Remembering offered some choices. April 15, if you let it, could be defined by a heartless attack. Or it could be defined by the selfless work of Samaritans and first responders. It could mean cowardice, but it could also mean bravery. It could mean unimaginable losses, but it might also mean an unexpected breakthrough—a new perspective on what was important in life, a new kinship forged in a time of fear. Of course, concentrating on the good stuff—the humanity and the strength—came easily for those not badly hurt or in mourning. The most severely wounded remained on their own distinct paths, each with his or her own unique map to recovery. Celeste Corcoran, Jeff Bauman, Roseann Sdoia, Lingzi Lu’s family and friends—they and all the others would have to negotiate many ups and downs, hoping to reclaim, one day, a life that felt like their own again. Some would find peace; some would struggle. Others would dwell somewhere in between. There was no justice in any of it.
An hour before the bombs exploded on Boylston Street, the Red Sox had celebrated their walk-off win against Tampa Bay, courtesy of slugger Mike Napoli’s double off the Green Monster in the bottom of the ninth inning. What the Sox couldn’t have known then, in their twelfth game of 2013, was that this kind of win would define the season, a season of improbable comebacks, good humor, steady management, and unruly beards, ending with the most unlikely feat of all: winning the World Series on a cool Wednesday night in late October. It was the team’s third championship in ten years but its first won on home soil in nearly a century. Few had ever felt so right. Fireworks shot into the night sky, players soaked up the acclaim, champagne was prepared. But first, hearts turned to the April tragedy that had unfolded blocks away from Fenway Park. “This is for you, Boston,” World Series MVP David Ortiz said over the public address system, hoisting the shiny trophy to the sky. “You deserve it.” The celebration carried into Thursday morning. Hundreds gathered on Boylston. Traffic stopped as fans knelt down in the darkness, touching and kissing the blue-and-yellow finish line.
Two days later, on a brilliant Saturday morning, the Red Sox climbed onto amphibious duck boats and rolled through downtown for their victory parade, hundreds of thousands of fans rejoicing along the route. When the procession reached Copley Square, left fielder Jonny Gomes climbed down onto Boylston with the World Series trophy, set it gently on the finish line, and draped it with a jersey that said 617 BOSTON STRONG. The crowd joined together in singing “God Bless America.” Shane O’Hara stood with the Sox players, tearfully accepting one of the jerseys. Initially he’d had misgivings about taking part in the brief ceremony. He wasn’t entirely comfortable being a public face of Boston’s healing. He recognized the moment’s importance to the city, though, so he accepted his role. He was glad he did. Gomes pounded him warmly on the chest. Jarrod Saltalamacchia gave him a sincere hug. The support felt good. In his slow recovery from April, another page had turned.
• • •
After Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, after the TV cameras moved on, the crime scene in David Henneberry’s Watertown backyard remained active for nine days and nights. FBI agents stayed there around the clock, working under floodlights after darkness fell. Inside, Henneberry and his wife, Beth, joked that they were sleeping in the safest house in America. When the investigators finally departed, they took the couple’s beloved twenty-four-foot powerboat, the Slipaway II, with them. It had been totaled, battered by bullets and stun grenades. There was very little insurance and, remarkably, no government recompense. After that fateful Friday night when he stood on a ladder and spotted Dzhokhar hiding inside, Henneberry never touched his boat again. “I never even patted her good-bye,” he said. He liked to think they might be reunited someday: maybe at the Crime Museum in Washington, DC, where other bullet-riddled exhibits include the car used to film the final death scene in the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde.
The first week after the capture, the Henneberrys received 575 phone calls. Most were from reporters, but there were a few real estate agents, too, who seemed to think they might want to sell their house. The mail began arriving soon after, piles of cards and letters from all over. A single stuffed envelope from Lincoln, Nebraska, contained 130 notes from Pound Middle School students; they had been studying ancient Greece, and heroism, at the time of the marathon. “Please, sir, know what an impact you made on their lives,” their teacher wrote. A woman named Liz from Trenton, New Jersey, wrote of how the drama in Boston had triggered terrible memories of 9/11. “You reminded our nation that good people can make a difference,” she said. Henneberry was touched and baffled by the gratitude. All he had done was call 911—wouldn’t anybody in his shoes have done the same?
Their neighborhood had become famous, too, and for a time the traffic past the house was constant. Henneberry was recognized—he was “the boat guy”—when he went out. He and Beth vowed to get another boat as soon as they could. “This guy took a lot from us,” Henneberry said. “He won’t steal our passion away.” Sun-drenched summer Sunday mornings came and went with no lazy, meandering journeys down the Charles River. Passing time made that night in April seem less real, the bullet holes in their fence the only proof. “It’s true, but you can’t quite believe it’s true,” he mused. He still wondered why it had to be his backyard: “What kind of coincidence? What kind of fate?”
In September, Henneberry traveled north of the city, to Marblehead, to pick up his new boat at last and steer it home. He and Beth had accepted the money appreciative strangers had raised for them online: $50,000 in three days after the capture. The new boat was much like the old one, a twenty-four-foot fixer-upper in need of all the meticulous care he could provide. He had decided to call it Beth Said Yes, retiring the Slipaway name forever. Cruising up the river into Watertown, Henneberry came around the bend and saw Beth waiting at the dock. He pulled the boat close and she climbed aboard. It had been a long, strange trip, but he was home.
• • •
Initially, Danny didn’t tell his parents a thing—not about the carjacking, nor the frightful ride with the Tsarnaev brothers, nor his dramatic escape. Finally, a week or so later, he shared the wild tale with his dad, who promptly relayed it to his mom. His mother didn’t mince words. She asked Danny to come home to China. But he wasn’t going to leave the life he’d found in America, which, outside of one bizarre night in April, he felt pretty good about. He got another Mercedes, a silver one this time. His heroism earned him a break on the lease payments. That girl in New York he liked? Well, they were still, six months later, just friends. But they had met a few times since Marathon Week and had gotten to know each other better. Both were happy he had survived, so they could still talk to each other. And that was something.
In the days after his adventure, Danny had found it almost impossible to believe that it all had really happened. It read like a fictional story, a scene ripped from a novel or a movie script. At first, he stayed home and didn’t venture out much. Then he found solace in exercise. He had just begun running a week or two before the carjacking—he credited the conditioning with helping him flee that night. A couple of weeks after it was all over, he started running again, almost every day, finding that it calmed his nerves. Danny felt, as the drama receded, like his life had more or less returned to normal. There were small ways, though, in which he had changed. He still liked to drive, for example, but he wasn’t sure he would ever again roll down his window or pull over if he saw someone asking for help. When he stopped to reflect on that night, he felt conflicting emotions. He had learned that he could be brave and strong, that he possessed the courage required to confront difficult situations. But he wasn’t sure his nerves could handle going through something like that again. He knew he was alive because of luck and the decisions he’d made. It could easily have gone a different way.
• • •
It started before they even got out of the city. The second bomb had just exploded a few feet away; Brighid Wall and her husband Brendan had scooped up their two children, ages
four and six, and their nephew, five, and fled through the Starbucks next to Forum into the alley. They made it to a church on Newbury Street and sat on the steps. Wall’s son Declan hadn’t spoken since the bomb went off, but now, on the church steps, he piped up with a request: Could his mother please call the babysitter, Marissa? “Tell her I don’t want to go to the Swan Boats anymore,” the six-year-old said. Later, on the drive home to the quiet beach town of Duxbury, Wall’s sister tried to convince the boy that the blast had been fireworks. It didn’t work. He remembered everything. So did his four-year-old sister, Fiona. She called the bombing “the storm” and drew pictures of it, overlapping circles of red and gray and yellow. In the middle she drew her prized pink-and-purple Red Sox hat. It had been knocked off her head in the chaos and lost on the sidewalk. Her father went to Fenway a few days later and got her a new one.
Wall took the children to the doctor and had their hearing checked. She got a referral to a children’s therapist. She did her best to answer their questions, and she reminded them how brave they had been. “What if it happens again and I’m not so brave?” asked her son. “It’s not going to happen again,” she told him. The children heard that a little boy had died. “Did a six-year-old die?” Declan asked. He wanted to know if “that man”—Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—was going to hell. They talked about it less as time went on, but it was there, beneath the surface. “Did that happen from the bomb?” one of the children would ask when they saw someone on crutches or in a wheelchair. One day they went downtown for their swimming lessons. “Let’s park at the playground,” Wall suggested, “and walk to the pool.” Her son refused. “We need our car at the pool,” he explained, “so if an emergency happens, we can leave quicker.” She reassured him again that there would be no emergency. Sometimes she worried he might always be afraid. She kept watching him, listening closely, waiting to see.
• • •
On the night of Sunday, October 13, the seven-year-old girl in a number fifteen Dustin Pedroia jersey walked confidently up to a bank of microphones behind the pitcher’s mound at Fenway Park, laid her right hand across her heart, and led the packed stadium in singing the national anthem. Six months after the marathon bombing took her leg and her eight-year-old brother, Jane Richard stood on her prosthesis and belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner” under the lights alongside a children’s choir from her church, St. Ann Parish in Dorchester. She basked in the resounding applause from the stands, and from the Red Sox players standing nearby. It was game two of the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers. The Sox, having lost the first game at home the night before, badly needed a lift. More than a few citizens of Red Sox Nation believed, when the hometown team pulled off a dramatic come-from-behind victory later that night, that Jane’s presence had been the catalyst.
Her willingness to put herself at the center of one of the most public places imaginable was an inspiring and hopeful thing, rippling well beyond the baseball stadium. It was a marker, too, of how far she had come. Jane had spent three months in hospitals and hundreds of hours in physical therapy. She had undergone at least twelve surgeries. She had returned to school, as her older brother, Henry, had done back in the spring. The Richard family’s burden had been far heavier than any family should ever bear. Bill and Denise had nursed their own serious injuries while they mourned Martin’s death and helped Jane adjust to life as an amputee. But, they reported four months after the bombing, “we are making progress on this long, difficult and painful road forward.” For her parents, Jane was a source of wonder—and, at times, exhaustion. One thing she loved was Irish step dancing. From age four, she had attended a dance school near her house. The hope was that in time, she would be able to return to the school and continue the hobby. It wouldn’t happen right away, that much was clear. But she was determined. She had already begun practicing at home. “Watching her dance with her new leg,” her family said, “is absolutely priceless.”
• • •
He sat alone, confined to a small cell in a federal prison hospital an hour northwest of Boston. It was a week after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had been pulled from the boat in Watertown. A narrow window and food slot were now his only regular links to the outside world. US marshals had quietly transferred him there overnight from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where the ambulance had first brought him after his capture. The federal prison hospital, in the town of Ayer, sat on a sprawling former army base known as Fort Devens. Just days before, Dzhokhar had enjoyed the freedom of sleeping in his college dorm room. Now he was one of more than one thousand inmates and defendants locked away under the constant watch of guards. This was where he would stay—with severe restrictions on his access to mail, media, phone calls, and contact with other inmates and visitors, even his defense team—as criminal proceedings against him began.
In June, a federal grand jury handed up a thirty-count indictment against Dzhokhar, charging him with using weapons of mass destruction to kill and maim, as well as the fatal shooting of Sean Collier. Seventeen of the charges carried the prospect of the death penalty. The decision on whether to pursue a death sentence would ultimately be made by the US attorney general, Eric Holder. Dzhokhar’s trial would then follow. In announcing the indictment, Carmen Ortiz, the US attorney in Boston, detailed how Dzhokhar and Tamerlan had bought fireworks for the powder, ordered bomb-making parts, and downloaded instructions on how to assemble their devices. She would not characterize the note Dzhokhar had scrawled in the boat as a confession, but she said the brothers’ motive in attacking the marathon was apparently to protest US foreign policy. Ortiz also said that she had met with the relatives of the victims and with survivors. “Their strength is extraordinary.”
At his first public appearance two weeks later, Dzhokhar offered no hint of remorse or contrition. Before his federal court proceeding, he sat in a holding cell with guards observing him through surveillance cameras. At one point, he decided he had a message to send: He lifted his hand toward a camera lens and flipped up his middle finger. Soon after, he came into the courtroom in ankle chains and an orange jumpsuit, his left arm in a cast and one eye swollen. During the seven-minute hearing, he fidgeted in his seat. He studied prosecutors as they talked. He glanced, at times, at the more than thirty survivors and family members watching the proceeding. When he finally spoke, in a climax both mundane and riveting, the accused terrorist leaned over a microphone and repeated, “Not guilty,” as each charge was read—in a thick accent that startled his high school friends in attendance, who remembered him speaking perfect English. As he was led away afterward, he blew a kiss to his two sisters, one of whom was sobbing. The other held a child in her arms. John DiFava, the MIT police chief who had come to watch, said as he walked from the courtroom that Dzhokhar wasn’t worth a single tear. “I’d like to grab him by the throat,” he said.
With Dzhokhar awaiting trial under lockdown, the body of his brother Tamerlan would lie unburied for weeks, the subject of an ugly fight over whether a dead terrorist deserved the same decorum afforded everyone else. Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine Russell, had decided not to take his body after his death; she would return to using her maiden name and move with her daughter back into her parents’ home in Rhode Island. Dzhokhar was in custody and his parents were back in Russia. Tamerlan’s uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, together with Tamerlan’s sisters, finally claimed the remains from the state medical examiner more than two weeks after the bombing. The body was first transferred to a funeral home in North Attleborough, south of Boston, where about twenty protesters soon gathered. It was then taken to Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester, whose owner, Peter Stefan, was known for providing burial services for the poor and unwanted. The body would remain there for six days while Tsarni and Stefan tried to find a burial plot. Tamerlan’s mother, Zubeidat, wanted to bring her son’s body back to Russia, but she lacked the money. Tamerlan wouldn’t be laid to rest in Cambridge—the city manager preemptiv
ely denied him a cemetery deed, saying that his burial there would not be in the city’s interest. Tom Menino took a similar stand in Boston. Protesters began picketing outside the funeral home, arguing that Tamerlan’s body did not deserve traditional burial privileges. The standstill threatened to drag on for days.
Then Martha Mullen stepped in. A mental health counselor from Richmond, Virginia, Mullen had heard about the protests on NPR. “It portrayed America at its worst,” she said. “Jesus says [to] love our enemies. So I was sitting in Starbucks and thought, maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something.” Mullen researched Muslim burial traditions and requirements and contacted Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which responded within an hour that it could provide a plot for Tamerlan at Al-Barzakh Cemetery, in the nearby town of Doswell. Then she contacted the Worcester Police Department, which had been providing around-the-clock protection for Stefan. A plan was crafted to spirit Tamerlan’s body out of Worcester in a rented van. Tamerlan was buried on his right side in an unmarked grave, facing toward Mecca.
• • •
They parked his truck in front of the church, the shiny black Ford F-150 he’d gotten two months earlier. The truck bed was filled with flowers. Bunting hung from the front bumper. A sticker with the MIT police insignia was affixed near the driver’s door; another sticker on a window said REST IN PEACE OFFICER SEAN A. COLLIER. This was how Collier’s family, friends, and fellow police officers said good-bye to the promising young cop ruthlessly murdered by the Tsarnaevs, at a private service in a town north of Boston. Officers from the Somerville Police Department, which Collier had been about to join, led the way out. A few months later, Collier acquired the municipal badge he’d always wanted. In front of family and police from around the state, he was posthumously made a Somerville police officer at a ceremony at city hall. “Sean has been called many things over the past four months,” said Collier’s brother, Andrew. “But one of the things Sean would be the most proud to be called is a great cop.” His badge number, 310, would remain unused by the department, the slot standing vacant in his memory.
Long Mile Home: Boston Under Attack, the City's Courageous Recovery, and the Epic Hunt for Justice Page 29