a more abstract mystery that comes along, and that challenges
1:24.9	our preconceived notions of loss, of mourning, of closure, of what it means for someone we
1:30.9	love to go missing. And Shannon, this feels to me like one of those stories.
1:35.9	Yeah, Nora, I think it is, because for the last two years or so while I was an investigative
1:41.7	reporter at WBUR, I'd been speaking with a family here in Boston about the loss of their
1:48.1	mother and wife, a woman named Benin. And technically we, the public, we know what happened to Benin.
1:55.7	Right. Her killing was covered in the local news here in Boston back in 2016. And even
2:01.3	a few months after she died, there were stories about the investigation. But six years later,
2:06.4	we still have no idea what actually happened. Yeah. I mean, we know what happened. And we
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