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

by Helman, Scott

  O’Hara ran back outside. He started ripping away the metal scaffolding that separated the sidewalk from the street. It had become a lethal barrier, blocking emergency responders from reaching the wounded. He ran in and out of the store, delivering clothes from the racks to bleeding victims and the people helping them. All around him he saw overwhelming damage. “Stay with me,” somebody said to one woman, her head resting on a helper’s lap. “Stay with me.”

  Out there on the sidewalk, just for one still moment, O’Hara felt everything fall away. A calm came over him, the world slowing to a crawl. He didn’t know what was next, if another explosion would follow, if he and everyone around him were about to die. Was he satisfied with what his life had been? He decided that he was. His mind was at peace. He was willing to accept whatever came. And then just like that, the sensation passed. He threw himself back into the pressing work of trying to save lives.

  It was there, right outside the store O’Hara managed, that Krystle Campbell had stood seconds before, watching the runners finish, hanging with her friends, taking part in one of the Boston sports traditions she so loved. Now she was on the ground, her head tipped back to the sky. She had suffered devastating wounds to her torso and lower extremities, worse than those of anyone around her. A Georgia emergency room physician and other rescuers tried desperately to save her. They rushed her to the medical tent, but it was too late. Her pulse had slipped away.

  • • •

  That’s not a cannon, Boston firefighter Sean O’Brien thought when he heard the first explosion. Maybe a transformer? He was standing in front of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, a couple blocks before the finish line. “Obie, that’s a bomb,” the firefighter next to him said. Right then, a second explosion tore through the sidewalk across the street. The first blast had happened in front of Marathon Sports, at 671 Boylston Street. The second explosion, just twelve seconds later, detonated one block to the west, in front of Forum restaurant, at 755 Boylston. Both spots were packed with afternoon crowds. Those who could ran for their lives, away from whatever might happen next—a third bomb? A fourth? Many, like O’Brien, thought the first blast was some kind of accident. When the second echoed, they knew it was something much worse.

  O’Brien’s thoughts raced first to his wife and his four daughters. In an instant, he sorted through his recent interactions with them and found them acceptable. No fights, no harsh words would stand among their final memories of him. Then he moved forward, over the barricade toward the bomb scene, the wounded walking toward him in a daze. He could smell the burning. He looked back across the street, near the spot where he’d just been standing, and saw a little girl’s bag, pink with flowers, abandoned on the sidewalk. That one’s next, he thought. I know it. He waited for the pink bag to blow up.

  • • •

  The first explosion had rippled the surface of Jason Geremia’s drink as he stood near the bar inside Forum. Conversations around him stopped midsentence. Smiles faded, replaced by looks of confusion. “What was that?” the bartender asked. The sound was loud, but far enough away that it wasn’t clear what had caused it. Jason turned to look at the front entrance and saw his friends Michelle and Jess standing in the doorway. He didn’t see Heather Abbott, who was supposed to be with them. Just then the second blast blew his friends into the bar. They were stumbling forward, falling, as he grabbed them and pulled them to the back, away from Boylston Street and whatever had just happened. Everyone else was stampeding the same way.

  • • •

  Brighid Wall threw her six-year-old son onto the ground when the second bomb exploded some ten feet away to their right. She lay across him on the sidewalk, her pregnant belly beneath her, and looked back over her left shoulder at the dazed people covered with black soot. She saw a man struggling to stand up; she realized he was struggling because he was missing a leg. The urge to flee seized her then, pushing away shock and fear, and she scanned the ground, looking for the bag that held her car keys. She stood up. Her husband grabbed their son and nephew. A stranger picked up her four-year-old daughter and they all ran into the Starbucks next door to Forum, blood and broken glass and spilled coffee under their feet. People were screaming but the children were silent—waiting, she realized, for someone to make them safe.

  • • •

  Searching in the smoke for one of his friends, Mike Chase came across a man holding seven-year-old Jane Richard in his arms. “We gotta do something here,” said the man, an off-duty firefighter named Matt Patterson. Chase, a high school soccer coach who had been watching the race, grabbed the belt Patterson had wrapped around the child’s thigh and pulled it tight. Her leg was in bad shape. Jane’s father, Bill Richard, was nearby, holding on to his oldest son, Henry, who was not badly hurt. Chase looked down and saw his missing friend, Dan Marshall, kneeling on the ground over another little boy. Others bent to join him, trying to help Martin. “My son, my son,” the stricken father said. There was nothing anyone could do.

  • • •

  Allison Byrne was so eager to finish the race that she was sprinting down Boylston. She saw the first explosion and veered away from the left side of the street. She felt the second bomb’s impact before she heard it. Something black hurtled toward her legs. It was an iPhone-sized piece of shrapnel, and it lodged in the meat of her left calf. With her good leg, she dove to the right, somehow crashing through the metal barricades on the opposite side of the street. Alone and scared, she lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

  “Oh my God, I can’t die!” she screamed. People trampled over her, desperate to escape. “Please don’t leave me,” she pleaded, making eye contact with some as they ran over her.

  Then she heard a voice: “I’m not going to leave you.” The voice came from Nancy Shorter, who appeared like an angel as ash fell all around them. Shorter was a spectator, there with her husband and stepsons. But she was much more than that. A retired nurse, she had spent years working in the ER at one of Boston’s best hospitals. She quickly elevated Byrne’s leg, grabbed her husband’s jacket, and applied pressure to the wound. Byrne rested her head against the window of a bank. Shorter sat with her, then helped her into the backseat of a police car.

  • • •

  After he heard the deafening explosions, Dr. Sushrut Jangi walked out the back of the marathon’s block-long medical tent and looked down Boylston Street toward the finish line. He saw smoke and a crowd of people running. “There are bombs,” a woman whispered at his side. Jangi, a medical volunteer who had spent the day treating chilled and dehydrated runners, felt the urge to flee. His hands began to shake, and he thought about slipping away. Inside the tent, someone in charge was speaking into a microphone, asking everybody to stay calm and remain with their patients. Jangi turned around and went back in. A nurse standing between two cots began to cry.

  • • •

  Heather Abbott lay on the floor inside Forum watching her friends disappear, running with the crowd into the back of the restaurant. She had been just outside the door, waiting to get in, when she heard the first explosion; she had turned her head at the sound and seen smoke rising. Her first thought was of 9/11: some dislodged memory of TV coverage from that day, surfacing before she knew what was happening. Then, before she could think of anything else, the second explosion blew her through the door and into the restaurant. Her left foot felt like it was on fire. She tried to get up and couldn’t, and thought to herself, I might die here. Everyone is running away. Who is going to help me? She sat up and called out for help. It was hard to tell in the din if her voice was a scream or a whisper. She took care not to look at her foot, fearful that she might faint at the sight of it. She had to keep her focus on finding a way out. All at once a woman appeared beside her, a stranger asking for her name and praying out loud: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” The woman’s husband bent down, lifted Heather up, and carried her in his arms out the back door into daylight. Her foot was s
till burning, but she wasn’t alone anymore.

  • • •

  Shana Cottone reached for her gun when the first bomb exploded. Something had gone wrong and she didn’t know what it was. Twelve seconds passed, the second bomb went off, and then, like so many others, Shana understood. They were being attacked and she was going to die. Fighting off the overwhelming urge to run away, she started ripping down the barricades along the sidewalk, moving into the drifting smoke in front of Forum. She picked up strollers, the babies still strapped inside, and carried them into the middle of the street, where it seemed like they might be safer, as stunned parents followed her blindly. She put one stroller down on the open pavement and saw a woman lying nearby, on the pavement in the middle of the street. She was covered with abrasions, her blonde hair singed to black around her face. Shana knelt and looked into her eyes. The woman was awake. Shana took her hand and started talking.

  “Talk to me,” she told the woman in the street. “Who did you come to watch? Where do you live?”

  “I can’t feel my leg,” the woman said. She was bleeding heavily, one of her legs nearly severed. Shana looked down the street. Where were the ambulances? Why weren’t they coming?

  “Your leg is there,” Shana said.

  “I can’t feel it,” the woman insisted.

  Shana wanted to call her by her name, to reach her through the fog of shock and pain and hold her there. She searched for one of the woman’s ID cards and found it: “I swear on my life, Roseann, your leg is there.”

  Around them was a churning sea of chaos: terrified spectators running away; police and firefighters running in; bystanders whipping off belts and handing them to first responders. Across the bloodstained pavement, small desperate clusters formed around the most gravely wounded victims. Within each knot of kneeling people in the street, the focus narrowed to one face, one broken body, one makeshift tourniquet. Time seemed to slow down. The motions of people trying to help were frantic, video clips from the scene would later show, but in the moment, every action seemed to unfold as if underwater. Even to those who worked there every day, Boylston Street in those first minutes was utterly foreign, a place that looked and felt completely unfamiliar. Seconds felt like minutes; death hovered close. They would not be able to fend it off for long.

  Lingzi Lu, the graduate student from China, was already gone. She had been standing in the crowd near Forum; now she lay still and silent on the ground, her lower body ravaged by the explosion. Firefighters tried to revive her, but it was futile. They determined she was dead and covered her body.

  Standing where the second bomb had just blown up in front of Forum, Boston fire lieutenant Fred Lorenz surveyed the carnage. He saw two people who looked like they didn’t have long to live. Those who weren’t making any noise were the ones who needed help the most. Looking up Boylston toward the scene of the first blast, he could see ambulances. On his radio, he called for help—755 Boylston, we need ambulances!—but all the other crackling voices drowned him out. The police and firefighters at the site of the first explosion, just a block away, were consumed with their own tangle of casualties; their focus had narrowed so tightly they did not yet realize a second deadly scene lay a short distance down the street.

  Firefighter Pat Foley was rushing toward the site of the first blast when the second bomb exploded just fifty feet away. Two or three more steps and he stood in the middle of the smoke and wreckage, surrounded by bodies and body parts on the ground. Foley was a thirty-four-year veteran of the fire department; as the assistant chief of the city’s dive team, he routinely rescued and recovered bodies from the water. As he began barking orders at the hysterical people around him, his authoritative tone silenced some of the screaming. “Gimme the belt,” he told a woman standing at his side. Other people turned toward the sound of his voice—people who were unscathed; people with shredded clothes and holes in their legs—seeking the small comfort of direction. “I need more belts,” he ordered, and people obediently fumbled to comply. Foley knelt beside a critically wounded man and cinched a belt tight around his leg, cutting off the blood flow. “Go get every towel in the restaurant,” he told a young man nearby, who sprang into action. Then Foley looked closer at the injured man whose tourniquet he gripped, and realized that his legs were still on fire. Grabbing his knife, he sawed at the man’s burning pants. The man, whose name was Marc Fucarile, lay not far away from Roseann, the woman with the singed blonde hair whom Shana was trying to comfort.

  Finally, an ambulance was coming toward them. “Here it comes; it’s almost here,” Foley assured the two victims. Roseann heard the sirens and thought, This one must be for me. But as the vehicle approached it showed no sign of stopping. Frantic bystanders and police rushed forward, screaming and waving, trying to flag down the driver. All at once their nightmare felt like a prison: There was no way out and no way to end it. “We’re full, we’re full!” the driver yelled as he passed them. Another ambulance approached and it, too, kept on rolling. Shana could not believe what was happening. What did the driver mean “full”? Was there any space at all, on the floor, in the front seat? Were these people going to bleed to death here on the street? We’ve got to get them out of here right now, she thought with mounting desperation. There are a million hospitals, but we’ve got to get them there.

  A van pulled up beside them in the middle of the street. It was a Boston Police Department prisoner transport vehicle—otherwise known as the “paddy wagon”—a white truck with a blue stripe down the side and a big metal box to carry passengers on the back. It was typically stationed near big events like the marathon, mostly to send a sobering message to any rowdies in the crowd. The driver, Jim Davis, was a large, imposing man with the tattoos of a biker and decades on the force. He could see and hear the desperation in Roseann’s eyes and in Marc’s voice, pleading with the first responders not to let him die. “I’ll get you to the hospital,” Davis said. People were already struggling to wrench open the truck’s rear doors, yelling about which victims needed to go first. To Fred Lorenz, in charge of the day’s EMS operation, it was perfectly clear who would go. But with the clamor in the street, no one seemed to hear him. Looking at Roseann and Marc, he spoke again, this time with a clarity that ended the debate: “These two people need to go now or they’re going to die.”

  Shana Cottone, Pat Foley, and another firefighter, Mike Materia, helped load Roseann and Marc into the back of the van. Each of the victims lay across a backboard; the firefighters propped the boards on the bare metal benches along the sides of the cab. Foley and Materia knelt on the van’s metal floor back to back, each cradling a victim in his arms as they tried to hold the man and woman steady on the benches. Up front, Shana leapt into the passenger seat of the wagon. The metal doors slammed shut, plunging the four passengers in the back into blackness.

  • • •

  In the alley between Boylston and Newbury Streets, Jason Geremia had discovered that his friend Heather was missing. Seven of them had come to the marathon together; now six were gathered behind Forum restaurant, in the frightened, confused sea of people who had fled through the back doors of businesses on Boylston. “Where is she?” Jason urgently asked their friend Michelle. She had been standing next to Heather at the front door when the bomb exploded, when everyone started running, but now she had no idea where Heather was.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” Jason demanded. He moved back toward the metal staircase they had just come down, intending to fight his way back up the stairs and into the bar, but people were still coming down in droves, blocking his path. Then, as he looked up the stairs, he saw Heather, in the arms of a big bald man coming through the door. Jason pushed closer. “Give her to me, bro,” he said.

  “Wait,” said the man. “Look at her leg.”

  Jason looked and saw that Heather was in serious trouble, her left foot partially destroyed. “Oh my God, oh my God,” she was saying. “What happ
ened? Jason, what’s going on?”

  The big man—Jason thought he was a bouncer from the bar but learned later he was Matt Chatham, a former linebacker for the New England Patriots—laid Heather gently on the ground. “Please call an ambulance,” she told her friends. Her friend Jess got on the ground beside her, resting her head on Heather’s shoulder and holding her hand, while Jason punched in 911 on a cell phone. “We’re behind the Pelham,” he told the operator, mistakenly giving the name of a bar back in Newport. One of his friends quickly corrected him. “Sorry, behind Forum,” he said into the phone. No one else nearby in the alley had been hurt, and strangers gathered around them, trying to help.

  “Do you think we should move her?” a man asked Jason.

  “Don’t move her!” a woman ordered sharply.

  Another woman hunted around in the alley until she found a sheet of wood five or six feet long, big enough to carry Heather out on if they had to. Heather tried to stay focused on one task: somehow getting herself to a hospital. She knew it had to happen fast, but the wait in the alley seemed to take forever. A nurse and a doctor appeared and asked for a belt. Her friend Tommy pulled his off and gave it to them. Someone fastened it as a tourniquet on her leg. Still no ambulance appeared in the alley.

  Her friend Jess was crying now, her face close to Heather’s. “Don’t leave me,” Heather told her softly.