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

by Helman, Scott

  “You can’t go up that way, sir,” an officer said.

  McGillivray explained that he was part of race management. Did that mean the area was off-limits even to marathon officials?

  “That’s correct,” the officer said.

  “Okay, sir.”

  That’s when it hit McGillivray that the 2013 Boston Marathon was no longer his. Nor was it even still a race. Athletics, competition—those things didn’t matter anymore. Now it was all about security and emergency medicine. An hour earlier, Boylston Street—like the entirety of the course—had been McGillivray’s domain. He could go anywhere he wanted. Now he had no more authority than a bystander. The realization was difficult for a man who, for so many years, had been Mr. Marathon, the guy who knew this event more intimately than anyone else.

  There was, though, one thing he could still do, and that was to take care of the runners. Almost six thousand had yet to finish. They were cold, scared, and exhausted. Many hadn’t connected with family yet. They needed to collect their bags. Out-of-town runners needed help getting to their hotels, or to friends’ houses. McGillivray and a few others began grabbing the runners’ bags off the school buses where competitors usually retrieve them after the race, wheeling them away from the blast sites in bins. The task was stressful in its own right. McGillivray had managed to connect with his family, so he knew they were okay. But as he and his team worked, they didn’t know if other bombs would explode near them. Was there one in that trash can right over there? They had no idea. “We were in a minefield for all we knew,” McGillivray said.

  • • •

  After a few hours, as afternoon turned to night, a clearer picture started to emerge of what had happened. Two IEDs had been left on the Boylston Street sidewalk, about 210 yards apart. The devices had been made from six-liter pressure cookers, filled with explosive powder and shrapnel like nails, BBs, and ball bearings. The IEDs, concealed in two black nylon backpacks, had battery-powered triggers and were set off with remote detonators, the shrapnel and metal from the pressure cookers shooting out like bullets in all directions.

  Once the sweep of Boylston Street was complete, and authorities were certain there were no more bombs, the investigation launched. It was the largest crime scene in the history of the city: Initially fifteen blocks—later reduced to twelve—in the heart of one of Boston’s best-known, best-loved, safest neighborhoods. Hundreds of investigators started working around the clock, collecting fragments of evidence from streets, buildings, and rooftops, labeling each one with the location where it was found. They spray-painted a massive orange grid onto Boylston, dividing the pavement into numbered squares for scrutiny, and they moved with careful urgency: Rain or wind might soon move in, threatening the evidence. The word went out to hospitals from the command center: The embedded shrapnel fragments surgeons were pulling from victims’ ravaged flesh were evidence; every nail and shard of metal needed to be saved.

  President Obama addressed the nation after 6:00, delivering a briskly paced three-minute statement. “We still do not know who did this or why,” he said, “but make no mistake . . . we will find out who did this, and we will hold them accountable.” He stopped short of calling what had happened terrorism; he would wait to use that word until the next day. The president reflected on the meaning of Patriot’s Day, “a day that celebrates the free and fiercely independent spirit that this great American city of Boston has reflected from the earliest days of our nation . . . a day that draws the world to Boston’s streets.” He invoked the city’s strength—“Boston is a tough and resilient town. So are its people”—and the empathy that had swept the country: “The American people will say a prayer for Boston tonight.”

  The prospect of a bombing at the marathon finish line, as far-fetched as it might have sounded, was a threat that public safety and race officials had talked about in the past and actively tried to prevent. That was just the nature of things after 9/11—the same held true for any big public event that drew many thousands of people to a confined space. Early in the day on April 15, police had begun sweeping both the starting line and finish line area for bombs. After dawn, the Boston Police Department’s bomb squad started scouring the area around Copley Square, looking in trash cans, flower planters, and the windows of cars and shops. Once they had swept everything, seeing nothing, the squad took up positions around the marathon course, ready to respond if the call came. Right after the blasts, the bomb technicians raced to Boylston Street and began furiously cutting open hundreds of abandoned bags with knives, looking for more explosive devices, fearing for their lives the whole time. No one could blame them for not preventing the bombing—the terrorists, after all, had brought in the IEDs right before setting them off—but they still struggled with the feeling that they had somehow come up short.

  The question of which law enforcement agency would lead the investigation was resolved with relative ease, thanks in part to the rapport between Davis and DesLauriers. An imposing figure at six-foot-six, Davis, fifty-six, had led the BPD since 2006, after a long career in his hometown of Lowell, the former mill city north of Boston, where he had worked his way up from beat cop to superintendent. DesLauriers, fifty-three, a native of Western Massachusetts, was a counterintelligence expert known for running risky, diplomatically sensitive operations, including one that traded Russian spies for American agents held prisoner in Russia. He had taken over the Boston FBI office in 2010. The two men, along with other law enforcement leaders, agreed that the FBI, with its superior expertise on terrorism, should take charge of the bombing probe. City and state leaders promised the public there would be seamless cooperation. Governor Patrick would later describe those initial conversations about jurisdiction as among the most important things that happened after the bombing. The potential for friction was huge; the collaborative start was a good sign. Besides, there wasn’t time for competition. There were terrorists to hunt down.

  One of the first people who drew law enforcement attention was an innocent Saudi Arabian student in his twenties named Abdulrahman Alharbi, who had come to Boston on a student visa in 2012 to study English. Alharbi, who described himself as shy and focused on his studies, stopped by the marathon alone on his way to meet friends and was injured by the second bomb. He was thrown into the street, with burns on his head, back, and arms; an uninjured runner helped him to an ambulance. To his surprise, several police officers climbed into the vehicle with him. At the hospital, FBI agents surrounded his bed and interrogated him for hours. The frightened student handed over his address and Facebook password; that night, authorities swarmed his apartment and some in the media identified him as a suspect. In one of his past posts on Facebook, Alharbi had included images of the Saudi and American flags and written in Arabic, “Thank God, I arrived [in] the [US] after [a] long trip.” The media, he said, translated that to the ominous-sounding “God is coming to the US.” When his friends tried to reach him after the bombing, the FBI would not let them call Alharbi or tell them where he was, he said later. The young man said that he did not blame law enforcement. But he felt he had been injured twice, by the bomb and by the accusatory coverage. “I don’t know if I am gonna be safe . . . because I lost my privacy,” he said. “It’s not [an] easy thing to just forget.”

  • • •

  As darkness fell on Monday, Shana Cottone was still working. Hours had passed since her harrowing ride from the finish line to the hospital in a police van. Now the van—so recently pressed into service as a makeshift ambulance for bombing victims—was being used to transport a police bomb squad as it roamed the neighborhood responding to suspicious bag calls. Shana had stayed with the vehicle after it carried her back to the finish line. Its driver, veteran officer Jim Davis, had an unflappable air that had steadied her through the awful afternoon. He had seen that she was shaken, and he hadn’t made her feel stupid about it. After all this is over, kid, he told her, you need to take care of yourself.

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nbsp; Shana had made one quick detour before heading out again with Davis: back to her parked car to get her bulletproof vest. She could not believe she had been caught without it. Once she had it on, she felt a little better. Still, she longed to get away. She was staggered when she got to Kenmore Square and saw people standing around in the street taking pictures. She couldn’t imagine why they would choose to be there, when everything felt so unsafe. She stuck to the widest-open spaces she could find. Leave now, she told anyone who asked her advice.

  When she finally got home to Hyde Park around midnight, her dog was waiting for her by the door. He had been acting strangely all afternoon, her roommate told her, whimpering as if he knew something was wrong. Shana looked down at the beagle and started to cry. The relief she felt at being home was overwhelming. But her tears signaled a deeper realization, too. Everything was different now, Shana understood. She might never leave the darkness of this day behind.

  • • •

  Karen Rand had arrived at Massachusetts General Hospital by ambulance, one of the severely wounded spectators hit by the bomb outside Marathon Sports. She had been standing near her close friend Krystle Campbell and had suffered massive damage to her left leg. Rand was given a patient number and rushed into an operating room. The handbag that came with her was put in a bag and labeled with the same number. The ER staff looked through it, searching for something to confirm the woman’s identity. They found a driver’s license with a name: Krystle Campbell. Word that Krystle was apparently at Mass General somehow made it to Patty and Billy Campbell, who came to the hospital believing their daughter was being treated there. Around 2:00 A.M. Tuesday, nurses led the Campbells into an intensive care room, where they expected to see Krystle recuperating.

  “That’s not my daughter!” Billy exclaimed. “That’s Karen! Where’s my daughter?”

  The hospital staff was shocked. The mistake was innocent but the effect was cruel, and it would be a cautionary lesson about correctly identifying patients going forward. Less than an hour later, a detective from Boston arrived with a photo of Krystle. Her family learned that she was already gone. Krystle had been one of three people killed in the bombing. Billy nearly collapsed to the floor. Instead of greeting his daughter at her bedside, he would soon have to formally identify her body.

  • • •

  Back on Boylston Street, the silence deepened with the night. A chill settled in. Two figures still lay on the ground where they had fallen, covered with tablecloths from a nearby restaurant. The bodies of Martin Richard and Lingzi Lu would remain there until 2:00 A.M. as investigators painstakingly collected evidence around them; Krystle’s body had been taken from the street already. Several Boston police officers had promised to stay at the scene, as long as they were needed, keeping a last watch over the bodies. Their vigil comforted Martin’s father, Bill, who had been distraught at the thought of leaving his son there.

  Not far away, a couple blocks east of the blast sites, Dave McGillivray, Rich Havens—the finish area coordinator for the marathon—and other race officials had spent six hours Monday night lining up yellow bags on Berkeley Street. These were the bags runners used to stow their personal items until after the race—clothes, wallets, plane tickets, money, phones, food. Race organizers put out word that anybody who hadn’t yet collected theirs should come there to claim them. As McGillivray and his team spread the bags out, they could hear, from time to time, cell phones ringing inside them, each chirp and tinny melody a loved one’s vain attempt to reach a runner. They listened to the phones singing in the darkness, a melancholy sound track to their solemn labor.

  CHAPTER 7

  OPERATING AT CAPACITY

  Saving lives, against the odds

  Heather Abbott opened her eyes. She was in a hospital bed, her mother beside her. She didn’t know how long she had been unconscious, but memories came back to her in fragments: Waiting at the door of the bar on Boylston Street. The sound of the first explosion; turning her head to look and seeing billowing smoke. Then, searing pain and mounting desperation. She remembered choosing not to look at her foot, knowing from the expressions on her friends’ faces that she shouldn’t. I wonder what happened to it, she thought. She let the thought stop there. Part of her wanted to know and part of her wanted to linger in the uncertainty. Her mother seemed calm and collected, relieved to see her awake. Her father, she would quickly discover, was more upset than she had ever seen him. Watching him struggle, realizing the depth of his devastation, Heather was taken aback. He had always been so sturdy. It was not how she would have imagined his reaction.

  Her left leg appeared to be in traction, elevated up above the bed, with a white sheet draped over it. From her small room in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital intensive care unit, she could see through a glass wall to the busy nurses’ station. Patient rooms fanned out around the station in a circle. A nurse told her they were filled with others who had been hurt at the marathon, but for the moment Heather asked few questions. She knew instinctively she couldn’t handle the whole story—not right now. For the moment, the pain demanded most of her attention. She had to concentrate on getting through it, the same way she had narrowed her focus the previous day, after the blast, to the necessity of getting to the hospital.

  Already, through the pain and the fog of medication, she knew her friends and family were gathering, bracing to support her through whatever lay ahead. Her mother told her that after she left Boylston Street in the ambulance, her friends had walked to Massachusetts General Hospital to find her. When they learned she was instead at Brigham and Women’s, another elite teaching hospital about three miles across town, they took a cab there and waited for hours, in their blood-smeared clothes, to learn her condition. Her friend Julie, a former bartender at Forum who had returned for a Marathon Day shift, had found Heather’s wallet lying in the middle of Boylston Street and brought it to the hospital, worried that Heather would need her insurance card. Her friend Al’s boss had told him to stay in Boston, and then paid for a hotel room. Everyone was sticking close, and wanted to know the same thing: Would her foot be okay? Would she?

  • • •

  Across the city, at Boston’s six major trauma centers, similar scenes were playing out. At Boston Medical Center, Celeste Corcoran, forty-seven, a hairdresser who had never been to the marathon until Monday, lost both of her legs below the knee. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Sydney, whose femoral artery was ruptured by shrapnel from the first blast, had been saved by a bystander who fashioned a tourniquet. When they were finally reunited, neither could stop crying; they would share a room as soon as they were stable, the beds pushed together so they could hold hands. At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in the city’s Longwood medical corridor near Brigham and Women’s and Boston Children’s Hospital, Paul Norden, thirty-one, a construction worker, struggled to accept the loss of his leg and learned that his older brother JP, thirty-three, admitted to the Brigham, had lost one of his, too.

  Altogether sixteen people—eight women, seven men, and one young girl—would lose limbs as a result of the bombing. All of them had been close to the bombs, but so had others who’d escaped with less severe injuries. It was, in many cases, a matter of feet, or even inches, that determined one’s degree of injury. Flying shrapnel added to the randomness. Later, Heather would wrestle with the knowledge that people closer to the bomb than she was had walked away unscathed. Her own two friends, standing next to her at the door of Forum, had not suffered a scratch—though one of them later found a blade-shaped shard of metal shrapnel in her handbag. Two people at the first bomb site would lose both legs—Celeste Corcoran and Jeff Bauman, the stoic, ashen-faced twenty-seven-year-old man aided by bystander Carlos Arredondo, the “man in the cowboy hat,” at the bombing scene. A photograph of Arredondo racing down Boylston Street, pushing Bauman in a wheelchair while gripping the tourniquet on his leg, had become one of the week’s iconic images. Bauman’s father, unab
le to reach his son after the blasts, only learned that Jeff was hurt when he saw the photo. “Unfortunately my son was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the senior Bauman wrote Tuesday morning on Facebook, breaking the news to his friends and family.

  Within twenty minutes of the blasts, thirty of the most critically injured patients had been “red-tagged”—marked as urgent cases for immediate transport—and distributed roughly evenly among the city’s largest hospitals, through a central dispatch center at Boston EMS. At the Brigham, the first patient from the finish line had arrived at 3:08 P.M. Monday, eighteen minutes after the first bomb exploded, followed by eighteen more in the next thirty minutes. Mass General took in thirty-one in the first hour, including five patients with amputations, received just minutes apart at 3:04, 3:15, 3:20, 3:22, and 3:27 P.M. At Boston Medical Center, surgeons performed a total of seven amputations on Bauman, Corcoran, and three other patients. It made for a nightmarish scene in the ER. Badly wounded patients lay on gurneys looking at one another as they awaited surgery, blood everywhere and agonizing screams—“Oh my God, my foot!”—ricocheting off the walls. There were three amputations at Beth Israel, two at the Brigham, and one on a seven-year-old girl at Children’s Hospital. In some cases, the decision to amputate was uncomplicated, because the patient’s foot or leg was gone, completely destroyed, or nearly severed. With others, the decision was less clear. At Boston Medical Center, surgeons consulted with one another to make sure more than one doctor reached the same conclusion. “What we like to do before we take off someone’s leg—it’s extremely hard to make that decision—is often we get two surgeons to agree,” Tracey Dechert, a trauma surgeon at the hospital, said that day. The consultations—“Am I right here? This can’t be saved?”—gave doctors reassurance, she said.