Jim Walsh
Nahant is the smallest town in Massachusetts, barely 1 square mile. Jutting out into Massachusetts Bay from the City of Lynn, north of Boston, it is the kind of town where, if you weren’t born here, when you come, you want to stay. That’s certainly the way it was for me 50 years ago.
Though small, any town has many faces, diverse opinions, tangled connections, histories both known and not known. Yet, when something especially beautiful happens, the townspeople share the happiness that flows from it… Tall ships anchored off of East Point, East Point itself, the Memorial Day Parade to the Greenlawn Cemetery and a child or children there reciting the Gettysburg Address, the tossing of flowers from the town wharf.
And when something tragic happens in our town, that too is shared with shaking heads and painful glances on every street.
Some months ago, a neighbor noticed that he had not seen the folks that lived across the street for some time. Because neighbors talk to one another, he would have known if they were traveling. It had snowed recently, but there were no footprints between the house and the car in the driveway. No shaded lights glowed at night. He called on the phone. There was no answer. He walked across the street and knocked on the door. There was no answer… but he noticed something strange. The air emanating from the house did not seem normal. It felt ominous and unsettling. He called the Nahant Police Department. When police officers arrived and knocked again, there was again no response. They pried open a window on the back porch and entered.
The Benson family had made that house their home for more than 100 years. Three generations had come of age in those rooms near the end of a small, dead-end street. One son, John, had never left. He stayed on, caring for his father until his father’s death at 97 in 2010. In 2005, a second son, Joseph, returned from a long teaching sojourn in Asia with a wife and new daughter. Many years later, that daughter had married and moved to a town not far away with a daughter of her own. The house on Cottage Street was the center of the Benson universe.
The two sons had been active in local affairs. I knew them both. They shared a love of nature, particularly birds. John loved to sing and sang in several churches on the North Shore. Joe loved to teach and was an ESL instructor at Salem State. Joe’s wife, Young Ae, was a regular at Council on Aging lunches, and his daughter, Lisa, recently a new mother, was studying for a doctorate in occupational therapy.
A lobsterman lived next door. Across the street sat the summer home of the Sisters of St. Joseph, looking north across Nahant Bay toward Swampscott, Marblehead, and Cape Ann.
Inside the house that day were the bodies of John Benson, his sister-in-law Young Ae Benson, a recent grandmother, and his nephew Andrew Carruth. They had died some days before — quietly, prematurely, unjustly — from poisonous CO2 gas, emitted from a furnace that had been installed secretly, imperfectly, without a permit, and never inspected.
Laws require that a plumber or an electrician get a permit from the town before they do their work. When they complete that, it must be inspected… and for good reason. That inspection protects everyone. None of that had happened at the Benson residence when the deadly source of the CO2 had been installed.
According to the police report, when the investigating officer, Lt. Steve Schultz from the Nahant Police Department, asked the installer of that furnace if he had obtained a permit from the town, the plumber’s response was, “We did not obtain one, that’s on us.” Lt. Schultz had also grown up in this small town. His father had been an active citizen and a member of the Nahant Police Reserve. One supposes that stopping speeding cars and keeping an eye out for burglars was far easier to deal with than investigating the multiple tragic deaths of others who had spent their lives in the shared square mile of Nahant.
A house once filled with Bensons had filled with CO2 and was now empty of life. A mother had lost a son, a daughter had lost a mother, a niece had lost an uncle. A voice that had sung was silent. Eyes that sought bald eagles and snowy owls at East Point were shut. Officers tasked with the safety of Nahant’s streets found themselves crawling through a kitchen window only to discover the three innocent, lifeless bodies of friends and neighbors. The Fire Department was called, an ambulance summoned, neighbors gathered. A community lost a valued member who spent much of his life actively seeking to protect its natural environment… and singing.
Lisa Benson — who lost her mother, her uncle, and her cousin that day — told me recently how difficult it is for her to return now to the place where her childhood had unfolded. Instead of a happy place where her young life was lived, it has become for her a place of tragic, unnecessary deaths. I find myself asking if there will be a consequence for those whose actions appear to have caused those deaths. It is an important question for those of us in this small town and also those who live on the far side of our causeway.
Jim Walsh is active in the Nahant community.
