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

by Helman, Scott

  On Saturday, the day after the citywide lockdown and the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, residents woke to a perfect spring day, buds in the trees and forsythia blooming brilliant yellow. They reveled in the leisurely routine of a normal—or almost normal—Saturday: pancake breakfasts and kids’ soccer games; dog walks and birthday parties. Boylston Street was still closed, and David Henneberry’s Watertown backyard was still teeming with FBI agents, as it would be for more than a week. But elsewhere it was possible to begin moving on from the harrowing five-day ride that had just ended. The day felt like a gift, and to some, a celebration of endurance and resilience. “Yeah! We’re alive!” one resident, Roberta Nicoloro, shouted, greeting her neighbors with hugs after emerging from her home in Watertown.

  The assault that began with two backpacks on the sidewalk had inspired, from the start, a posture of defiance. A few hours after the explosions, two Emerson College students opened up a laptop and designed a simple T-shirt they could sell to raise money for the victims, a way to transform helplessness into useful action. For a slogan, they chose BOSTON STRONG, a local adaptation of the LIVESTRONG campaign made famous a decade earlier by cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong. It was simple, more about the place than the event, and it struck the right tone, the two students thought. They ordered 110 blue-and-yellow shirts and hoped for the best. Within a day or two, their rallying cry had struck a chord, becoming universal shorthand for the way the city wanted to be seen—and to see itself—after the tragedy: unbroken and unbowed. It appeared on city buses and on billboards, on stickers and wristbands, on baseball hats and storefronts. Mayor Menino embraced it, and beloved Red Sox slugger David Ortiz did, too, in his own memorable way. “This is our fucking city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom,” he told the cheering crowd at Fenway on Saturday. “Stay strong.” Within two weeks, the Emerson students, Nick Reynolds and Chris Dobens, would sell more than forty-seven thousand T-shirts, raising $716,000 for the victims.

  Boston’s embrace of the slogan was not without backlash. Critics of the way the city had handled the day of the capture, with its sweeping shutdown of just about everything, mocked Bostonians for calling themselves strong. “Last time I saw them they were cowering indoors,” observed one unimpressed out-of-towner in an online post. Mental health experts voiced concern that widespread use of the term “Boston Strong” might marginalize those traumatized by the attacks, making them feel weak or discouraging them from seeking help. But if some people wore the T-shirts as a display of strength or defiance—an easy proposition for anyone not directly touched by the bombing—far more were drawn to the “Boston Strong” campaign as a way to publicly support the victims. There was the donation they were making—of the $20 paid for every shirt, $15 went to the victims’ fund—but there was also the unified message they were sending to the wounded men and women watching from the city’s hospitals: We stand behind you. The victims heard, and signaled their appreciation. Heather Abbott wore a personalized “Heather Strong” T-shirt. The Richard family wrote in a statement that “Martin was ‘Boston Strong,’ and now we all must be, for him and for all of the victims.” Billy and Patty Campbell later toured the memorial in Copley Square clad in the iconic blue-and-yellow T-shirts.

  That impulse to help, which had inspired both the bystanders improvising tourniquets and the college students selling T-shirts, swept the city in the days after the attack, a philanthropic wave that surged over the most optimistic projections. The calls had begun flooding the mayor’s office and the governor’s office early Tuesday morning, the day after the bombing. They came from corporations and from individuals in Boston and around the country, asking what they could do to help and offering money. Menino and Patrick spoke briefly before the morning press conference that day at the Westin and agreed they must act fast to set up a fund for the victims. Menino gathered his team in his hospital room after the briefing and made a plan: They would recruit volunteers to run the fund, and solicit free office space, minimizing administrative costs. The mayor was adamant that it would be a single fund, an undivided pool of cash to provide the maximum benefit and equity. They would call it the One Fund; the website would be ready to go live that night. If they could bring in $10 million, Menino thought, that would be a success. But the calls kept coming, more than he ever imagined. By the end of the first week, they had reached $20 million; by summer, the total would climb past $60 million. “People wanted to give $1 million, half a million, matches,” Menino said. “Everybody was saying, ‘I don’t need to be recognized.’ I’d never seen anything like that.” John Hancock Financial, the lead sponsor of the marathon, gave the first $1 million gift. Athletic shoe maker New Balance gave $1 million; other corporations lined up behind them. The Red Sox initially contributed more than $600,000, a figure that would grow, with help from partners, beyond $2 million. Millions more streamed in online from individuals around the world. Menino reached out to Ken Feinberg, the administrator of the 9/11 victims fund and a Massachusetts native, to ask for his help in distributing the payments.

  The last thing Menino needed or expected at such a critical moment was the Internal Revenue Service getting in his way. The mayor had been firm from the start: that the money would go to aid, not administration, and that the setup would be simple and streamlined. He wanted a few volunteers in a donated room processing incoming checks as fast as they could. But the IRS was cool on his plan, Menino said, telling him, in essence, “Just a minute, Mr. Mayor.” For reasons the mayor found utterly uncompelling, the IRS wanted donations channeled through a city or state agency. They wanted him to organize a fund-raising event. The mayor was furious at the interference. “Why?” he demanded to know. “We already have the money, and we don’t need the bureaucracy.” He started calling everyone he could think of who might intervene, all the way up to Vice President Joe Biden. Finally, something shifted—maybe it was all the phone calls; maybe it was the erupting IRS scandal over its screening of political groups—but in mid-May, the One Fund received its tax-free designation.

  Barely two weeks before the marathon bombing, Menino had stood in Faneuil Hall and announced that he would not seek a sixth term in office. It was a deeply emotional moment for him, saying farewell to the city he loved and had served for a record two decades—a onetime insurance man, elected mayor after a decade as a little-known city council member from Hyde Park, a neighborhood on Boston’s southern fringes. He was seventy, and despite his recent health problems, he vowed to use his remaining time well: “I have nine months left—just think of what I could do in nine months! We could have some real fun.” In truth, his legacy was more or less cemented by this point: He was the fabled urban mechanic, focused on the little things that make city life work: the throwback pol with a long memory and reach into every neighborhood. He would never win eloquence awards—some had nicknamed him “Mayor Mumbles,” fondly or not so fondly—but his twenty years in city hall had been untainted by scandal, and his stamina was unmatched. Polls showed that Menino had personally met more than half the city’s residents, an incredible yet completely believable feat, given his near-constant visibility at parades, cookouts, ribbon cuttings, and tree lightings.

  This was not exactly how Menino had envisioned the twilight of his term. He could not have foreseen a period so demanding and emotionally draining. In some terrible way, the bombing on Boylston Street seemed to complete a cycle that had begun a dozen years earlier, on a sparkling September morning at Logan Airport, when two planes roared down the runway, rose above the sunlit water, and turned south, headed for New York. That day, September 11, 2001, had been among the worst Menino had faced. Boston’s connection to the attack on the World Trade Center towers was an enduring source of pain and frustration for him. At the time, he had wondered in private if his city would be next, and now, more than a decade later, his fear had finally been realized. There was no comparison between the scale of the events, but this one was his.

  The bombing
was an unprecedented moment, and yet Menino’s read of it was characteristic, infused with his optimism and pride in his hometown. He saw a city that would be stronger for the experience. He lauded the teamwork among city, state, and federal agencies that had come together, more or less seamlessly, and he was moved by the actions of ordinary people, like the college students who raised more than half a million dollars selling T-shirts. He imagined keeping the spirit of collaboration alive, using it to fuel progress in other areas. “We’re a big city, but we are also a small city,” Menino said the day after Boylston Street reopened to the public, as he sat having lunch on the patio outside the Lenox Hotel. “Helping neighbors out: That’s what this renewal is all about.”

  • • •

  With money continuing to pour in for the victims, the end of Marathon Week brought another surge of feeling, this one for the first responders. The Boston Bruins invited twenty-six of them to their home game at the TD Garden on Sunday, and after the final buzzer, brought them onto the ice for an emotional ceremony. Most of those honored were police and firefighters, but David King was there, too, looking slightly uncomfortable in his sport jacket, holding his six-year-old daughter’s hand as they waited for his name to be called. “Brad Marchand, meet Dr. King!” came the booming voice of the announcer. The Canadian forward skated over, pulled off his black-and-gold jersey, and handed it to the doctor as the crowd lingering in the seventeen-thousand-seat rink roared its approval. King was not an avid sports fan by any stretch, but in that moment, feeling the warmth of the gesture, it didn’t matter. “That was the coolest thing that ever happened, at least to me,” he said later, after the jersey had been signed and framed and hung in a prominent spot on the wall of his office at Mass General.

  It was, for King as for many of the police there on the ice with him, a striking departure from everyday routine in a world where their efforts were not always appreciated. Caring for trauma patients was not like working in other specialties, where doctors sometimes built long relationships with patients. King’s patients often appeared at 2:00 A.M. with gunshot or stabbing wounds, and it sometimes seemed to him that they expected to be saved, and took it for granted, no matter how many hours and how much effort it took. When he went to check on such patients the next day, introducing himself as “the doc who fixed you,” it was rare to hear a word of thanks. “When’s breakfast?” was a more common response. Looking back over the course of his trauma career, King could count on one hand the patients with whom he had connected deeply and stayed in touch. Never in his life, before the marathon bombing, had he felt such gratitude for the work he did, and the feeling was at times a little overwhelming.

  • • •

  Boylston Street, a place usually packed with people and life, remained desolate. Up close, it looked like a movie set: Gatorade cups strewn everywhere, folding tables, water bottles, and barricades left in disarray. As if bombs had gone off everywhere. On the weekend following the attack, Dave McGillivray and a small marathon team got their first chance to return. The city wanted to reopen Boylston as soon as possible, and the remnants of the marathon had to be swept away first. After getting permission from the FBI, they put on full-body hazmat suits and began the messy work of cleaning up, of restoring Boylston to its normal state. On Saturday, they worked on the street, clearing away the race debris. On Sunday, a couple of McGillivray’s deputies cleaned the medical tent. It was not a pleasant task. They were surrounded by the evidence of Monday’s trauma and by reminders of the hasty exits, like the unclaimed bags with runners’ bib numbers attached. They tried to remain stoic, to stay focused on the work. “I’m as emotional as anyone, but I also gotta get beyond it and get the job done,” McGillivray said. “That’s my calling. That’s what God put me here for.”

  It had not been easy, for anyone, to put the street back together. The evidence—the ball bearings and nails shot by the bombs with lacerating force; the fragments of the brothers’ backpacks—all of that was gone, collected and sorted and labeled and sent to crime labs for processing. The blood and the orange FBI spray paint had been removed from the sidewalks, steamed away in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, eight days after the bombing. But residents and business owners let back in later that Tuesday had found a street frozen in time. Hotel workers had to sweep up broken glass and mop up blood from tiled floors, left behind by injured people who had run inside seeking safety. “I’m just trying to pull it together,” said Mark Hagopian, operating partner of the Charlesmark Hotel. “It’s eerie. It just feels haunted a little bit.” Employees at other businesses found more shattered windows and bloodstained carpets, half-eaten pizzas and half-empty bottles of beer, swarms of fruit flies and rodents that had moved in. The losses to Boylston Street businesses were staggering, with early estimates in the tens of millions of dollars and little clarity about how much would be covered by insurance.

  In the midst of the mess were countless poignant reminders of the joyful way Marathon Monday had unfolded until 2:50 P.M. GO LAURA GO, read a small sign tucked into the corner of one store window. Sharon Maes returned to her apartment near Forum wearing the same bright green pants and orange sweater she had been wearing when the second bomb exploded, as she cowered in her doorway a few feet away. She had left without her wedding ring; her husband had left without his wallet. “We don’t even know if we locked the door,” she said. Coming home triggered conflicting emotions. “I’m happy, but I’m sad,” she said. “I’m very confused about how it will feel.” There would be one last private gathering on the Boylston sidewalks before the street’s strange separation from the city ended. As darkness fell on Tuesday, Mayor Menino, under a cold rain, escorted a few dozen family members of the victims to the two blast sites. They huddled together beneath a tent, looking out at the place where their loved ones—who had gathered there to celebrate—had instead faced death.

  If there was one moment that most powerfully symbolized the promise of better days ahead, it came before dawn on Wednesday, April 24, nine days after the explosions left their mark. At 3:35 that morning, police officers lifted the barricades blocking Boylston Street and stacked them on the sidewalk. With no further ceremony, the street reopened to cars and pedestrians, its empty stores and restaurants and sidewalks ready to return to business. As the sun came up, coffee shops hummed with activity. Two panhandlers got back to work at the corner of Exeter Street. Everything looked normal from a distance, except for some boarded-up windows, but if you watched closely, you could see it: hitches in the foot traffic past the bombing sites, people pausing to absorb the new significance of the two places on the sidewalk. Up the street at the victims’ memorial in Copley Square, a new sign had appeared in the days just before Boylston reopened, asking: CAN YOU FEEL A BRAND-NEW DAY? It was the feeling that the city had been longing for, and with the crime scene gone, it seemed to finally be a possibility.

  At Marathon Sports, right where the first bomb had gone off, manager Shane O’Hara had gone back in with the store’s owner on Tuesday, at the eight-day mark. A crew from ARS Restoration Specialists—experts in reclaiming places where bad things had happened—had already done the worst of the cleanup, ripping up the rug, removing the tiles, and ridding the storefront of bloodstains. Even with the progress, the place in many ways looked as it did when they’d left—nearly full beer bottles, empty apparel racks, broken hangers. O’Hara felt uncomfortable in there, like he was snooping around in his own store. His sense of unease was amplified by what they all now knew about the first bomb’s toll, the young life—Krystle Campbell’s—that had been taken right outside their door. “It was just a disgusting feeling that day,” he said. The next day, Wednesday, O’Hara and his staff tried to rebuild; the owner was eager to reopen. They straightened up the front of the store. O’Hara scrubbed his office. He put away an extra register they had taken out for the weekend of the marathon, typically a peak time for sales. I’m starting all over again, he thought.

  When Thursd
ay came, emotions among the staff ran high. They took a group picture. They had pizza together. They made some speeches. They shared tears. Then they were finally ready to face the world again. After the bombing, O’Hara and some of his colleagues had made a pact that they wouldn’t go out the front door of Marathon Sports again until the store was open—that they would use only the back entrance until customers were allowed inside. The last time O’Hara had been through the front door was a week ago Monday, when he’d been tending to the wounded on the sidewalk. Afterward, using it just didn’t feel right. Around 2:00 P.M., the staff tore down the paper covering the front of the store, walked together to the front door, and threw it open. Outside, a crowd of people had gathered, maybe two hundred strong. O’Hara and his staff formed a line to welcome them in. At first, no one moved. Someone started clapping, and then everyone started clapping. O’Hara and the others led customers inside. It was gangbusters from the opening minutes. The support from the public that day, and in the days that would follow, was cathartic. The outpouring would never erase the tragic memories that O’Hara and his colleagues carried. But it was a start.

  CHAPTER 16

  LETTING GO

  The only way forward

  All week long, Heather Abbott had been waiting.

  She had been waiting with her friends to get into Forum when the second bomb exploded a few feet away. Then she had waited on the ground for someone to help her, and for an ambulance to make it down the street. After doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital saved her badly damaged foot, Heather had waited to see if the transplanted blood vessels would take, and what her prospects of a normal life would be. Finally she had made her decision, the hardest she had ever faced. She was ready to move on, yet here she was, waiting again. Her fourth and final surgery—the surgery that would set her new course—had been scheduled for first thing Monday morning, one week after the bombing. The morning had been busy, though. Her surgeons had fallen behind. They kept postponing the time of her operation, first by one hour, then again. This delay was excruciating. Now that she had made up her mind, she wanted it all behind her. She needed to stop dwelling on what was about to happen and start figuring out how to deal with it.