Tragic fate for young sisters

In the gray light of yesterday afternoon, Wisline Emile stood at the edge of Harlem Street in Dorchester and recalled a request her younger sister, Stephanie, had once made of her.

“My sister, she always said she wanted to go back home to Haiti,” said this petite, 29-year-old woman who works as a teacher’s aide. “  ‘When I’m old and gray,’ she’d say, ‘or if anything should happen to me, I want to be buried back home.’ ”

All of 21, Stephanie Emile never got the chance to grow old and gray. On Monday morning she was shot and killed along with her 23-year-old sister, Judith, in the apartment the sisters shared a few doors away from their mother.

Yesterday, Wisline Emile, her sister Miralda and brother Murat discounted all the usual possibilities that tend to explain the violence of a cold-blooded double homicide.

They could think of no spurned boyfriends, no family enemies who would ever exact such a gruesome fate on a pair of sisters “who got up every day, went to work and went to church and treated everybody with respect,” according to Wisline.

“All we want to know is why?” said 29-year-old Miralda Emile, tears creasing her face. “Why would someone do this? We have no closure, no reasons. Nothing. My two sisters are dead, and for what?

“We’re begging someone to step forward and tell us why? What did my sisters ever do to deserve this?”

“We are a family of 13 children who are very close,” added Murat Emile, 26. “My sisters moved to an apartment two doors away from our mother. They never felt threatened here. They were never afraid.

“All they ever did was get up and go to work every day, take care of a niece and go to church at St. Angela’s.”

“No man, no woman, no child should have to die the way my sisters did,” said Wisline Emile. “No one in our family has any drama or other so-called reasons why something like this would happen.”

Crime scene tape blocked the entrance to the Harlem Street building yesterday afternoon, and a Boston police officer stood sentry in the hall. Otherwise, this tidy street, a few blocks away from Franklin Park, was eerily quiet.

Yesterday, the siblings who stood together in the dank afternoon said their father, who once believed America held more promise for his children, was returning one last time from Haiti to fulfill Stephanie’s wish and also bring her sister, Judith, back home forever.