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

by Helman, Scott

  At that, Correale’s team began walking methodically up the driveway. As they reached the edge of Henneberry’s house, they heard a voice over a PA system: “Back up!” They stopped, not knowing who was giving the command, or what it meant. It turned out later that there had been some confusion over which SWAT team would advance. The FBI leader told them to keep going, so they did. But again they heard it: “Back up!” Correale thought this meant danger. They see a gun? A bomb? What are they seeing? he thought. Again, the FBI leader instructed them to continue. “Fellas,” he said, “they’re not talking to you. We’re going to keep going.”

  They stepped closer. Then, as they reached the boat, a couple of the SWAT officers fanned out from the stack. They now had a clear view of Dzhokhar, whom negotiators had coaxed onto the side of the boat, to a spot where the tarp had been ripped away. “I’m saying, ‘Holy shit, this is the kid on TV. This is him,’” Correale said. The same mop of dark hair, the hoodie with blue and orange lettering, the college-boy look that seemed so incongruous with his violent acts. Mike Trovato, a SWAT officer from the city of Revere who was part of the team, remembered his thoughts flashing quickly to his wife and his daughter, who was just a few months old. It was that kind of moment—police were trying to adhere to their training, trying to do their jobs, to follow orders, to focus. But their hearts were pounding. The climax had arrived.

  Dzhokhar, illuminated like a stage actor by lights police had trained on him, was draped along the edge of the boat’s port side, blood trickling down like rain on a storm window. His left leg hung over the side, and he was slumped over. He raised his shirt as SWAT officers approached, seeming to offer himself in surrender. But he kept rocking left to right, his right hand dipping out of view inside the boat. He seemed to be falling in and out of consciousness. He was a mess, a bullet round having left a wound on his head, his ear all ripped up, a gash on his neck.

  “Show me your hands! Show me your hands!” Correale yelled at him. Brian Harer, a SWAT officer with the transit police, shouted similar instructions. One of the officers was calling him by name.

  “All right, all right,” Dzhokhar said back, his voice woozy, lethargic.

  “Get off the boat,” Correale said. “Get off the boat.”

  “But it’s gonna hurt,” Dzhokhar replied.

  He had a point. The side of the boat was maybe seven feet off the ground. It wouldn’t be an easy fall.

  This was the tensest moment for the SWAT team. They couldn’t see Dzhokhar’s right hand and right leg. They feared what he might be holding, what he might be reaching for. Maybe the groggy voice was a ruse. Maybe he was just pretending to be out of it. Maybe this was all part of the plot. They’d heard all kinds of things about what weapons he had. And they were only a couple feet away from him. As he began to bring up his right hand, Correale thought, Here it comes, here it comes. Powell was thinking the same thing as he watched the hand slowly rise: Pay attention to his hand. Pay attention to his hand. Finally Dzhokhar’s hand came into sight. He had nothing. They kept telling him to get off the boat, but he didn’t. The time had come to pull him down.

  In a flash, the SWAT officers, including transit officer Jeff Campbell and Revere Police chief Joseph Cafarelli, reached up from the ground and flung Dzhokhar down, the first hands anyone had laid on him since the bombs exploded at the finish line Monday afternoon. Dzhokhar landed on the ground, and not gently. The officers swarmed, immediately frisking him for explosives and weapons. They pulled up his shirt. They patted down his legs. Trovato put his knees on Dzhokhar’s arm and checked his hands for triggers or cell phones that could detonate a remote bomb. They flipped him onto his stomach. Dzhokhar offered no resistance. Trovato, who wore only a T-shirt under his armor, had Dzhokhar’s blood all over his forearms. Two transit cops, Saro Thompson and Kenneth Tran, each grabbed an arm. Thompson snapped handcuffs on his wrists. Around 8:45 P.M., the radio crackled with the words everyone had been waiting for: “He’s in custody! He’s in custody!” A cheer went up in the command trailer back at the mall. Amid the police radio traffic, Menino’s voice cut in: “People of Boston are proud of you.” Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis added his own congratulations, saying over the radio, “It’s a proud day to be a Boston police officer.”

  In Henneberry’s yard, the officers’ priorities shifted to a new urgency: saving the life of a terrorist who had killed and maimed so many. “It was a real possibility that he could die without medical aid,” Trovato said. “I very much wanted him to live.” Like many other cops, he wanted to see Dzhokhar stand trial, to face justice for what he’d done. “Let’s move him away from the boat,” the FBI leader said. He was concerned an explosive device might be on board. Trovato grabbed Dzhokhar by the belt. Transit officers grabbed his arms. They dragged him across Henneberry’s yard, fifteen or twenty feet away from the boat. “Okay, that’s good,” the FBI leader said. Another FBI agent ran up and began emptying Dzhokhar’s pockets, to inventory things for evidence. Trovato and other officers yelled for EMTs. Two medics from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives came running over and began working on him. Two Boston paramedics jumped in, too. The medics provided oxygen. Dzhokhar was lifted into a waiting ambulance and brought to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the same hospital where his brother had been taken. Dzhokhar was in rough shape: fractured skull, multiple gunshot wounds, including one from a bullet that went through the left side of his face, and injuries to his mouth, pharynx, and middle ear. He was battered and bloody, but he was alive.

  • • •

  At 8:45 P.M., the BPD tweeted the three words the city badly wanted to hear: Suspect in custody. The news swept through the crowd of media at the scene like wildfire; within minutes, Anderson Cooper and Diane Sawyer were repeating it on CNN and ABC. The instant Dzhokhar’s capture was made public, Greater Boston erupted in euphoria. All the pressure that had been building since the bombing, all that anxiety and uncertainty, evaporated. Revelers streamed into the streets near Fenway Park. They flooded Boston Common. They ran out onto the sidewalks. They waved American flags and shouted teary thank-yous to police. They belted out “God Bless America.” In Watertown, they cheered as Dzhokhar’s ambulance sped toward the hospital. In the center of town, a crowd gathered outside the H&R Block and hollered attaboys at the cops, whose blue lights swirled in the darkness. Unlike the night before, those lights now cast a reassuring glow. The sense of relief was overwhelming, and it was everywhere. Police officers who’d been at the scene exchanged hugs, high fives, and emotional reflections. Some shed tears of joy. It had been one hell of a week. Adrenaline dissipating, they felt pride, exhaustion, and grief for the damage that remained. All the cheering felt good. As they left Franklin Street, Cox said, it looked “like if the Red Sox had won the World Series.” Not everyone follows baseball, though. Everyone was following this. Everyone had a stake in it. In an era of social and political fragmentation, it was perhaps the closest Boston would come to a shared, unifying moment.

  Correale, Powell, and Cox stayed at the scene a few minutes, then started the unhurried walk back to their van. It didn’t take long before the gravity of it all began to sink in. That’s probably going to be a piece of history right there, Powell thought. His fiancée called as he walked away from Franklin Street. She had just seen him on TV. She was proud but a little piqued—Powell had told her only that he would be helping out that night. It wasn’t exactly untrue. He’d just left out the part about being on the front lines. “The drive back, we’re like, we can’t believe we were involved in that,” Correale said. “What are the odds?” It’s possible that commanders on the ground initially assumed they were a Boston SWAT team, because of the similarity of the Boston and Malden uniforms. But it had hardly mattered in the end—they were trained to do the job, too, and they had done it. “We took one of the most wanted men in the United States into custody—we were part of that,” Correale said. “And that’
s something.”

  One of the state troopers who took part in the operation at the boat was a member of Deval Patrick’s police detail. He told the governor afterward that any one of the officers there would have gladly put a bullet in Dzhokhar. But when Dzhokhar was wheeled to the ambulance right in front of them, the restraint was striking. No one made even a gesture of disrespect. “Is it my place to kill him? If he posed a threat to me and my officers, in a second,” Cafarelli said. “But I’m not the instrument—and my guys aren’t the instruments—of vengeance for anybody. Bring him to justice and let the courts do what they gotta do.”

  When it all ended, Patrick was relieved but still concerned that there might be more to the story than they knew. The investigation, in many ways, was just starting. Was the crisis really over? He wasn’t sure. “So personally, it felt like a triumphant moment, but not a conclusive moment.” At 10:05 P.M., President Obama spoke at the White House. He thanked law enforcement for their work. He promised a thorough examination of the Tsarnaev brothers’ backgrounds, motivations, and associates. He paid homage to the fallen. And he praised Boston’s spirit for carrying the city through one of the most trying weeks imaginable. “Whatever they thought they could ultimately achieve, they’ve already failed,” the president said of the terrorists. “They failed because the people of Boston refused to be intimidated.” Back in his temporary quarters at the Parkman House on Beacon Hill, Menino cracked his bedroom window and heard the party on the Common. He felt proud of the city, and happy as hell.

  The sense of liberation Friday night was real, and in many ways deserved. The week had indeed been hard on just about everybody. Since 2:50 P.M. on Monday, Boston had been in terror’s grip. The sense of release could hardly have been more welcome. It was easy, though, for most of the celebrants to shout, and to sing, and to broadcast their civic pride in the BOSTON STRONG T-shirts that were suddenly everywhere. It was easy for them to crack open a Sam Adams that night or pour a shot of Jack. It was easy to go to bed knowing that they could wake once again to a peaceful city, restored to its rightful sense of order. It was easy to look forward to the next morning’s Starbucks ritual, thankful that your son’s baseball game was back on.

  But for Heather Abbott, for Billy and Patty Campbell, for all the wounded and the grieving families still reeling from Monday’s attack, there would be no such unburdening. There would be no luxury of exhalation. The week had ended for everyone else. Not for them. In many ways, it never would. As Krystle Campbell’s brother put it, “I’m happy that nobody else is going to get hurt by these guys. But it’s not going to bring her back.” The only thing to do was to move forward, one day at a time, in hopes that tomorrow would be better than yesterday.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 15

  A CITY REBORN

  Starting toward normal

  It began with a handful of small American flags tucked into the barriers that blocked off Boylston Street. Almost by the hour, in those first uncertain days after the bombing, the makeshift memorial grew, becoming strangely powerful and enduring, a place of pilgrimage and reflection for the thousands of people who flocked to Copley Square. It was as if by getting close, by breathing the air, they might understand what had happened there. Many felt compelled to leave a token, some symbol of their grief or solidarity. And so the bouquet of flags became, too, a rising pile of race medals, candles, and rosary beads. It swelled with running shoes and baseball caps and arrangements of fresh spring flowers, purple irises and yellow daffodils and white lilies. It became, as the days went by, a free-form shrine, adorned with hockey pucks, a bag of Boston Baked Beans candy, and clamshells bearing messages like “Boston will run again.” Everything had its place—the stuffed Wisconsin badger, the quartet of elf figurines with Bs scrawled on their pointy hats, and the quilt of handwritten note cards, left by visitors from around the world:

  Houston Loves Boston

  Greece Loves Boston

  Tibet Stands with Boston

  Colombia is with Boston

  We will not submit

  May the light outshine the darkness

  Kevin Brown first saw the memorial on Thursday, three days after the bombing. The fifty-eight-year-old carpenter had tried to get into the Cathedral of the Holy Cross for the interfaith service with President Obama, drawn there by heartache and a love for the city of Boston. The big stone church was full, all of its seats taken, so he joined the milling crowd outside. After the service, Brown walked to Back Bay, where he came upon the memorial. He spent hours there that day, at the eastern edge of the cordoned-off crime scene, in the quiet company of hundreds of others seeking solace. He returned the next day, and again the day after that. When the police ordered the sprawling memorial moved out of the street, he was one of dozens of volunteers who formed a human chain and passed the items down to their new home on a wide swath of plaza in front of the Bank of America at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley Streets. Later, when the city moved the memorial to its third and more lasting home in Copley Square, Brown dutifully followed. It had become, for him, a kind of calling.

  The square, named for the colonial portrait painter John Singleton Copley, is in many ways the heart of Boston. The memorial to the bombing victims lay between the Boston Public Library, the oldest publicly funded library in the country—with its Beaux-Arts façade, interior murals by artist John Singer Sargent, and the motto FREE TO ALL carved above its doors—and the rustic stone profile of Trinity Church, a Romanesque tour de force by the architect H. H. Richardson. Both buildings are on the National Register of Historic Places, as is Old South Church across the street, its Venetian Gothic tower rising above a congregation first established in 1670. Even in a place as history-steeped as Boston, it was hard to find another square boasting three such landmarks. Over the centuries, it had hosted many more. Copley was home to many of the city’s best-known institutions before they moved elsewhere: Harvard Medical School, MIT, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston University, Emerson College, and Northeastern University all started there. It was a remarkable run of history for a swath of land that began the nineteenth century as an 850-acre tidal marsh, part of the Charles River estuary, and was filled in with sand and gravel to relieve overcrowding in the city in the 1850s. The massive job of creating the new neighborhood took decades—the work went on even in the middle of the Civil War and, at its peak, saw some four hundred train car loads of fill delivered to Back Bay daily. The landscape that arose on that hard-won foundation became a thing of beauty, an elegant embodiment of the city’s loftiest ambitions.

  The week following the bombing, Brown spent hours there, day after day, helping to organize the maze of mementos on the pavement at the edge of the square. He felt a welcome sense of purpose; the simple routine gave him comfort. Three weeks before the marathon, Brown had lost his mother. Isabelle Brown was ninety when she died, after a long, full life, and he hadn’t expected it to hit him like it did. His mother had been a pillar of strength—she raised eleven children while working two jobs after Brown’s father became disabled—and she and her fourth son had enjoyed an unusually close relationship. “We were exactly alike,” Brown said. “We clicked. I made sure she was treated like a queen.” His careful work at the memorial became, in part, a tribute to her.

  Soon Brown was spending twelve hours a day at the site, taking on the role of unofficial caretaker. It comforted him to see the reverent crowds who gathered at all hours, to hear them saying prayers and singing hymns, to watch them unlace their sneakers, leave them there, and walk home barefoot. He loved the children who approached to ask, ever so politely, where to hang the drawings they had made. It gave him peace to light the candles on the ground as darkness fell, to replace the dead flowers with fresh ones, and to talk with those who wanted company. He met the governor and the vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, a runner who stopped by to leave her shoes beside the others. People brought him cups of hot coffee and fresh rolls of
tape. They passed him cash and told him to buy what was needed: more flowers, more candles, sheets of plastic to cover the place when it rained. He served at their will; they had made the place together. It was hard to explain what it meant or why it mattered, but one visitor, Sally Graham of Dorchester, came close: “In some ways, it says to me [that] good does outweigh evil.”

  A carpenter from Indiana had built three wooden crosses for the memorial, one each for Martin, Krystle, and Lingzi, the victims who had been killed at the finish line. Visitors draped rosary beads over each one; every day, Brown carefully rearranged the heavy, tangled necklaces so the name on each cross could be easily seen. After people began asking about a cross for slain MIT police officer Sean Collier, Brown built a fourth cross just like the others, roughly three feet tall. He carried it to Boston on the bus and subway from his home in Brockton, a blue-collar city twenty-five miles to the south. Brown’s daily trek to the memorial took ninety minutes each way; the commuter train would have been faster, but it cost twice as much and he could not afford it. A serious back injury had prevented him from working much in recent years.

  The same day Brown brought the fourth cross to Boston, Collier’s father showed up and stayed at the memorial for hours, helping the caretaker paint his son’s name on the cross. “Boston needed a place to heal,” Brown said later, reflecting on the outpouring he witnessed. “I never thought it would grow so big and last so long.” His family didn’t understand what he was doing in a far-off Boston park, but he believed his work there had clear purpose. If the memorial became an eyesore, the city would take it away, leaving people—leaving him—with no place to grieve.

  • • •