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

by Helman, Scott

  That held true for the caregivers, too. Just before 8:30 A.M. on Wednesday morning, Patrick arrived at the emergency department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The plan was for him to slip into the hospital quietly, without the media knowing, greet employees in a small staff lounge, and maybe make some remarks. Patrick began walking around the emergency room, chatting quietly with secretaries, nurses, housekeepers, anyone he came upon. He shook hands, he gave hugs, he asked how they were doing. They were simple, unremarkable gestures, but something about his solicitousness gave license to people to open up and confront their own emotions. Many broke down in his presence. “People who had been saying, ‘No, no, I’m fine’ up until that moment with him seemed to say, ‘It was really hard. It was really awful,’” said Erin McDonough, the hospital’s senior vice president of communication and public affairs, who was there. “It started to feel okay to say you’re not okay.” Patrick approached one nurse who had been working on Monday. She’d seen the carnage wrought by the bombs. Her husband, a paramedic with Boston EMS, had been one of the responders who tried to help Martin Richard on Boylston Street. Patrick walked over and embraced her. He thanked her and her family, but didn’t say much more. He didn’t need to. They stood, arms locked, for several moments.

  Patrick figured that the adrenaline that had been propelling the medical teams since Monday afternoon would soon begin to ebb, that the enormity of it all would soon sink in. His message, when he finally made it to the ER lounge, was simple. “I told them I wanted them to know that they were appreciated, that I was proud of them, but that they also needed to look after themselves,” he said. The Brigham, like the city’s other top hospitals, boasted some of the most accomplished doctors and nurses and technicians in the world, wizards of medicine whose skill and experience would save lives that week they had no business saving. Underneath, though, they were still people. Their own emotional wounds, which they’d tried, out of necessity, to ignore since the bombs had gone off, would also need tending.

  • • •

  As dusk fell on Tuesday outside her hospital room, Heather Abbott was feeling reassured: The terrible thing that had happened to her could have been worse. She had learned the answer to her question—the question she had hardly dared to ask—and to her surprise, she still had her foot. It was there, underneath the sheet that covered her leg. She was one of the lucky ones. She could hardly believe it. But she wasn’t out of the woods yet—the doctors had made that clear. In the hours after the bombing, surgeons had removed blood vessels from her undamaged right leg and grafted them into the left in the hope they would take over the work of circulating blood through the devastated foot. But it was too soon to tell if the transplant would take. If it failed, much more painful options might await her.

  Heather’s close friend Jason Geremia had been with her at the bar by the finish line. Now he was beside her in the hospital. A home builder from Newport who was nearly ten years her senior, he had always been protective, like an older brother. Late into Monday night, after the bombing, he had waited downstairs with their other friends, in a room filled with the families of other victims. Every group of loved ones he saw was different—five people here, a couple there, a girl by herself in the corner—but almost every one of them was crying. There was food and water in the room, and at some point as the hours crawled by, a priest appeared. Jason found himself talking to the man, asking him why God would let something like this happen.

  “God didn’t do this,” said the priest. “Evil did it.”

  “But God created everything,” said Jason. “Didn’t He?”

  Yes, the priest acknowledged. He was ready to say more. But just then a doctor walked into the room, looking for Heather’s friends and relatives.

  It was hard to know how to react to the news he brought. Jason had wanted more than anything to believe that Heather’s foot could be saved. For the moment it had, and that was a huge relief. But the doctors warned them that things could change quickly. If blood couldn’t get to the foot through the transplanted veins—if the foot turned gray—they would have to consider amputation.

  To Heather’s mother, Rosemary Abbott, the wait for information Monday night seemed endless. She and her husband had rushed to Boston from Rhode Island after the call from the ambulance. They knew nothing about the bombing at first; they thought Heather had been in an accident. They had found their daughter’s friends at the hospital—and had seen the bloodstains on their clothes—but Jason and the others shared few details about what had happened, believing it was better to leave that to the doctors. For six or seven hours she waited to learn more, with no idea how dire the situation was. When at last, around 11:00 P.M., a doctor called to tell her the surgery was over, Rosemary still thought maybe Heather’s leg was only broken. Instead, he said her daughter’s foot had been severely damaged but that it had not been amputated. Shock washed over Rosemary as the words sank in. She had been waiting and worrying for hours, yet she had not imagined anything this bad. It was gut-wrenching, but there was no time to dwell on it. Heather was out of surgery, headed to the ICU, and her mother needed to get there and reassure her.

  “You’re alive,” she told her daughter. “We will deal with this.”

  In the midst of all the worry and the waiting, an unexpected visitor had shown up at the Brigham. Heather’s ex-boyfriend had rushed to the hospital as soon as he’d heard she was hurt. Their on-again, off-again relationship had ended badly a few months earlier. Now, in the wake of the bombing, he wanted to start over. He was emotional when he finally saw Heather, late that night in her room in the ICU. “I’ll never let you down again,” he promised. She was groggy, vulnerable; still, she had her doubts. She had been hurt before. The stakes were a lot higher now. She wanted to believe him, though. So she said okay.

  Her mother stayed beside her through that first long night, leaning forward in a chair beside the bed, resting her head gently on the mattress. “Talk to me,” Heather said, and so Rosemary did, speaking softly to her until Heather fell asleep. The busy ICU beeped and hummed around them. Nurses moved in and out, monitoring her condition as the night outside went from black to gray. The watching and waiting continued all the next day. Heather drifted in and out, in pain and medicated, but she understood that a gamble had been waged. The surgeons had done their best to give her foot a chance. The passing hours would reveal their failure or success. There were no guarantees, but there was reason to hope for the best: a full recovery and return to normal life. Lying in her bed, she tried to focus on the hope. It was hard to do in the midst of so much pain.

  • • •

  Even with his legs gone and his life hanging in the balance, Jeff Bauman knew he had something vitally important to share. After he was rushed to an ambulance after the bombing, Bauman began talking about the suspicious man he’d seen standing near him—the one with the hat, sunglasses, and backpack—with whom he’d exchanged a stare just before the blast. Bauman told someone at the hospital the same thing. When he woke up after surgery, FBI agents were waiting for him. As Bauman described the man he felt certain was responsible, a sketch artist began to draw. The furious work of finding the bombers was on.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE HEAVIEST TOLL

  Three voices, silenced

  The mission was one no mother should ever perform, nor even contemplate. But late on Tuesday afternoon, barely twenty-four hours after her daughter had lost her life on Boylston Street, Patty Campbell summoned all her strength, stepped out onto the weathered wooden porch of her two-family home in Medford, and prepared to deliver the most painful words she would likely ever say. She surveyed the pack of reporters, photographers, and camera operators staring up at her from the sidewalk along Park Street, in a quiet residential neighborhood bordered by the highway and the Mystic River. The cameras clicked away, capturing every frame of her stunned movements, every angle of her shock. Wearing a black jacket over a blue shirt, Pa
tty put on her glasses and approached the bank of microphones. She looked down at the notepad cradled in her shaky hands.

  “We are heartbroken at the death of our daughter, Krystle Marie,” she said. “She was a wonderful person.”

  Every word was a struggle. Her voice broke, her breathing heavy. She took her glasses off. Her son, Billy, stood to her left in a white Boston Red Sox cap, his right arm hung tight over her shoulder. Her brother John Reilly walked up on the other side and put a hand on her back. She fought on.

  “Everybody that knew her loved her,” Patty said. “She had a heart of gold. She was always smiling, friendly. You couldn’t ask for a better daughter.”

  Her face was a portrait of agony; still she pressed forward.

  “We can’t believe this has happened,” she said. “She was such a hard worker at everything she did. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  She looked out pleadingly at the dozens of gathered reporters, who were quietly taking in her statement, and threw her hands up, as if looking for an answer. As if one of them might explain how it was that she could be standing in front of them here today, on a porch her daughter had been up and down countless times. How it was that Krystle, such an outsized presence in their lives, could suddenly be silenced.

  “What kind of daughter was she, ma’am?” a reporter asked as she turned to walk away.

  “She was the best,” Patty said.

  Her family led her back inside the house.

  • • •

  Two blocks east of the finish line, smack in the middle of Berkeley Street, a few thousand unclaimed runners’ bags lay in rows. It was Tuesday morning. The night before, marathon officials had hastily arranged them in numerical order. Now runners were arriving to fetch them, flashing their bib numbers at a checkpoint to prove ownership. It was not supposed to be this way. They had expected to cross the finish line triumphantly, receive a coveted race medal from a volunteer, and collect their stuff from school buses parked nearby. Instead the whole place had become a crime scene, their marathon experience forever scarred. It was nothing compared with what the Campbells were facing, but the running community had lost something, too.

  So on Tuesday, race officials did their best to restore some of the ceremony the bombing had taken away. They parked a cherry-red GMC van stocked with medals in the middle of the baggage area and began bestowing them on runners who hadn’t been able to finish. The transactions were brief, as marathon representatives carefully draped blue-and-yellow ribbons around people’s necks. But they meant something. Some of the runners were distraught. Race officials became tearful, too. “Quite a few people were crying, on both sides of the fence,” said Matt Carpenter, a member of the Boston Athletic Association’s organizing committee. The moment Carpenter will never forget came when a middle-aged woman from Hong Kong approached him with her bib number. He awarded her a medal, and she broke down. He held her for five minutes. “I will be back next year,” she told him.

  In the afternoon, marathon officials took the medals and bags over to a former armory a few blocks away, a building known as “the Castle.” Here, they laid down a nearly three-foot piece of the blue-and-yellow adhesive finish line brought over from Boylston Street. Runners who hadn’t finished the marathon were invited to step across the tape and receive their medals. Volunteers snapped photos and offered applause. For some of the runners, it was a complicated moment, their emotions a mix of heartache, pride, and anger. One woman remained composed as she received her medal and her bag. But then she dug out her cell phone, which she had stowed before the race. The voice mails from loved ones in the twenty-four hours since the bombing plunged her back into Monday’s terror.

  The hours after the attack were like that, Carpenter said, a blur of dread and sadness. Many of the staff, board members, and volunteers of the BAA felt the same way. Their organization had put on the Boston Marathon for 117 years—before World War I even—and here they were in 2013, badly shaken, unsure how they would get past this year. Tuesday morning, after Governor Deval Patrick briefed the public on the start of the investigation, he slipped over to BAA headquarters behind Copley Square for a brief visit. The task was similar to the one he would perform at the hospitals: offering support, words of comfort, and an acknowledgment of their grief. Everyone gathered in a conference room, and the governor walked around and shook hand after hand. For Dave McGillivray, Patrick’s visit was a source of consolation, but the race director couldn’t dwell much on his feelings. The practical challenges and immediate demands were all-consuming. Calls and e-mails streamed into the BAA, from runners, from media, from people across the world offering support and assistance. More urgently, the BAA had thousands of marathoners for whom it had to account and care. “We didn’t have time to reflect and pause and think about what happened,” McGillivray said. “We had to give answers and directions.” Then he walked back into his house north of Boston for the first time after the bombing and saw, in the eyes of his seven-year-old son, Luke, just how much had changed. “Dad,” Luke said the minute he came in the door, “I don’t want you to ever direct that race again.”

  • • •

  As nightfall arrived on Tuesday, a thousand people gathered in Garvey Park in Dorchester. In the deep blue April twilight, they lit candles in memory of Martin Richard, the yellow flames flickering inside small cups. They sang “God Bless America.” They wept for a loss that would never make sense. None of what had happened made sense—every death, every grievous injury was its own injustice. But to lose Martin, an eight-year-old boy out enjoying a spring day in the city with his family—this one cut especially deep. “My grandson plays sports with little Martin,” said Maria Deltufo, a lifelong resident of Dorchester. “When it’s somebody in your neighborhood, and your hometown—and such a little boy that is so full of life and so happy . . . The whole family is now destroyed senselessly.”

  Many children at the vigil had known him; they had gone to school or played together in the neighborhood. They had played together at the very park where they gathered to remember his life. Martin told the best knock-knock jokes, his friends said. He always won at math games. He reached out to classmates who were isolated. “He sticks up for kids,” recalled Colin Baker, nine. “If somebody was left out, he would come say, ‘Want to join my group?’” The more the world learned about Martin, the larger his absence loomed: Who would stick up for the kids who needed it now? “It should not have happened to him,” Colin added. “It should not have happened to nobody.”

  • • •

  Her friends, in the hours after the bombing, had taken to Facebook, Twitter, and the Chinese social media site Sina Weibo, frantically looking for information. Lingzi Lu was missing. They urged police and the news media to help find her, posting pictures of the Boston University graduate student, with her seafoam-green nail polish, her warm smile and dark, piercing eyes. “Lingzi, where are you now?” her roommate asked in a Weibo message. “I know you get lost so easily. Don’t worry. We will find you.” Her roommate also contacted BU’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association, an organization of Chinese students and employees at the university, and the group’s members began trawling the streets. When Lingzi didn’t call after the bombing, her parents and extended family in China grew worried, too.

  One friend, Yijing Lu, drove from hospital to hospital, eventually landing at Boston Medical Center. There, Yijing found what she thought was a glimmer of hope. She was told the hospital was treating an unidentified woman of Asian descent, and that the woman wasn’t stable enough yet to handle visitors. So Lingzi’s roommate and friends gathered and waited. Hours later, they learned the patient was not Lingzi. And it was there at the hospital that the terrible news came: Their friend had been killed. First, they sat in stunned silence. Then her roommate began quietly telling stories about Lingzi, about what she had been like. What they had just learned was too much to comprehend. Better to focus on what had come be
fore.

  On Wednesday morning, tributes to the promising young statistician began appearing at the foot of a statue in front of Marsh Chapel on campus—flowers, a pair of running shoes, messages of remembrance. Joy Liu, a twenty-three-year-old journalism graduate student, left a green scally cap with a shamrock on it and a note that said, “From Boston and Beijing with love, RIP.” Freshman Jiani Jiang, nineteen, another native of China, visited the makeshift memorial to pay her respects to Lingzi, whom she did not know but whose death made her feel sad and homesick. “There are a lot of foreign students who want to go home now,” she said.

  • • •

  A few miles north, word of Krystle Campbell’s death spread like a crushing wave across Medford, from the high school where her strong personality stood out, to the streets around her parents’ home, to city hall, where the flag was lowered to half-staff. It was hard enough trying to absorb the blow the bombing had delivered to Boston. Now they had lost one of their own. “To deal with those emotions of shock, of anger in the early stages, and then finding out that one of the three victims was actually a young lady from our city, just compounds the sadness and the anguish,” said Medford’s longtime mayor, Michael McGlynn, who reached out to the Campbells on Tuesday and would help them navigate the rocky weeks to follow. The Medford High School Lady Mustang softball team dropped their heads for a moment of silence at its Wednesday game and dedicated the balance of the season to Krystle. Later that evening, the city came together at Grace Episcopal Church for a prayer service. Many other tributes, benefits, and rituals of mourning followed.