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

by Helman, Scott

  • • •

  Shana Cottone leaned all the way out the window on the passenger side of the police van as it inched up a side road, away from Boylston, screaming at the people in the street to get out of the way. Her sense of urgency had not abated, but she felt a little safer, now that they were heading away from the scene of the bombing. They turned left onto Huntington Avenue. She took out her phone and dialed her father in New York. “Dad,” she said when he answered, “we’re being attacked. I’m okay. I’m trying to get people out. I love you.” She hung up. The van was passing quickly through the Back Bay now. They turned onto Stuart Street and then onto Charles, between Boston Common and the Public Garden, two of the city’s swaths of downtown green, the Common much older than the country.

  The back of the police van was another world, hard and windowless and completely dark. The two firefighters knelt on the metal floor as the vehicle careened across the city, each holding one of the severely injured victims. They struggled to protect the wounded from the rough ride, to keep them from sliding off the bare metal benches while still gripping the tourniquets on their legs. Foley was afraid that Marc, the man he cradled, might think that he had died, because of the pitch-blackness in the van. He reached into his bunker coat, found a tiny light and switched it on. Marc was asking for his fiancée and child; he was fading in and out of consciousness. They were so close now, a minute or two away, but it wasn’t clear if he had that long.

  They turned right on Beacon Street, then cut left to zigzag down historic Beacon Hill, on narrow streets lined with well-kept brownstones, to Massachusetts General Hospital. The van’s driver sped toward the emergency room entrance, slamming the vehicle into reverse to back into the ambulance bay. As they rolled in reverse toward their destination, the cell phone Marc was clutching started ringing. Somehow, he managed to answer the call from his fiancée, thrusting the phone at Foley and begging him, “Please, talk to her.” Normally, at accident scenes or in ambulances, Foley avoided speaking to family members. At this moment, though, he could not refuse. He took the phone. “This is a Boston firefighter,” he said. “We have your husband, we’re at Mass General, you need to come here.”

  Outside the van, in the concrete chamber where ambulances delivered patients, security guards were banging angrily on the sides of the vehicle, bellowing at the driver to move it out of the way. They knew about the explosions at the marathon; they were out there waiting for the victims to show up. “We’ve got ambulances coming!” they yelled at Jim Davis in the driver’s seat. Shana jumped out and ran around to the back of the van, yanking open the doors. Light flooded into the cab, revealing the horrific tableau. Shana helped Pat Foley carry out the injured man as the security guards looked on in shock. “They’re bringing them in paddy wagons!” one of them exclaimed. Marc looked gray and lifeless as they laid him on a gurney. Never had Foley so longed to hand over responsibility. But as he prepared to step away, a nurse spoke sharply. “Don’t let go of that tourniquet,” she warned him. Together, then, they were moving through the door and down the hallway, the firefighter running alongside the gurney, his hand still on the belt, his viselike grip still holding back the flow of blood.

  • • •

  Jason Geremia looked up at the metal staircase behind Forum and saw paramedics with blue gloves coming down it, carrying a backboard used for moving victims. They were coming for Heather; they were going to get her out of this alley and into a hospital. Jason and his friends followed as the paramedics carried her back up the stairs and through the wreckage in the restaurant. They approached the front door; the scene up ahead, the smell like gunpowder, was shocking. This is what soldiers see all the time, thought Jason. But I’ve never been to war, and I’m not prepared. Police let two of Heather’s friends follow her outside, but they turned away Jason and the others at the door, sending them back through the restaurant to the alley. Out in the street the ambulance was waiting; the EMT put Heather inside it. Her friend Jess tried to climb in the back with her, trying to keep the promise she had made back in the alley. “No, no,” the paramedics told her. “You can’t come with us.” “It’s okay,” said Heather. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”

  A paramedic put a needle in her arm and started an IV. Someone cut off her clothes with a pair of scissors. She could hear the driver screaming at the people in the street: “Make a hole! Make a hole!” The thought of being stuck there filled her with fear. Please, she thought, willing the crowd, please move out of the way. As they lurched through the streets toward Kenmore Square and Fenway Park, where she had started her day, heading for Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Heather asked the EMT to call her parents. She had lost her cell phone, but she knew their home number by heart.

  Her mother picked up the phone at home in Rhode Island. The paramedic told her that Heather had been hurt, that they were heading for the hospital, and that she should come to the Brigham. He paused, listening to her questions. “I can’t talk anymore,” he said before hanging up. “Just come as fast you can.” Then the ambulance was jerking to a stop. The doors swung open and Heather was moving fast, into the teeming nerve center of the ER. I made it, she thought with relief. I finally made it. It was the last thought she would remember having before everything went black.

  • • •

  The two firefighters had run beside the gurneys into Mass General, gripping the two victims’ tourniquets as they sped through the maze of corridors. Finally, deep within the emergency department, the nurse in charge cleared them to let go. The two patients, Marc and Roseann, disappeared, headed straight for surgery. Pat Foley and Mike Materia stood in the middle of the hallway looking at each other. Neither one of them knew how to get back out. Then they looked down at the floor and saw the trail of blood, clearly marking the way they had come in. They followed it out, back to the waiting police van. Foley realized that his hand was aching from holding the tourniquet so tight for so long.

  Outside, Shana was waiting with Jim Davis, ready to take them back to Boylston Street. The back of the van was slick with blood, but the firefighters climbed in. They were already covered with it anyway. It felt almost impossible, what they had to do next—going back to the street to face it all again. But it was their job, their duty. They steeled themselves to it as best they could. They had no choice.

  Only forty minutes had elapsed since the bombs exploded, maybe less. Yet the scene had been transformed when they climbed back out of the van. Everyone was gone; everything was silent. There were no more bleeding people in the street, no more screaming bystanders. There was only a sea of debris, scattered metal barricades and gently drifting paper and bags dropped by spectators in agony or in flight. It was still late afternoon, but the unreal quiet belonged to the darkest hour of night.

  CHAPTER 6

  “THESE BASTARDS GOT US”

  Terror comes into focus

  Ed Davis couldn’t believe what he saw when he first got to Boylston Street after 3:00 P.M. The Boston police commissioner walked toward the wreckage from the second explosion, outside Forum. Two lifeless bodies lay still. Shrapnel and human limbs littered the bloody ground. The heart of Boston resembled a smoldering battlefield. Everything had gone quiet. The tens of thousands of spectators who had filled the sidewalks a short time earlier were largely gone. Now it was just police officers, presiding over the aftermath, securing the crime scene. Davis paused for a moment. Studying the severity of the damage, he understood in his gut that the two blasts, at Forum and a block away in front of Marathon Sports, had been no accident. Someone had detonated powerful bombs aiming to kill and maim. Davis felt the way he had felt twelve years earlier, upon learning that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center in New York. The conclusion, on this April afternoon in his own city, was just as inescapable: “These bastards got us.”

  Davis was almost sure, from the start, that this was terrorism. At home just before 3:00 P.M., he had barely hung up from the White Hous
e conference call on gun control when his phone rang. It was his superintendent in chief, Daniel Linskey, who was speeding toward Boylston after hearing another cop screaming for help on the radio. Davis heard sirens in the background as he listened to Linskey. There had been two separate explosions, Linskey told him. “I’m not sure what we got, boss, but I think it’s bad,” he said. “I’m hearing multiple amputations.” That was all it took for Davis to believe Boston had been attacked. The amputations gave it away: That kind of trauma was typical of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, placed on or near the ground. Right after Linskey’s call, as the commissioner raced back downtown in his car, he called Rick DesLauriers, the special agent who ran the FBI office in Boston.

  “Rick, look, I don’t know what I’ve got,” Davis told him, “but I need to roll whatever SWAT teams you have available to Copley Square.”

  DesLauriers hadn’t yet heard of the explosions. “I’ll get everything I can to you as quickly as I can,” he told Davis, promising to meet him at the scene.

  Davis also called Timothy Alben, the head of the Massachusetts State Police, asking for his SWAT teams. Alben had been at the starting line, in Hopkinton, and was heading back to his home in Western Massachusetts when he got the call. He turned around and drove back east. Having studied terror attacks around the world, Davis felt fairly certain there would be a third device, perhaps aimed at first responders. Not only were his officers scattered everywhere on Boylston Street, the targets in other corners of the city were many—from tourist-jammed Faneuil Hall to major transportation hubs. The commissioner was gripped by a powerful sense of foreboding and urgency. One or more terrorists had launched a vicious assault on Boston, and they were still out there somewhere.

  • • •

  Panic rippled across the city as law enforcement descended on Copley Square. Word of the explosions spread rapidly, through social media and frantic bulletins from TV, radio, and print reporters, many of whom had been wrapping up their marathon coverage for the day. Steve Silva, a Boston.com sports producer working at the finish line, was one of the first to broadcast news about the blasts on Twitter: God help us, he tweeted minutes afterward, sharing a photo of the chaos on the street. Everyone seemed to know someone who had run the marathon, or someone who was watching it near the finish line. Sitting at their desks, driving in their cars, nervously turning on TVs in their hotel rooms, Bostonians and out-of-town visitors scrambled to decipher what had happened, and to account for loved ones. Communication failures amplified the hysteria. The wireless networks for Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T were quickly overwhelmed, leaving people at the scene unable to call out, and preventing outside callers from reaching people in Boston. Runners and spectators tried to share phones, flocking to those that seemed to work. Two runners of South Asian descent, a man and a woman, approached Terry Wallace, who had been waiting for his wife, Michelle Hall, to finish the race. The woman was nearly in tears. They were desperate to tell their families they were okay, but no one would share a phone with them. Wallace did so willingly and they were deeply grateful.

  Twitter and Facebook, meanwhile, lit up with firsthand accounts and pictures, each one more difficult to believe than the last. The images on TV and online were so shocking, so out of custom for Marathon Day, that they were almost impossible to digest. And the threat seemed to be spreading. Word came of a mysterious fire at the John F. Kennedy Library, a few miles away, which had broken out about the same time as the blasts. Alarm swept Boylston Street when a dropped bag under the VIP grandstand triggered fears of a third, unexploded device. Davis moved to lock down the street, pushing people and police off Boylston so bomb squads could go in and pick meticulously through the sea of debris, rooting out suspicious packages. They blew up at least one bag. It turned out to be harmless, but it was a jarring moment for the first responders, who heard the controlled explosion and wondered if a third bomb had gone off.

  One of Davis’s immediate tasks was to establish a command center where law enforcement leaders could gather and plot a coordinated response. He went looking for space. He tried the Marriott Copley Place first, but the hotel had already set up for a function in its ballroom. He had better luck across the street at the Westin Copley Place. By 4:00 P.M. the top brass had gathered there, a dozen of them around a single table, including Davis, DesLauriers, Alben, US attorney Carmen Ortiz, and Daniel Conley, the district attorney for Boston. Within an hour the crowd in the room had swelled to one hundred. More officers kept coming: city, state, and transit police; FBI; the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. At least thirty agencies would take part in the investigation before it was over, hundreds of police and federal agents working out of the Westin. Davis called on every police officer in Boston to return to duty. They were dispatched across the city, charged with being a visible presence and calming fears at hospitals, train stations, and historic landmarks, where public anxieties were peaking. Others fanned out to hospitals to interview witnesses. Over the course of an hour, Boston’s mood had swung from carefree to deeply anxious. Any bag left momentarily unattended could spark dozens of nervous calls to police.

  • • •

  Katherine Patrick had only been a street or two away when she heard two blasts. She saw people running. She called her father, Governor Deval Patrick, who was on his way home for a quiet afternoon.

  “What’s going on?” said Katherine, a twenty-three-year-old working for a social justice organization in Boston. “I’m scared.”

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. His first instinct, a paternal one, was to reassure. “I’m sure it’s okay,” he told her. Maybe race organizers used some kind of celebratory cannon this year, the governor thought.

  The impulse to explain it away, to grope for a benign explanation, was widely shared. In the confusing minutes after the twin blasts, everyone wanted it to be manhole explosions—Boston had seen several in recent years—or another blown electrical transformer. Hadn’t one caught fire just a year before in the same neighborhood? The thought of bombs at the finish line was too unlikely and monstrous to accept. “I was really resistant to the growing evidence that something terrible had happened,” said Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! and an avid runner, who had led a visually impaired competitor across the finish just minutes before the explosions. Even after someone showed him photos of bloodstains, he told himself it could be Gatorade. “I was completely in denial.”

  Patrick’s hopeful illusions were quickly dashed. After he talked to his daughter, his phone rang again. It was Kurt Schwartz, the state’s emergency management chief. He and Patrick had been through a lot together—floods, blizzards, hurricanes, power outages, and a spate of snowy roof collapses. Schwartz was at the finish line. He spoke of explosions. A lot of people are hurt and down, he reported. It’s a mess. Schwartz’s voice was thick with emotion; Patrick had never heard him like that. The governor knew, at that moment, that he had to get to Boylston Street. His state police detail resisted, saying it wasn’t safe. So he went to the State House instead, though state police weren’t wild about that, either, fearing that it could be a potential target. By 4:00, Patrick had joined the other principals gathering at the Westin. President Obama called and spoke to the governor around 4:30, pledging the full resources of the federal government to the investigation. Patrick also conferred with FBI director Robert Mueller III and with Janet Napolitano, the US secretary of homeland security.

  The mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, had made it to the Westin, too, after checking himself out of the hospital. His doctors had tried to stop him; it was only two days since his surgery, and he wasn’t supposed to put any weight on his leg. Menino wasn’t having it. “Give me some clothes and a wheelchair and let’s get out of here,” he told his staff. Someone grabbed a white hospital sheet from a supply closet to drape over his lap, to hide his catheter from view. The mayor felt he had to be visible right away—no
t for the sake of his profile, but to reassure the city he had led for twenty years.

  • • •

  Dave McGillivray had changed into running clothes and arrived in Hopkinton, ready to begin his customary run of the marathon course. He was standing near the town green at the starting line, stretching and mentally preparing for the 26.2 miles. Two state troopers on motorcycles were nearby. As always, they would escort the race director through the course. About five minutes after McGillivray arrived, his friend Ron Kramer, who, according to their tradition, always drove him out to Hopkinton, got a phone call. He hung up and summoned McGillivray over.

  “My daughter just called,” Kramer told him. “She said a bomb went off at the finish.”

  The words were chilling. At first, McGillivray thought they couldn’t possibly be true. Disbelief shifted to fear. He started to worry not only about the runners and spectators but about his own family, who were on Boylston Street. He called his wife. No answer. He had to get back to Boston. Kramer asked the state troopers, who were just learning of the explosions over their radios, to escort them to the city, and fast. McGillivray hopped back in Kramer’s Nissan convertible and they followed the troopers to the Massachusetts Turnpike. They raced back east at one hundred miles per hour. “It was a NASCAR experience,” Kramer said. McGillivray was nervous and wanted to slow down, but Kramer didn’t want to lose their escort; the troopers had told him to stay close. Going in with police would be their only chance to get into the scene.

  When they arrived, Boylston had been largely evacuated. McGillivray went right to the medical tent. The gravity of what had happened was quickly apparent. First responders were treating the injured on cots. The scene was bloody. He would describe it later as organized chaos. He didn’t say a word to anyone, not wanting to interrupt the emergency care. “I knew right away—this isn’t where I belong,” he recalled. McGillivray tried to walk out of the tent and onto Boylston, but police stopped him.