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

by Helman, Scott

  They had all lost their limbs at a time of growing interest in the plight of amputees. More than 1,500 American soldiers had lost limbs in combat since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began a dozen years earlier, drawing attention to the two million people in the United States living with amputations. Scientists like Hugh Herr at MIT, himself a double amputee, had begun developing more sophisticated prosthetics: computer-controlled knees and robotic ankles. There were prosthetic legs that contained microprocessors and motion sensors, and legs with custom-made silicone skin and sculpted toes that looked astonishingly real. Increasingly, wounded soldiers had begun choosing to have their severely damaged legs amputated and replaced with high-tech prosthetics—sometimes months or years after being injured—to achieve a higher quality of life. The amputees in Boston didn’t realize it yet, but the international attention focused on their suffering would bring another burst of momentum to the field. It would also spur debate about the high costs of better prosthetics, as survivors discovered they had limited insurance coverage for artificial limbs that could cost $1 million over the course of a lifetime.

  For Celeste Corcoran, the way forward may have begun with the marine at the foot of her bed. As he encouraged her, she grew more composed. She stopped crying and talked about her sister Carmen, how proud she had been to go and watch her finish her first-ever marathon. She told the marines how her sister didn’t get to cross the finish line, because of the bombs, and how Carmen planned to run again next year, for Celeste. Warming to the conversation, she even joked about becoming a runner herself. “Running’s never been my thing, because I always get the most horrible shin splints,” she confessed. “Now,” she said, gesturing down at her missing legs, “I don’t have shins anymore. I’m not gonna be having shin splints. I can do this.”

  “That’s the attitude right there,” one marine told her approvingly.

  • • •

  As she wept in her hospital bed that Sunday night before her surgery, Heather’s distress lit up the monitors in the nurses’ station. A nurse who came to check on her sat down by her bed. The woman knew what Heather was facing, and she stayed at her side for an hour, reviewing all the reasons for choosing amputation. It helped, and Heather was finally able to sleep. On Monday, her resolve returned. She would make this final trip to the operating room, and then she would start working, day by day, to get her life back. The bombing had left her with a terrible, complicated problem, one that seemed almost insurmountable. But solving problems was her specialty. Somehow, she felt confident she would find a way.

  The doctors made their final preparations for the operation. They warned her about a needle that was coming, but assured her that they would sedate her first. She started to nod off, the drugs making her sleepy. Then she felt the needle stab her in the thigh, a piercing pain that jerked her to alertness instantly. “Wait, I can feel it,” she gasped. No one else seemed alarmed or surprised. Finally, then, the anesthesia swallowed her. She would not wake again until it was all over. When she returned to her room that afternoon, her friends were lined up in the hallway waiting for her. Exactly one week earlier, they had been with her at the marathon. They had stayed by her side, waiting to see if her foot would be saved, and now they were here for the start of the next phase, when she would learn to navigate the world anew. Her friend Jason found himself crying. He couldn’t believe they had ended up here. He held on to Heather’s arm and couldn’t let go.

  Jason couldn’t yet see what Heather already knew: She was going to fight her way back, whatever it took. The very next day, she would get out of bed and stand up using a walker. Two days after that, again leaning on the walker, she would will herself to somehow move ten feet. The nurses and family watching her beamed. Heather, unimpressed, thought, Oh boy . . . If they’re that excited about ten feet, this is really going to take a long time. She was still in constant pain—now at the site of the amputation instead of her foot—but at least the pain would end someday, when the leg was healed. “This is the situation I’m faced with, and it’s not going to change,” she would say three days after the surgery, facing a room full of reporters at her first hospital press conference. “To dwell on the negative would be a waste of time.”

  CHAPTER 17

  MISSING THE SIGNALS

  Radical views and unsolved murders

  With every day that passed, the questions burned brighter: What had driven two brothers, one married to a Rhode Island girl, the other a college kid who’d been well liked at his Cambridge high school, to kill and maim at the Boston Marathon? What had pushed them to this place—was it disaffection with their adopted country? Resentment at their station in life? Some faint identification with foreign jihadists? As Marathon Week receded, no clear answer emerged. There were plenty of reasons why it didn’t matter—and plenty of people who made it clear they didn’t care. But along with the anger and dismissal there was longing for a way to make sense of it, a box to put it all in. What the Tsarnaevs had done was evil enough. The lack of clarity about their motivations only made their disregard for life more difficult to stomach.

  What was clear, within minutes of Dzhokhar’s capture, was that this was not the first time that US authorities—from local homicide investigators to federal intelligence officials—had heard the name Tsarnaev. Not even close. Shortly after the chase ended that Friday night, the FBI acknowledged that its agents had investigated Tamerlan for suspected terrorist inclinations two years earlier. Within days, it came out that the CIA had, too. In Boston and in Washington, news of the government’s past probes sparked pointed questions: Could the bombing have been prevented? Would a more vigorous investigation have saved lives?

  In March of 2011, Russia’s Federal Security Service, the agency that had grown out of the Soviet-era KGB, sent a letter to the FBI through the US embassy in Moscow. The Russians reported that Tamerlan had, apparently while living in the Boston area, become a radical Islamist bent on joining militant groups abroad. Tamerlan, the letter said, had first sought to team up with “insurgents in Palestine” but had difficulty learning the language. Instead he hoped to link up with militants within Russia. The Russians’ concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported, were based at least in part on intercepted text messages between Tamerlan’s mother and a relative, in which she indicated Tamerlan hoped to join fighters in the Caucasus region. The letter asked the FBI to share any information it had on Tamerlan and his mother, whom the Russians believed had also become radicalized.

  So, two years before the Boston bombing, FBI counterterrorism agents in Boston searched for Tamerlan in government databases. They looked for records of his phone communications, whether he had visited websites promoting radical activity, his travel plans, and any associations he might have with militants. Agents even interviewed Tamerlan and his parents. They didn’t find much, at least not enough to trigger further action. Under its own guidelines, the FBI must close a domestic investigation of an individual after ninety days unless it finds “derogatory information” that justifies reasonable suspicion of a terror threat. The FBI reported its inconclusive findings back to the Russians in August 2011, and had Tamerlan’s name added to a US Department of Homeland Security watch list. That way, any time Tamerlan exited or entered the United States, customs officials would be alerted. Tamerlan’s name would remain on the list for a year.

  Russian authorities still had misgivings. In September 2011, they went to the CIA with the same concerns. The CIA investigation, though, also found no evidence that Tamerlan had ties to violent extremism. Still, CIA officials had his name added to a second watch list, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment. Known as TIDE, the list is US intelligence agencies’ catchall for anyone connected to a terrorism investigation, a database of hundreds of thousands of names. Tamerlan was among those on the lowest rung of suspicion, so he wasn’t barred from air travel or subjected to additional screening at airports. When he then went to Russia in January 2012, US
customs officials got an alert. But after his trip ended that July—after he had traveled to Dagestan and reportedly sought to make contact with militants, just as Russian authorities had feared—his return to the United States did not trigger any notifications. The customs list had stopped tracking his travel after a year, and the TIDE database didn’t flag him because his travel documents had an alternate spelling of his name and a different birth date. Without even trying, the would-be terrorist evaded the systems designed to monitor his movements, proving that the nation’s antiterrorism firewall still had holes. Boston would pay the price.

  • • •

  The week after Dzhokhar was captured, Congress launched high-level hearings to determine whether the government should have done more. “We learned over a decade ago the danger in failing to connect the dots,” Republican US representative Michael McCaul of Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said at his panel’s hearing. “My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed.” McCaul’s reference, of course, was to September 11, 2001. After the largest terrorist attack in US history, Washington took significant steps to improve intelligence sharing, even creating a new cabinet agency, the Department of Homeland Security, and new collaborative groups in every major US city called Joint Terrorism Task Forces, composed of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. Those measures were informed by a key conclusion of the 9/11 Commission: that if government agencies had shared intelligence about terror threats facing the United States, they may have disrupted Al-Qaeda’s devastating attack.

  In the weeks after the marathon bombing, deficiencies in communication came under the spotlight once again. When Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis testified before Congress, he said he hadn’t known that the FBI and CIA had investigated Tamerlan prior to the bombing—even though Boston police officers sit on the city’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Davis said he wasn’t sure he would have done anything differently than federal investigators, but he would have liked to have known. “If there is information that comes in about a terrorist threat to a particular city, then local officials should have that information,” he said. “There should be a mandate somewhere that the federal authorities have to share that with us so that we can properly defend our community.”

  There were communication lapses between countries, too. When Russian authorities first queried the FBI and CIA about Tamerlan in 2011, they asked US officials to alert them if Tamerlan ever traveled there. But US officials apparently never informed their Russian counterparts about Tamerlan’s 2012 trip. FBI director Robert Mueller III told Congress that while he did not believe such a notification would have prevented the bombing, he acknowledged the communication breakdown. For its part, the FBI had repeatedly asked Russian authorities for more information on Tamerlan, but none ever came. In a May 2013 meeting in Moscow, members of Congress asked two top Federal Security Service officials about the Russians’ failure to respond. “Why is it that three times our government has asked for more specific info regarding Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and you refused to do it?” Representative Bill Keating, a Democrat who represents a US House district south of Boston, said he asked Russian authorities on the trip. Russian officials said they never saw those requests.

  In the months after the bombing, the FBI declined to send anyone to public congressional hearings, saying it couldn’t divulge anything while its own investigation into the attack was ongoing. And that self-scrutiny would in the end yield little. In August 2013, the New York Times reported that the FBI had determined that the agency could not have done anything more than it did to avert the bombing. Keating wasn’t persuaded. “Until they give us facts that we can review as an independent branch of government,” he said, “I don’t think that’s particularly useful what they think.” McCaul said that US officials receive only about two dozen letters from foreign countries every year about specific individuals like Tamerlan. That makes such warnings fairly extraordinary, he said, so the FBI and CIA should have performed a more thorough investigation. “What the Russians said was right,” McCaul said. “What they said came true.”

  • • •

  On September 11, 2011, three men—Raphael Teken, Erik Weissman, and Brendan Mess—were murdered in the city of Waltham, just west of Watertown. They were found the next morning in Mess’s second-floor apartment, on their stomachs, throats slashed, heads tilted to the right, their bodies covered in marijuana. Murders were rare in Waltham. In the decade before the three were killed, the city had seen five. This triple homicide appeared to be drug-related, and not just because of the marijuana. Weissman, thirty-one, had founded Hitman Glass, a bong manufacturer. Mess, twenty-five, a martial arts instructor, had told a friend he was considering getting into a marijuana-growing venture. Investigators thought he was running a drug operation. All three, including Teken, thirty-seven, a graduate of nearby Brandeis University, had been selling drugs for years, according to their friends. But they were known for low-level deals; friends could recall only one episode of violence, when Mess was beaten up for not paying a drug supplier in full.

  The ritualistic array of the bodies suggested these were no ordinary killings. Other evidence indicated the violence wasn’t random, either. There were no signs of forced entry into the apartment, nor any marks of a struggle, even though both Mess and Teken practiced martial arts. Still, investigators found few other clues. For more than eighteen months, no suspects were named. Then, in the wake of the marathon bombing came a chilling revelation: One of the Waltham murder victims, Brendan Mess, had been Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s “best friend”—or at least that’s what Tamerlan had told John Allan, the owner of the Wai Kru mixed martial arts gym in nearby Allston, where Mess and Tamerlan occasionally worked out. Tamerlan often ate with Mess and Weissman at a nearby diner, Brookline Lunch, and had been a regular visitor to the apartment where Mess and Weissman lived. Mess’s girlfriend recalled Tamerlan and Mess making plans there a week before the murders. “Tam asked Brendan, ‘Are we going to do that thing?’” she recalled. “And I asked Brendan what that was, and he told me not to worry about it.”

  More troubling, Tamerlan, despite their friendship, wasn’t visibly perturbed by Mess’s grisly death. He didn’t show up to the funeral or memorial service. He didn’t tell his wife that Mess had been killed; she learned of the murders through local news reports. When she asked Tamerlan what might have happened, he suggested that it might have been a drug deal gone bad. Others, too, found Tamerlan to be strangely nonchalant. “He laughed off the fact that he was murdered,” said Allan, the gym owner who had known them both. “Like, ‘Aw, man. It’s crazy, right? I guess if you do that, that’s what’s going to happen.’” Friends of the victims said they told homicide investigators about Tamerlan’s relationship to Mess. Investigators, however, never followed up. After the marathon bombing, that became an easy decision to second-guess: Would a more aggressive murder investigation have stopped Tamerlan before his violent spree in April 2013?

  The question became much less academic after authorities began, following the marathon attack, to take a hard look at Ibragim Todashev, whose phone number the FBI had obtained by analyzing Tamerlan’s phone. Todashev, whom Allan had mentioned to investigators, had also trained with Tamerlan at the gym, and he was someone who stood out. “He’s got a bad temper, he clearly has anti- American sentiment, a radical-style Muslim,” Allan said. Todashev and Tamerlan sometimes prayed together. Todashev had graduated college in Chechnya, where he was from. He had come to the United States in 2008, hoping to improve his English, and the US government granted him asylum from Russia later that year. In April and May 2013, FBI agents interviewed him at least three times at FBI offices in Florida, where he lived.

  On May 21, Todashev sat down for a fourth interview, this time at his Orlando apartment. The interrogation, with an FBI agent from Boston and two Massachusetts State Police troopers, started at 7:30 P.M. and lasted five hours. Invest
igators questioned Todashev about the Waltham murders. Todashev admitted he had been involved, implicated Tamerlan in the killings, and started to write a statement describing what had happened, according to the FBI; a court filing by federal prosecutors would later confirm that Todashev had asserted Tamerlan’s participation in the murders. At the interrogation, Todashev was sitting at a table, across from one of the state troopers and the FBI agent. When the agent looked away, according to a law enforcement official’s account, Todashev picked up the table and threw it at the agent, knocking him to the ground. The agent drew his gun and saw Todashev running at him, either with a metal pole or a broomstick. The agent shot Todashev, who fell backward. Todashev got up and charged the agent again. The agent fired more shots, killing him. The FBI initially released few additional details about the confrontation. The bureau even told the Florida medical examiner not to disclose its report on Todashev’s autopsy, citing an ongoing investigation into the shooting. Todashev’s family and civil rights groups, fearing a cover-up, called for more transparency from the FBI. The state prosecutor in Orlando, Jeffrey Ashton, said his office would conduct its own independent review.

  Tamerlan’s possible involvement in the Waltham slayings added a sickening coda to the story of the marathon bombing. The murders—on the tenth anniversary of 9/11—had come at a turning point in his life, his isolation deepening, his views increasingly radical, his family falling apart. Only weeks before, his parents had sought a divorce. Had the killing of Teken, Weissman, and Mess been Tamerlan’s first violent strike against America? Had it been a warm-up, of sorts, for the marathon attack, and for murdering Sean Collier—the race and the cop both symbols of everything he wasn’t and would never be? Maybe all this cycled through his head that Thursday night of Marathon Week, not long after he and his brother had gunned Collier down. When they kidnapped Danny and commandeered his Mercedes, the route they drove took them right past the street where three men had been slain.