Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice

by Helman, Scott

  On his return to Cambridge, Tamerlan was a changed man. His face was covered by a thick beard. Gone were the silver boots and fur hat. In their place were dark clothing and a woven white prayer cap worn by Muslims. His prayers in the corner of the Wai Kru gym, which once took minutes, now lasted up to half an hour. “He had really dialed up the religion thing,” his training partner recalled. “The days of joking about his appearance, the Eurotrash—that kid was gone. In his place was a quiet, intense individual.” Tamerlan’s anger over American military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq had also escalated. He railed about Muslims being killed overseas. He launched a YouTube account with a username that combined a name given him by his Union of the Just comrades and the phrase “the sword of God.” In one video in his playlist, called “Terrorists,” a speaker wearing camouflage, flanked by armed men wearing masks, holds an assault rifle and says in Russian, “There will always be a group of people who will stick to the truth, fight for that truth . . . and those who won’t support them will not win.”

  As their relationship grew closer, Tamerlan confided in Donald Larking, his friend from the mosque, about the voice inside his head, which he said he had been hearing for some time. “He believed in majestic mind control, which is a way of breaking down a person and creating an alternative personality with which they must coexist,” Larking said. “You can give a signal, a phrase or a gesture, and bring out the alternate personality and make them do things. Tamerlan thought someone might have done that to him.” Just as he had once described it to his mother, Tamerlan told Larking that it was like having two people inside him.

  Dzhokhar, meanwhile, had begun his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in the fall of 2011. He joined an intramural soccer group, made other acquaintances playing video games and watching TV, and posted jokes on a newly opened Twitter account. He was generous with favors. Mostly, though, he was recognized for a different venture—selling notably strong marijuana. “He was known for having the best bud on campus,” said one longtime friend. He also took his reckless tendencies to new limits. A lit cigarette in hand, Dzhokhar loved to imitate race-car drivers, pushing his 1999 green Honda Civic up to nearly 120 miles an hour, according to several close friends. Other times he would turn corners with the steering wheel between his knees, leaving his hands free to roll a joint. If partying was a priority, schoolwork was not. As Dzhokhar’s wallet thickened with cash and his sense of invincibility grew, he was rarely spotted studying at the library or student lounges.

  In the spring of his freshman year, another crack appeared in his easygoing manner. The young man who had seemingly assimilated more successfully than the rest of his family claimed that he was done with his adopted country. A decade in America already, he wrote on Twitter. I want out. After a summer back in Cambridge, working as a lifeguard at Harvard University’s Blodgett Pool, he returned to campus in the fall of 2012. It was a much lonelier place. His closest friends had left or moved off campus. His grades sunk further. The future looked bleak. His country, though, was ready to accept him anyway. On September 11, 2012, in a ceremony at Boston’s TD Garden, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev became a US citizen.

  • • •

  One day in early 2013, Dzhokhar showed up at his former high school with his wrestling shoes, looking to get on the mats again with the old team. “We’re all laughing; everyone’s pulling his hair and saying, ‘You ought to do cornrows,’” said Peter Payack, one of his coaches. It was the same old Dzhokhar—or so it seemed. Even as he continued to display his charms and party with friends, he was spending more time at his family’s Cambridge apartment, where his brother lived. Tamerlan at this point was an unemployed husband and father, devoting countless hours to his Muslim faith and watching over his toddler daughter. Together the two brothers, both of their once-bright futures dimmed, began orchestrating a deadly scheme against the country that had welcomed them.

  In early February 2013, Tamerlan drove up to Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New Hampshire, and paid $200 in cash for forty-eight mortars containing eight pounds of explosive powder. The next month, the two brothers went to a firing range in Manchester, New Hampshire. Dzhokhar spent $160 to rent two 9mm handguns, buy two hundred rounds of ammunition, and, with Tamerlan, shoot at targets for an hour. A few weeks later, Tamerlan ordered electronic components over the Internet, arranging delivery to their Cambridge apartment. At some point he used his laptop to download an article from the summer 2010 issue of Inspire, an English-language Al-Qaeda publication. The article was called “Make a Bomb in The Kitchen of Your Mom.” It provided detailed instruction on how to make a bomb in a pressure cooker using commonly available flammables like the powder from fireworks and homemade shrapnel fashioned from nails or steel pellets. “Put your trust in Allah and pray for the success of your operation,” the article instructed. “This is the most important rule.”

  Their Cambridge kitchen was no longer the kitchen of their mom. Zubeidat had returned to Russia months earlier after being caught shoplifting at a mall in suburban Boston. Tamerlan and Dzhokhar were on their own, with few positive influences, no direction, and little to lose, a tandem of failure whose descent had brought them lower than anyone could have imagined. The two brothers set to work on their violent plot. They readied their homemade bombs. Now it was just a question of targets. If you have the knowledge and the inspiration, Dzhokhar wrote cryptically on Twitter on April 7, 2013, all that’s left is to take action. They considered public events with big crowds, like Boston’s Fourth of July celebration. They considered attacking police stations. But they were impatient now, ready to go. Once the devices were finished, Monday, April 15, presented an immediate opportunity to unleash the destruction they sought. It was Patriot’s Day, which would bring thousands to downtown for the 117th Boston Marathon. As night fell on Sunday, the eve of the marathon, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan walked down their street carrying a pizza box. A neighbor, Malisha Pitt, was sitting on her stoop. One of her relatives asked them for a slice, and Pitt admonished him. “Stop harassing my neighbors,” she said. The two brothers laughed and kept on walking.

  CHAPTER 3

  STARTING LINE

  Perfect day for a marathon

  The volume on his alarm was set as low as it could go, but David King was instantly awake when the first faint beats of techno music reached him in the darkness. In the kitchen, his coffee was already steaming, the machine having been set to start ten minutes before his alarm. It was 4:00 A.M. on Marathon Monday. The sun would not be up for two more hours. The long-awaited day had arrived, and King rose swiftly to meet it.

  He was almost always up this early. His work schedule at the hospital could be unpredictable and merciless. These quiet predawn hours were his training time, the only time he could count on to test and retest his endurance. His training had grown more rigorous in recent years, as King—the once-reluctant marathoner who had only lately tapped the rapture of distance running—had pushed himself further. Just six weeks earlier, in Taupo, New Zealand, he had completed his first IRONMAN triathlon: a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, topped off by a complete twenty-six-mile marathon. He had finished in eleven hours and fifty-eight minutes. Running through pain at the end, he felt buoyed by waves of bliss, a happiness so overwhelming he had to fight back tears. It was, he said, one of the purest joys he had ever felt.

  Today’s run would take him just over three hours, if all went as planned. He had run faster marathons elsewhere—he had run the relatively flat course in Miami in under three hours—but Boston was tougher. If he hit his goal of 3:10, it would make this, his third time running Boston, his fastest ever. Reaching for his coffee mug on the kitchen counter—the sugar cubes were already inside, where he had dropped them the night before—the doctor felt certain the race would go well. Only two weeks ago, troubled by his nagging back pain, he had not been sure if he could run Boston at all. Just in time, those doubts had lifted, like storm clouds p
arting to reveal the sun. Now he was ready. He couldn’t wait to start. First, though, he needed to eat breakfast.

  For years, King had eaten the same thing on marathon mornings: three packets of instant oatmeal, two bananas. A year ago, though, he had discovered chocolate chip pancakes, and now nothing else would do. Skilled as he was in the operating room, where he presided over hundreds of urgent, often lifesaving surgeries every year, King had yet to master the art of pancake preparation. So he relied on the kindness of his wife, Anne. She would soon be getting up to mix the batter. Later in the day, near the end of the marathon, she would be waiting on the course with their two young children just before the turn from Commonwealth Avenue onto Hereford Street, less than a mile from the finish. His parents would be there, too, cheering him on, his dad making sure the family was pressed up against the barriers when he came along, as close to the street as spectators could get. It was never hard to find them. They were always right there. That familiarity and ease of planning were part of what made it so comfortable and so much fun to run Boston, now his hometown marathon, every April.

  King’s informal running club, the Beacon Hill Runners, had space on a bus to the starting line in Hopkinton, so after finishing his pancakes he caught a cab across Cambridge to MIT, where the motor coach was idling. He settled into his seat, his earphones chirping more techno beats. The doctor, who had double majored in music and biology in college, favored a type of electronic dance music called dubstep. Its sound features heavy, driving bass lines and bass “drops,” when the percussion stops short and plunges the song into silence before resuming with increased intensity. He used it for motivation before workouts. Other runners on the bus might have tried to shut out the world on this ride, marshaling their energy for the grueling day ahead. King was too much of a multitasker for that. It was Marathon Day, but it was also income tax day, and he had a few loose ends to tie up with his accountant. Forgot to send you this, he tapped on his iPhone screen as the sun rose higher and the bus rolled west. Sorry so last minute. Much of the city might have been enjoying a lazy Patriot’s Day morning, but on April 15, tax accountants were working, even in Boston. The accountant had news for him, and it wasn’t what King hoped to hear: She had calculated how much he owed the government, and it was a lot more than he had expected. He felt himself getting upset. Then, browsing through news stories on his phone, he stumbled across a fact that irked him further: President Obama had paid an effective federal income tax rate of 18.4 percent in 2012, a rate lower than King’s own. What is that guy doing that I’m not? he messaged his accountant. I want a deal like that.

  It was not the ideal state of mind for the start of the race. But as he stepped off the bus into the morning sun, he felt the promise of the day start to sweep everything else away.

  • • •

  Dave McGillivray rose alone around 3:30 A.M., greeted by the quiet of his hotel room. His family used to stay with him. Not anymore. He’d come to realize that he needed the solitude, needed the peace, to focus. This was, after all, the biggest day of his year. Outside, Copley Square lay dark and still. In a few short hours, the sun would rise on another Marathon Monday. Hundreds of thousands of runners, spectators, volunteers, police—the whole city, really—would be counting on him to again deliver a flawless race, to make it all go right. As he got up, he spoke to his pillow, as he did every year. He said the words out loud: “When I come back and lay my head on this pillow, boy, am I going to have some stories to tell.”

  After a shower, McGillivray pulled his gear together, separating it into two piles. In the first, he assembled everything he would need to direct the race—two-way radios, credentials, a list of colleagues’ cell phone numbers, an energy bar and banana for sustenance. In the second, he laid out his running clothes. At some point that afternoon, he would return to his hotel room for a quick change, part of his Marathon Monday ritual of running the course once everyone else was done. By 6:00 A.M., McGillivray was in Hopkinton, his game face on, with a long mental list of things to inspect. He began at the athletes’ village at the local high school, then surveyed the volunteer check-in, the water stations, the portable restrooms, the staging area for the lead vehicles, the local elementary school where the wheelchair athletes gathered, and the Korean Presbyterian church, home base for the elite runners. He consulted with a mobile unit of the Massachusetts State Police, made sure the school buses of runners were on their way from Boston, kept an eye on the weather, and gave interviews to the media. Then he walked up and down the starting line to see that the race marshals were in place, the ropes up, the course ready to accept the cascade of competitors, always shadowed by a volunteer with a ham radio, allowing him to communicate with his team.

  After twenty-five years as race director, McGillivray had it down to a science, his wisdom an accumulation of so many Marathon Mondays, so many notes carefully logged on a voice recorder he always carried with him. Over all these years, he hadn’t quite seen it all, but just about. He knew every nook and cranny of the course—every hill, every turn, every mile marker, every landmark. He could see the whole operation in his sleep, from the oasis of water cups and restrooms in the parking lot of a Hopkinton supermarket to the grandstands and expectant crowds in Copley Square. He had learned, too, how the slightest aberration could threaten the whole day—an unfortunate pile of manure from a policeman’s mount, a car parked on the course, rowdy fans infringing on the runners. His task largely consisted of managing an event he couldn’t even see. “We’re not in an arena,” McGillivray said. “This isn’t beach volleyball.”

  The margin of error was precariously slim. Getting more than twenty-three thousand runners through a narrow chute at the start, and then safely down the course, required a careful staging of who started when, and how much space to leave between the waves of competitors. You couldn’t have the elite male runners overtaking the elite women en masse. You couldn’t have the leading women bumping up against the wheelchair racers. You couldn’t have official race vehicles trying to pass one another on the narrow route. The wheelchair racers would roll out at 9:17 A.M.; the elite women would follow fifteen minutes later. At 10:00 A.M. came the elite men and the first wave of ordinary runners. Twenty minutes later, a second wave would follow, and twenty minutes after that, at 10:40, the final group would set off. By the time the last batch crossed the starting line, the leaders would be miles down the course. Over the years, McGillivray and his colleagues at the Boston Athletic Association had learned how critical it was that the field be spaced just right. Once the runners leave the starting line, it’s too late to fix anything. Momentum takes charge, a herd of thousands of runners stampeding toward Boston with one goal in mind, everyone straining for the best time their bodies will allow. “Everything has to be perfect,” McGillivray said. On this morning, as on all marathon mornings, he lived by his motto: It isn’t about putting out fires. It’s about preventing them.

  • • •

  King lay down on the cool gray Hopkinton pavement and gazed up at the blue sky, looking to coax forth the elation he always felt at the start of a marathon. As he lay there on the ground, though, he realized that he felt a pressing need—he had to go. This was always a problem, for King and countless other marathoners: where to relieve themselves during the tedious wait for the starting gun. It was an even bigger problem for Hopkinton residents, some of whom cordoned off their yards with yellow CAUTION tape to try to repel desperate runners heeding nature’s call. King made his way to a row of portable toilets, but after waiting a few minutes in an endless line, he decided he wasn’t going to make it. He would have to go into the woods. Looking around, he saw plenty of runners ducking into the brush and trees along the road; most stepped in no more than a few feet. King decided he would seek better cover. He hiked into the brush some forty feet, well off the road, with a righteous sense of having been more thoughtful than the masses. When he emerged, feeling much relieved, a police officer on a bicycle was wait
ing.

  “What were you doing in there?” the officer demanded.

  King smirked. “Farming corn,” he answered. “What do you think I was doing?”

  The young policeman on the bike was not amused. “You know I can give you a ticket for public indecency,” he warned. The two men stared each other down, each indignant at the other’s challenge.

  “Fine,” King told him. “Go ahead. Give me a ticket.”

  The officer hesitated and then waved King on. “Fine, go,” he told him. “Don’t let me catch you again.”

  King had won the standoff, but it had been close. And it hadn’t done a thing to focus him before the race.

  It was always hard to decide when to get into position for the start. Committing oneself to the starting corral meant giving up one’s bag and phone and snacks and sweatshirt and embracing the stripped-down aesthetic needed for the race itself. Some runners held off until the last minute, but King was a fan of the opening ceremonies, and he liked to get close enough to listen. His starting position had moved up over the years as his qualifying times had improved, from the back of the pack when he was a newer, slower marathoner, running four hours or more, into the first wave of racers, starting just behind the elite runners. Moving into place there, King felt the exhilaration that had eluded him earlier start to kick in. He felt the same way every time, standing at the starting line with the familiar course spread out before him—almost giddy, he said, “like a five-year-old sneaking downstairs to see his Christmas presents.” He waited, reveling in the electric charge of the countdown, and listened for the national anthem. That was the emotional highlight for him. Once he heard it, he was ready to run.